Recovery

This post is here to help me clear my head and organize my thoughts. It is not likely to be interesting to most of my regular readers, so feel free to ignore it and move on.

One of the things that I have been doing is talking to the females that are a part of my past, and trying to figure out why relationships always seem to end for me the way that they do. I always say that you should look for the common denominator when you have problems, and the common denominator seems to be me.

One of the women that I have spoken with is a woman who broke up with me fifteen years ago, and had many of the same complaints as the latest one. She is married and lives in Arizona now, and we have slowly begun speaking over the past few years, via email and social media.

Fifteen years is a long time, and long enough that there is no longer any raw emotion or hard feelings that will get in the way of honest discussion. I have been hoping to get some answers that way.

The largest complaint that she had at the time was that I made her feel stupid. She now tells me that our intelligent conversations are what she misses the most about our time together. I remember when we were together, we used to lie in bed and talk for hours, until one of us fell asleep. We talked about everything and we talked about nothing, sometimes until the sun came up. I agree with her, I miss that. She said that she doesn't get intelligent conversation from her current construction worker husband (he calls her a nerd), and that they are always short on money, but she is happy with him.

She told me now, that looking back on it, she thought t the time that I was trying to be jealous and controlling, and was smothering her. She said that she now sees that I was just trying to be a large part of her life, and wishes that she would have talked with me about it, rather than running away.

That got me to thinking:How can I avoid this in the future. Is it that I am not communicating effectively? I tend to not discuss my feelings very much, and maybe that is the problem. I will have to ponder on this for awhile...

War on drugs

A man gives 75 cents to a homeless beggar, and the cops detain him for an hour, and tear up his car looking for drugs, laughing about it all the while.

Do not EVER consent to a search. THIS is one of the reasons why I oppose the war on (some) drugs. We are in a police state, they just haven't yet begun to disappear people that they don't like.

This is really getting on my nerves

After hearing from my ex-girlfriend last weekend that she didn't want any of her things back, I decided that enough was enough. I hadn't talked to her since last Sunday, and figured that my stuff was just gone. Last night, she emailed me and said that she had changed her mind yet again, wants her stuff back, and will deliver my things to me as well.

This woman is crazy, and I don't know what kind of games she is playing. I just want her out of my life, and I want her to leave me alone. I can't get over this and move on with her constantly contacting me.

How can I miss you, if you won't go away?

Idiots

So, in the wake of this week's shooting, the Florida press is starting to make noise about why people are being permitted to carry guns at a movie theater. They are hinting that the law in Florida should bar people who have a CCW permit from carrying in public.

What the press, and the morons that they interviewed, fail to realize is that this particular shooting was perpetrated by a retired police officer. Under Federal law, a person who served as a police officer for ten years or more has nationwide authorization to carry a concealed weapon anywhere he wishes for the rest of his life, with the exception of government buildings. Sure, under the law the property owner can ask an armed cop to leave, but that just doesn't happen, for all practical purposes.

Ryan is an ignorant tool bag

So a guy named Ryan from Garden Grove California, with an IP address of 64.203.36.# came here and decided to post the following comment to this post:

Speaking of stupid I came across your "it's a felony to use someone's wi-fi" and had a good laugh, consulted with several of my friends (who are attorneys), and they had a good laugh as well.

#1: You are an ambulance driver, not an attorney. Please don't pretend you know the law until you've actually studied it or consulted with an actual attorney.

#2: It is not a felony to use someone else's wi-fi unless you actually hack into their network and spy on their network traffic or steal information, which would fall under a completely different category.

#3: Your analogy of using wi-fi being comparable to breaking into someone's home is absolutely laughable because: wi-fi is ubiquitous, it is everywhere, your neighbor's wi-fi is in your home, and your wi-fi is in your neighbor's home, so for you to compare it to breaking into their home, well... ironically you overlooked the fact that their wi-fi is already in your home, and yours is in their home.

#4: You should just make a blog of your ignorant comments, that would probably be more amusing, and more people would read it.

First, you are an ignorant ass, and your attorney friends are incompetent assholes that I wouldn't hire to get me out of a $20 parking ticket. See, the police and the prosecutors disagree with you, and proved it when Benjamin Smith became the first man arrested in Florida for using someone's open WiFi without permission.

You didn't even comment on the post that you were referring to, which is found here. Nowhere in that post did I compare using WiFi without permission to be analogous to breaking into a home. However, when you use someone's WiFi without permission, you are stealing their bandwidth. Yes, the radio waves are passing through your home, but using that logic, so are your cell phone calls, the satellite signal for HBO, and the nuclear launch codes that the Navy uses. That doesn't make them mine to take.

Law change will cost you

As of today, the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act expires, as it was not renewed by Congress. This is a HUGE problem for underwater homeowners. Let me explain:

Underwater homeowners often try to negotiate with their bank so that they can sell their homes for less than they owe in a short sale or have their mortgage balance reduced. But the difference between what the homeowner owes and the lower sales price approved by the bank is considered income for the homeowner and subject to tax by the Internal Revenue Service.

For example, someone with a $100,000 mortgage who is allowed to sell their house for $80,000 is supposed to pay taxes on the remaining $20,000.

But the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act saved such homeowners from the tax burden. Last year, Congress rushed to extend the law during negotiations about the fiscal cliff but only through the end of 2013.

They did not do so this year. This means that the IRS will consider a short sale to be INCOME, even though the homeowner took a loss in selling his home for less than what he paid for it.

So let's say that you borrowed $240,000 for your home in 2007. The bank allows you to short sell it in 2014, and you get $100,000. That $140,000 difference will count as income, and if you are married and each earn around $45,000 a year, you are now considered subject to the taxes that the evil rich must pay. Your tax bill will be about $45,000 higher than it otherwise would.

Hope this doesn't keep you up at night.