This idea was expressed several times in the second two Matrix movies. We can never see past the choices we do not understand. It’s absolutely brilliant, and even if it would have been the only significant idea expressed in the entire trilogy, that one idea alone makes the whole movie series worth watching.

We can never see past the choices we do not understand. There’s a reason for this; if we do not understand the choice, how can we understand its implications?

But I didn’t come here to talk about the Matrix. I came here to talk about relationships.

In 1992, I was deeply, passionately in love. Her name was Robin, and she was living with Kelly and I.

It was a disaster. For many reasons, mostly my own, the relationship failed; that relationship taught me that I’m not immune to jealousy, that a cold shoulder is the relationship equivalent of a nuclear weapon, and that some kinds of damage done to any relationship can’t be repaired.

Eleven years later, the structure of my relationship with Kelly still reverbrates with the damage I did during my relationship with Robin, like a bell struck too hard. One of the consequences of my relationship with Robin is that Kelly vowed never again to live with anyone else in general, but particularly with anyone who is my lover.

Shelly wants to live with me. This is something very important to her, and it’s very important to me as well. My relationship with Shelly has reawakened in me the things that have been sleeping for eleven years–the very same things that led me to want to live with Robin all those years ago. At the end of the day, I’m not polyamorous because I want to sleep with a bunch of chicks; at the end of the day, I’m polyamorous because of the way I feel about family, and commitment, and love.

I knew that once, and I forgot it. Now I’ve learned it again.

Last week, Kelly agreed to let Shelly move in with us.

The past year has been extremely hard on all three of us. Kelly is not polyamorous; her ideas about love and family are very different from mine, and from Shelly’s. Kelly would be much happier if I did not love the people I sleep with–or at least, if I did not love them deeply. Many of the reasons for this are rooted in her past; other reasons seem to be a fundamental part of who she is. My relationship with Kelly has been an eighteen-year story of negotiation, and compromise, and seeking to find the middle ground between what is ultimately two fundamentally contradictory worldviews.

The contradiction between Kelly and I creates stresses that are most sharply focussed at the point where someone who loves me resides. Over the past year, Shelly has been hurt repeatedly–not through any deliberate malice on kelly’s part, but simply because Kelly wants a life that does not include anyone else. The exclusive model of family is particularly hard on anyone who wants to join an existing poly relationship in a way that’s inclusive.

Kelly doesn’t precisely understand how she has hurt Shelly. As a result, it’s hard for Shelly to feel safe, and to believe that Kelly won’t hurt her again.

Kelly is, I believe, sincerely trying to understand my relationship with Shelly. And she has decided to invite Shelly to live with us. But she does not understand her decision, because she does not, ultimately, understand my ideas about family, and I do not understand hers.

We can never see past the choices we do not understand.

Kelly has made a series of choices since the start of our relationship. She has made the choice to be involved with me, even knowing that I am polyamorous and that this is such a fundamental part of who I am that I cannot be happy any other way. She has made the choice to accept, even if she does not understand, my relationship with Shelly. She has made the choice to invite Shelly into her home.

But she does not understand these choices, and because of that, I wonder if she understands how hard it will be for Shelly to live with us, knowing that she is making herself vulnerable in a way that means Kelly can easily hurt her very badly.

Shelly is in a difficult position: She loves me, she wants to build a life with me, but she believes that if she does, she will be hurt. kelly is in a difficult position; she is being asked to give up something she feels is important for her, and she is being asked to trust that Shelly and I will take care of her and listen to her needs, and she does not understand how that is possible. I am in a difficult position; my family is broken, and I do not know how to fix it.

We can never see past the choices we do not understand. Wish us luck.

Online map directions from the Shire to Mordor. Work-safe.

Gollum raps in Middle-Earth. Work-safe, funny, and VERY well done.

…if you were thinking about getting a way-cool Villain Tees t-shirt for Christmas…we’re flooded with orders and won’t be able to get any orders placed today or later out by the 25th. Sorry.

Quick review:

– Spent a good part of last week in bed with a back injury. Suck.

– Went to DisneyQuest over the weekend with Shelly and Kelly. They have an enormous, multistory arcade with an entire wing dedicated to vintage arcade games. Got to play Star Wars, Joust (one of my all-time faves), Battlezone, Tempest, Marble Madness, Zaxxon…many for the first time in years. They even had Space Invaders and Space War machines! Cool.

I don’t know what it is with modern video games, but they all suck. Fifteen varieties of combat games, ten varieties of first-person shooter games, fifteen varieties of racing games, each more formularistic and derivative than the last. Boring. Boring. Modern video game manufacturers wouldn’t know an original concept if it bit them on the collective corporate ass.

– Back in the office: Nothing but disasters. Clients with servers failing, five emergency rush jobs in the last sixteen hours alone, I can’t keep up. Suck.

– Meeting today with a patent consultant for an idea I have. Cool.

– San Francisco is only about three weeks away! Rumor has it Apple is planning something really, really big–much bigger than just new computer announcements. And we’ll get to hang out with altenra. Very, very cool.

– Christmas with my family and somewhat estranged sister. Could be cool, could suck.

And finally, for your moment of Zen: Work-safe and family friendly

A haiku for sunyata__‘s cat

The turkey lasagne and the big game…er, kind of

Thanksgiving, I’m told, is a day when families get together and eat turkey, and afterward there’s a game.

Seems a venerable tradition. Thursday, Kelly, Shelly, and I headed over to share Thanksgiving dinner with a number of close friends, including lightgatherer, moonshadowdance, and my archnemesis. Kelly spent the entire week cooking, making lasagne (including the noodles!) from scratch.

Afterward, we retired for the traditional Big Game–in this case, a LAN game of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun.

Which Shelly is now addicted to. 🙂

This “game after Thanksgiving” tradition is pretty cool. Think I’ll make it a regular part of the holiday.

Saturday: A day to spend with friends, family, and cute lesbian chicks

Saturday morning, Kelly and Shelly and I headed down south to spend the afternoon with my parents for a second Thanksgiving dinner. Frankly, I suspect this was rather a justification to get me to work on their computers… Got both of ’em running seti@home now, though, so I should be able to start kicing out more work units now.

Then back to Tampa to celebrate a birthday with my friend Scooter, who held her party at a local lesbian bar.

At eleven o’clock in the evening…mere moments after a car slammed into a telephone pole, knocking out power to the bar. Well, hell.

Didn’t get to do any dancing, but it was very cool to spend time with her–I haven’t had the opportunity to see her in a while.

It was FARGING cold, though.

Back to work

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate all things Micro$oft?

A client bought a PC from me last Wednesday. Today, bad RAM and bad video drivers and several blue screens during a Windows XP Pro install later, I still haven’t delivered it.

Gotta love an operating system installer that crashes while installing. God bless Microsoft.

Hope tomorrow is more fruitful.

Celebrity Death Match: Gollum vs. Dobby.

…or, when good electronics go bad.

I finally finished collecting all the components I needed, and this evening I spent several hours assembling the circuitry I’m going to use to borg out Shelly the next time we go clubbing.

The street finds its own uses for things.

The idea is to assemble a real live, working circuit directly on her face, gluing the components in place with spirit gum and running fine Kynar wire between the components. The prototype was built on a Styrofoam dummy head of the kind used to hold wigs and jewelry in beauty salons.

Here it is, in animated glory to show what the circuit does Picture is perfectly work-safe, which is rare for this journal

I was in Publix a few days back–a rarity, I’ll admit, and not something I try to do often–and noticed that Publix has taken to putting opaque covers over the Cosmo and Self magazines. It seems, you see, that customers have complained about–get this–how risque the covers are.

The ultraconservative Wal-Mart chain has also started protecting us from the evil of women in naughty dresses by covering women’s magazines as well.

I don’t get it.

We live in a culture totally steeped in sex. Those magazine covers look the way they do for a reason–because they sell magazines, which in turn sell clothes, cologne, perfume, and fad diet books. The most popular brand of shampoo and body wash in America, Herbal Essence, is supported by an advertising campaign in which a beautiful, soaped-up model moans in ogasmic ecstacy while an announcer breathlessly declares that the product is “a totally organic experience.” It couldn’t be any more blatant if the announcer said “Buy our product–it’s great to masturbate with.”

So what it comes down to is that we, as a culture, are both fascinated and repelled by sex. We want, hate, and fear it; we can talk about it, but only in a juvenile locker-room “nudge nudge wink wink” kind of way. Serious conversation about sex (or, God forbid, actually doing sex!) is beyond the pale.

It’s kind of ridiculous, really. We can watch movies about chainsaw-wielding maniacs who dismember sorority girls by the bushelful, but if someone actually has an orgasm on screen, it gets slapped with an NC-17 rating to protect us from the horror. We literally hate and fear sex more than we fear death.

What the fuck? How did we get so dysfunctional and schizophrenic? It affects every part of our social discourse. Our national government is overrun with cheating, philandering divorcees like “bouncing” Bobby Barr (the man who made Larry Flynt say “My god, that man’s a pervert!” after he was caught cheating on his wife with three prostitutes in a seedy hotel) trying to pass legislation to “protect” the “sanctity of marriage” (by, if you can believe it, forbidding people to marry). We’ve got a music industry that exerts pressure on its artists to censor themselves to please retail outlets like Wal-Mart, which appears to believe that carrying music with racy lyrics will inevitably lead to the utter collapse of Western civbilization and a corresponding decline in gross sales.

It’s ridiculous and it’s embarrassing. We as a culture need to grow the fuck up already.