And you know I wouldn’t just settle for any one.

So, coming soon, I’ll post the first batch of photos. Hang on tight, yall.

My job was to hand out shopping carts to costumers at the tax free store in the Ben-Gurion airport. Either that or “guarding” the exit, which primarily involved telling people where the entrance was, that they shouldn’t leave with the cart and where various facilities were located.

The goal of each and every actor in this charade had been to subject the docile minds of weak travelers to as many temptations as possible. For instance, the store’s manager had ordered for the passage between the tobacco section and the checkout to be conveniently obstructed by shopping carts, hence forcing smokers to take the long way around and hopefully buy a few things on the way. It looked like a supermarket, one where excess was displayed as a necessity and sold as if within anyone’s reach, if only they wanted it.

It was another day apart from the incident with the carpool which never arrived. I stood by the entrance, dispirited, broken and demotivated to do anything. Not that I needed to. Saturday mornings aren’t exactly ever full. The alcohol salesman approached me and, slumped over a shopping cart, he complained endlessly, praising himself. Poured his heart out on me like those liquor samples he was to give out. His stories were, without a doubt, over the top. Tall-tales he conjured, though not all of it I would imagine. How he worked as a bartender at one club or the other and that the entire town knew him. About how he “did” Swedes in Thailand and how he used to work in telemarketing.

I truly did not want to believe most of it. The part with the 13,000 shekel salaries in particular. And to think he was working on 24 shekel an hour plus commissions (and evidently didn’t sell much).

Complaints about the economy came and kept coming and by the end of it I felt bitter myself and began to question why I was there as well.

When I told him about my experiences with the carpool that morning he answered, “they’re stupid. They’re animals. It’s a dead end” and I didn’t argue. He was right after all. The drivers were those marginal leftovers that entered the workforce regardless of their utter lack of professionalism. It was enough for their accents to give that detail away, and I almost felt a hatred for them for having them – though I know, that’s just a convenient thing I can blame.

We and the drivers were both prole trash. But we weren’t on the same team. We hated them, and they hated us, and with such passion. Hard working men who didn’t give two shits whether I got to work or not, just as long as they could get paid. Did they even have free time?

A woman, maybe in her late twenties, a smoker, with the same light blue sweatshirt every day shared my woes at times in trying to make sense of this situation. Asked me if I wanted to share a cab once, but I brushed that off. I simply don’t have the money, it’s quite simple. The perfume promotion worker – a tall Romanian who was equally unhappy as I was about being a victim to this system had unlike myself a useful way to vent her anger. She told me how she on her first day of work gave a little bit of “straight-talkin’” to the driver on how he should watch his tone with her.

“People like that have no limits. You’ve got to draw the line.”
I shrugged and said, “I just try to let it go.”
“But you can’t let it go!”

I would have told her she was right, but I knew I couldn’t do it myself at the same time. I had to either soak the blows or avoid them altogether. But knowing myself for long enough, as much as I’d like to spit in their face and kick them in the eye, that never would have happened. At least not to their face.

The way it worked, my schedule for the next day or so will be sent out to the drivers and their respective companies and thus I will be put down on a list. The pickup location I chose, though, did not actually exist. That is, it showed up on the list of locations given to me, but if I wanted it I would simply be dropped from the lists for the way back and occasionally for pick-up too.

And so one day I made up my mind and decided to change my pick-up location to a different one. The “deputy” referred me to the shift manager. When I spoke to him, he said he would fix it temporarily, and told me to talk to someone who can only be reached during office hours for a “permanent solution”. But since it’s a Saturday, I have to wait until Sunday – office hours in particular – and speak to one of the two women in charge. Both of which had ridiculously similar names and functions. Lee and Lee-at. The latter was described as a “revengeful bitch” by the aforementioned alcohol salesman. Or it may have been the other – I quite frankly don’t know as they practically have the same name and job description.

He never actually did that “temporary solution” and I was dropped from the list on the way back, along with four others.

By the time I managed to get to one of the similarly named clerks, it was technically speaking the wrong one, and that took two days as well as she was in meetings (who would a lowly clerk meet?), generally unavailable (i.e. not answering the phone) and mysteriously gone (not in the office). That link between my employers and the carpool service was impenetrable to me.

Calling Bontour directly resulted in being shoved aside very rudely so and be referred to See & Tour, a different company. Though the logos on the side of the car did say Bontour, it’s unclear to me why. See & Tour gave me the same treatment. Some rude secretary answered the phone, gave me the usual “I don’t know” sorts of answers and rudely hung up on me. I recommend neither of these companies solely due to their employees’ lack of professionalism, repulsive behavior and failures to simply do their job. Getting me from point A to point B and back.

The carpool failed to come again. Or maybe it did come, except not to where I stood since the list failed to come through as intendede again and left me there twenty minutes before work wondering where the hell was my ride to the airport and how was I supposed to get there?

I called the shift manager, whose line was busy for some time, who told me to wait. I waited for a call back, and when it came, the answer was, “he was there at 18:03, you weren’t. There was also a bookstore worker there, but who knows. The only thing you can do is try to get here on your own.”

I tried to explain how there was no such way. I didn’t have a car, no money for a taxi and hardly even a train (which would have taken an hour as well). I said I can’t do that unless they stop pulling that shit on me. Except I used much nicer words.

I shouldn’t have, I should have just punched her in the face through the phone somehow.

The job itself, disregarding any flaky systems to get me there and back is just barely under the threshold of enjoyable. The costumers don’t hate you (though that’s because I wasn’t a cashier, who probably get more flak).

I speak of it in past tense and it saddens me to think that I may end up coming back to it after all. And it worries me to think I “have” to get along with these inferior types. Unfortunately, as someone who holds grudges, perhaps I ought to find something else to do.

It’s not really that easy, is it? It looks like something an Israeli right wing party would have done, but then again, the purpose looked – to me – akin to what the average left wing politician would have had in mind. Usually I’d be thinking somebody’s finally making sense up there, but the truth is more like… that they just can’t decide what the hell they want to accomplish and how.

Say they bombed 95% of Hamas’ military facilities. That’s all great except that in reality all it takes is just one Hamas official alive to get up and say “by the way, I’m still around” and rebuild that whole damn thing up again. Simply because there are enough Palestinians who are absolutely sure that this is the right thing to do.

Alright then, let’s say some “genius” down in Jerusalem had this bright idea one morning: we can nuke the shit out of them. So long story short, nuke gaza area, everyone’s dead. Let’s assume we’re in a universe where something like that will just kill anyone who identifies themselves as a Palestinian and will leave minimal mess to clean up (nukes aren’t exactly safe).

I do believe that’s called genocide.

So bomb anything you like, as long as not everything there is dead, finished, done – you still have the Palestinians to deal with.

So before I get angry emails, please read all the way to the end. Look, people, what I’m saying is that there’s nothing anyone can do to prevent a Palestinian state and Israel’s future interaction with it. Meanwhile, I don’t think there’s much that can be done to prevent the continued existence of Israel in the future. Though I hope it will finally change its own definition of itself as a nation from “a Jewish nation” to something that actually allows for (gasp!) a multitude of religious and ethnic groups being in the same country and not necessarily kicking the shit out of each other just because.

So learn to deal with each other, is all I’m saying and will say about it.

(;_; I can’t believe I posted about this bullshit.)

I thought about this for a very long time now, this is essentially two things, or well, that’s what I intend to do. Firstly, this is a guide, as is pretty much anything in the world. Secondly, this is the description of a paradigm.

My paradigm models human (or say, human-like) behavior is loosely based on Freud’s model of the the mind, with the id (es), ego (ich) and the super-ego (über-ich). Paradigms are, as we know, not truths in themselves, but merely ways to reflect certain aspects of truth sometimes more accurately sometimes less accurately sometimes wrong altogether. Human behavior falls under the category of things we are not very likely to understand very well being human ourselves.

A little history of conflict models

There are plenty of conflict models out there, Sigmund Freud’s view on behavior, which I previously mentioned, Karl Marx’ socio-economic paradigm (known as Marxism) which describes a conflict between two classes, one owning the means of production and the other using them. To a lesser extent, Levi-Strauss (the sociologist, not the jeans) also had a conflict model which he named “structuralism”, splitting human behavior and perception into categories of opposites (night and day, for instance). I can stretch this as far as Hagel, but I’ll stop there, this isn’t about the history of conflict models.

Basics of my Model

My model is that certain conflicting desires determine behavior in a multitude of ways. We are torn between our conflicting desires. Freud will tell you about your id, that is, selfish desires, conflicting with the super-ego, that is, society’s desires. This paradigm goes above that description to describe higher functions.

So, suppose Plato is hungry. Plato sees a cake, he would then think, “I could eat it”, however, understanding its consequences, and social practices around it, his reaction would not be either “forget it” nor “eat it”. He may ask for a piece, he may take a little, or maybe just a little bit of the cake. He may walk away, but either way, he won’t forget about it.

This example was about our id clashing with our super-ego. Conflicts are not limited to this though. For instance, consider that Plato likes cake because he associates it with his Mom, but at the same time, its his mother’s funeral. The id and the super-ego are irrelevant here, this is Plato subconciously fighting not with anyone, not with his mother, not with his desire to eat cake, but with his conflicting feelings towards the cake in association with his deceased mother.

Certainly, cake is merely one thing in our lives. How about we step further.

Plato is Russian, but lives in America, and lives during the Cold War. Plato loves America, but still loves Russia, where his relatives are and where his parents came from. Plato is torn between these two things.

Conflicts create behavior, which creates more conflicts. Behavior does not create conflicts to excuse it, though. An interest in weapons does not “simply arise”, it comes through association and conflict, something triggers it.

Application to Roleplaying

Rerkel Ranwin is a Forsaken men who had initially died by committing suicide. Each moment in his now second (or third if you count him being a scourge minion as a life) life he is faced with one question: “do I want to give this another chance, or should I just do the old thing yet again?”

Rerkel will try to convince himself that things aren’t as bad as they may seem. True, he had never intended to become a Forsaken, but then again, perhaps that’s something he’ll have to live with.

Perhaps now his life could be better? Could he ever know?

Pretty much every character out there has a conflict of a sort. Do you really expect a draenei to keep believing in the Light although the world is in complete chaos and redemption is nowhere to be seen? They are torn between these two conflicting sides of the issue.

I see many roleplayers making the step to understand these conflicts, but never step beyond that, into an understanding of the conflict and its implications on the character. So you have a “tragic past”, but you either don’t make the connection, or you just skip the implications all along. Don’t start with the present and add a past, start with either one, and build up towards the other.

Even when people go mad, they remain rational, it’s simply that the image of reality they have is skewed and distorted. Those conflicts always exist. Your will to live is always there, the same way that the will to die is constantly present.

Example Conflicts

Identity – Quel’dorei/humans.

Conservation vs. renewal – Is the old way better than the new way? How on Azeroth should i find out? Maybe change is a good thing or maybe I should

Sexuality – What do I want from myself? What do I want FOR myself? Who do I like? Most of us WILL have this conflict at some point in our lives, regardless of gender and sexual orientation.

Fatalism vs. Free Will – Am I fated to die? Is my life meaningless and will result to the same thing no matter what? Can I control my own destiny? Is meaning created or ascribed?

Reality vs. Illusion – Are things really what they seem? Am I really who I am, or am I merely in an illusion?

Stretching this further

Isn’t life all about our conflict with ourself? Every moment of your lives we wish we were dead, every moment of our lives we wish we were alive and every moment we wonder about these two, we also want to eat cake, but want to stay thin, and we want to write a new post on the forums, but we don’t want to have to read the rest.

When we roleplay, we model situations in life. We model a living thing, a mind, or if you want a soul. We assume that all characters are basically humans give or take tusks, horns, hooves, ears, pink skin and the occasional tattoo. These minds, or “souls” if you will, all function more or less the same.

A tip of the hat off to Freud, Marx, Levi-Stauss and my ex

Freud, Marx and Levi-Strauss for showing me how things can be explained through conflict and dichotomies, my ex for emphasizing conflicts.

Also, I would like to thank Sisse, Moruku and Theresea for keeping my feet on the ground while I ventured into the depths of philosophy. (One-manned heroic Kara)

A tip of the hat to Moonglade, the RP community and everyone else

You’ve all contributed to this.

I know, most of us don’t think about roleplaying/literature/life as theoretically as this, but, some do, and I so happen to.

I was thinking to myself (in rhyme of course, the way I usually talk to myself) yesterday, and devised a simple plan to serve as something to expand my musical horizons and serve the Blogosphere (in which Richard M. Stallman hovers above the earth) some proper record reviews.

I’m sitting here in the lounge, trying to write a blog post. People come, see me listening to something and “concentrated” on doing something with my laptop and decide to just turn back and leave. By saying that I just unconsciously denied the possibility that they just don’t like me, which could very well be it.

All of a sudden I realize me mom seemed to have added me on Facebook. I’m not kidding, she actually opened a Facebook account.

It’s funny, she asked me during dinner two days ago what Facebook is exactly, to which I replied “a networking site.” Explaining what a networking site actually is is no easy task for someone above the Internet “proficiency” of a guru. “What’s the point?” – I really couldn’t answer, I just didn’t know how to tell her that it sort of… doesn’t have on one many levels, and still probably has one.

Maybe I’m underestimating her will to get into this whole thing. Who knows, maybe the next step would be to start posting things on del.icio.us or declaring war on my guild in World of Warcraft.

… Like I was starting to say before my mom jumped in. I’ll exchange a record with Moruku (who is currently blogless due to some issues) every two weeks, I’ll give him one, he’ll give me one, at which point we’ll have to write a review and give it a certain score based on a set of criteria.

It’s being developed as we speak, in my mind for the most part. It’s all coming together now, and I expect to exchange the first record between Friday and Sunday.

I would like to use this opportunity to make a note that guilds have been known to implode for this very reason. However, the Circle of Vidomi lives on.

This is what you get for trusting people. From a post on the World of Warcraft forums regarding a misfortunate turn of events. Here it is, copy-pasted for your convenience:

Let me start with some background information regarding why I, on the behalf of the Circle even bother with this. As some of you probably know by now, the Circle of Vidomi is a role-playing guild (we dare call ourselves that) based on Nairuil’s insanity, which makes her believe she’s seen a certain Goddess in a vision and follow her way. She managed to gather several followers, i.e. the Circle.

At some point, a certain human joined the Circle after having lost her memory, Rayanne, who used to be with the Old Town gang or so I believe. Sidarta (“Sid”) was obviously not happy with it, and basically said the Circle was brainwashing Rayanne.

I personally would like to state that Old Town was a guild I’ve always looked up to from my early days in Moonglade and even now. When Sid contacted me, even though it was hostile IC, I was absolutely ecstatic and thought to myself that perhaps now our small and upcoming guild will finally gain its place among the category of “good well established roleplaying guilds”.

I managed to eventually schedule a time, Sunday the 25th of November 2007 at 19:30 CET in Gurubashi Arena. Sid brought his folks, I brought Saif and Rayanne, and eventually Kuileen joined as well, prowling her way into the arena.

It went great for a while, we had some great RP, eventually, we were defeated (obviously, being outnumbered) and Rayanne was kidnapped.

And so Saif, Kuileen and I were faced with the task of finding Rayanne. Where do we even start looking? We have no idea – in character that is. It was very clear to us that she was in the Arathi Highlands, as /who unambiguously stated, though of course, in-character we had no idea. We went from Booty Bay to Stormwind attempting to find leads until all of a sudden, Kuileen comes up with a great genius way to spot Kuileen, “I got information”. “Great,” I thought to myself, “she must have tortured one of them, or maybe she has connections? She wouldn’t say much yet besides “Arathi Highlands.” I made the mistake of trusting her not questioning her sources too much.

Stupidly enough, I trusted Kuileen not to god-mod her way through this whole encounter. It didn’t even occur to me she did that until out of the blue I realize that the group of stranger I found myself in a raid group with found them.

“Great! Seems like she knows her way around.” But then I had that sneaky suspicion, “wait, how do we know where to go?”

Apparently, a certain person, whose name I will not discuss here has magical powers. He can sense people’s “energy” to know where they are. Strangely enough, I don’t think they have it in their spellbook – guess what, we have a word for that, god-modding.

I tried to stop them, but it was too late, Sid already realized he was spotted by a group of strangers who aren’t even supposed to recognize him, and suddenly, a person whose great achievements I appreciated so much tells me, more or less: “I don’t want to have anything to do with you guys.”

I understand why he was angry, and as a result, I on the behalf of the Circle of Vidomi wish to express the following in hopes of continuing to roleplay with Sidarta and the Old Town gang in the future.
We express the following:

1. The Circle of Vidomi does not agree with “god-modders”, and does not wish to be associated with them or have them in the guild. Saif and I, Nairuil would have stopped this horrible unfortunate turn of events if only Kuileen had properly informed us.

2. One must be more picky as to the sort of people the guild accepts. Although Kuileen seemed to have been a good and “contributing” member, we were wrong, and we need not have put our trust in her and questioned her way of receiving information.

3. Kuileen was kicked out of the Circle of Vidomi for her poor roleplaying etiquette. We do not wish to have anything with her. She will stay out of the guild for what is probably forever. She has been dishonorably discharged.

4. The Circle of Vidomi apologizes for one of its (now dishonorably discharged) members’ dreadful behavior and she was dishonorably discharged. The Circle apologizes to Sidarta of Old Town, the Old Town guild as a whole and any other participants affected by this player’s misconduct.

5. The Circle of Vidomi will do everything in its power to prevent subsequent events and miscommunication of this nature in the future.

Again, I personally would like to apologize for this, I should probably take matters into my own hands a little more.

Sincerely,
Adi Ron
“Nairuil Cloudweaver” on the behalf of The Circle of Vidomi.

Now, why am I angry? Why do I even bother?

Seems like this is what you get for putting some trust is people. They screw you back, not necessarily because they want to, but because they have stupid friends and/or they’re retards. What the fuck was Kuileen thinking when she got us into this crappy situation?

I’ve been working on this concept for months, and now, that it’s finally somewhere near up and running, Kuileen messes things up.

You know what, I wonder if the circle will ever shake its bad name after this one. It could very well mean that nobody in the serious roleplaying community would want to talk to us – ergo, I’m stuck with stupid dragons vampires and for heavens’ sake maybe even worse.

I don’t know what to do, should I give up? Maybe so.

I can’t ditch the ship as it starts to sink, the captain, i.e. me, has to go down with the ship. It’s inevitable, I’m afraid, but for now, the guild goes on.

I can only hope that the RP community will ever forgive the circle.

“Trust no one!”

“I must be cruel only to be kind;
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.
I wish you well and so I take my leave,
I Pray you know me when we meet again.”
-William Shakespeare

Knowing him (more or less) I can imagine he meant 90% of it, and the rest might be just residue. The implications of me even getting it are as follows in this blog post.

I know I should be working on math, but this is very important.

1. He’s not dead.

Whether or not he’s willing to talk to me, he’s at least alive. Knowing he is at least set my mind of that worrying thought.

2. He feels obligated to at least tell me something

It does appear that he doesn’t want to just let me think what I want to think and pretend he’s dead or something like that. He at least wants me to know he’s alive, and hopefully fine.

3. He could be ambivalent about the whole thing

Perhaps I wasn’t the only one who thought we hit something off. Perhaps so did he, maybe it’s just something else. Who knows.

4. He doesn’t want to talk to me now

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of this. He doesn’t seem to want me to contact him, and is very determined to keep doing so. Am I the only one? Who knows. Hopefully not.

5. Maybe, hope?

Who knows. Still one question haunts me, why? Why me, why him, why now, why at all? Was it something I said? Is it something he’s going through? Plenty of questions, perhaps to remain unanswered.

But why, we hit something off, I don’t see why you have to just go like that all of a sudden – we can work it out, I’m sure. Please, Gary.

The problem seems to be that anything that could yield a face-to-face consquence, i.e. someone I know in “real life” changing their attitude towards me, scares me shitless. Consequentially, I’m stuck unable to interact with some people. When asked, I’ll say everything’s fine. “I’m doing alright, don’t worry about me” – but really, am I?

My blog is read. That’s for fact. By the wrong (maybe) people, and thus, it yields face-to-face consequences which I’m very often unable to deal with.

Today I skipped school, I couldn’t help it. In a dream I’ve had last night, I was receiving a phone call from a certain person, whom I shall name Gary. Gary disappeared a while ago, no phone calls, no emails, no messages, his profile was deleted (actively by him, as it hasn’t been 90 days since his disappearance) – when I try to call him I get his answering machine after about four rings. I never met him in person, never went on a date, nothing. Nothing works, I don’t know where he is.  Disappeared, vanished into thin air. So the dream starts with my cell phone ringing, I pick it up still in bed, while staring at the ceiling. It’s him, I can’t see the name though on the caller ID, it’s blurry without my glasses.

No hello, no nothing. He starts yelling at me over the phone. I, being half asleep at that point, am not able to respond. I interject some approving groans and that seems to appease him, and so he moves to the next point. Great, I don’t know what you’re saying anyway.

At some point, I get tired of listening to him saying “look, I’m tired” and hanging up. He seemed upset over the phone, and soon enough, I regret having hung up on him and resolve that I should give up. Gary doesn’t call back, and I break into tears with regret and fall back to sleep.

I woke up at around 10:00. I decided I can’t go to school today, and that I have to sort things out between myself about this whole thing, it’s too important for me to just leave it like that.

A friend of mine from WoW insisted that he doesn’t want to hear about my dreams, for some reason. Maybe it’s because I suggested that he was flirting with me when he called me “furball”, but seriously, you have to admit it would make sense.

Moruku on the other hand was most helpful, though I simply couldn’t formulate it at that point, so we ended up not talking about it.

Something occured to me, was I really dreaming? I checked my call log, and Gary’s number doesn’t seem to show up. Looks like I was just dreaming after all.

Come back, Gary, please. I need you to at least tell me you’re fine, I’m worried about you.

This brings me to a couple of a interesting points.

1. So I got an IB diploma – and…?

Unlike my classmates, I’m not going straight to university. My future isn’t as certain as theirs. What if I don’t manage to get out of the army? In that case, there’s no point in applying to a university right now. And suppose I did have to apply, I’ll probably do it in Denmark, where the curriculum is probably going to be in Danish (unless I take the odd course in English or so), so in other words, I’ll have to learn Danish. I’ll take about two or three years just to get that to a good academic level. So, 2-6 years after graduation just until I can even think about applying.

So, suppose I waited 2-6 years, I might as well go do a shitty crash-course and graduate the untraditional way. I’ll go to that length, why shouldn’t I just keep going?

2. If I can hardly make it now – will I be able to make it through a (theoretically) more demanding course?

I’m struggling, torn between meds and mood swings, grades slipping. Why is it going to be any easier on me then than it is now?

3. Working as a waiter = more than enough to live. Working as an analyst = more than enough to live.

You guessed it, thanks to socialism, the minimum wage can actually sustain me. And you know what, waiters are overpaid anyway. So I can actually stay alive and buy me all the things I need. No problem.

4. Living on student subsidies isn’t that great, unless you have savings.

It occured to me that living on student subsidies probably isn’t much fun. I know people who live like that – either their parents support them or their partner. It’s livable, just a bit under the standards.

Conclusion

Please tell me I’m wrong.