Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“In organized crime, victims never survive because they will get revenge. In book reviewing, victims invariably survive and ‘bide their time.’”

—Joyce Carol Oates, Twitterfeed, May 30, 2013



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

—Nora Ephron, Wellesley College Commencement Address, 1996

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Well, I was this close, >THIS< close to having a month in which I showed some moderation in my book buying (3), but then a late month splurge blew that out of the water. Still, eight books is not as bad of a total as some months. Ahem.

I even bought a book by Dr. Wayne Dyer. I can't believe that! I've avoided him assiduously for years. I had this otherwise beloved English teacher in high school, see, who was a big proponent of Dyer. Though I ate up everything else this teacher said with a spoon, I never bought into ol' Wayne, and my beloved teacher wound up having a nervous breakdown the next year so it seemed like whatever Dyer was pushing hadn't worked too well.

Added to that, I'm generally deeply (deeply, deeply) skeptical of all New Agey power of positive thinking type philosophies because if you scratch beneath the surface of all their affirmative talk, they seem to be blaming victims for the bad things that happen to them. "You didn't think positively enough," or "You let stinkin' thinkin' rule you." Social Darwinism in new packaging, folks. Still wrong. When confronted with this question, Dr. Dyer says that people who say such things have over-simplified his message to an absurd degree, and perhaps that's so. I remain skeptical.

But I'm not skeptical about a positive attitude being more helpful than a negative one. I just think that sometimes it's impossible to maintain (and probably inappropriate) in the face of some of life's more brutal turns, turns that are just part of the wheel spinning to a new position, that have nothing to do with the victims having put themselves into a position of being victimized. Sorry, Wayne, no can go there.

Dr. Dyer has recently been diagnosed with leukemia. I sincerely wish him well (because I seriously believe in the threefold law), but we'll see how his positive thinking works out for him.

Which is a long damned preamble as to why I bought one of his books, isn't it? Could it be someone is feeling defensive? Hmm? Whatever. I have my own theories about "The Power of Intention" and I found myself deeply curious to see what Dyer's's made of it. So I'll read it. With reservations and caveats, probably, but I'll read it.

( And now the book portion of my screed. )

(No, not ferrets. They're cool.)


Oh me. Here's the quote from the quote file which I forgot to add to this the first time around:

"Gain not base gains; base gains are the same as losses."

—Hesiod



So late Sunday/early Monday my car got broken into for the second time in two weeks—down in the bowels of our "security" garage. Two weeks ago they broke the lock on the driver's side and got in—but my car is old and crummy and I don't keep anything of value in it. All they got was the garage door opener. Of course, since I only have public liability and property damage on my car, the insurance company will not be reimbursing me for the cost of having the door lock repaired.

Yuri, our post-Soviet manager, reset the garage door code and fixed the "security building" lobby door which wouldn't lock and was, presumably, how the thief got in. How they got into the garage the second time is a matter of some debate, but no guessing as to how they got in my car: through the same driver's side lock. Then they popped the hood release inside and stole my old battery out of my car. I won't be reimbursed for the new battery I bought, either.

1. Perhaps the fellow at the Union 76 who replaced my battery is right and "they" have stolen the old battery because they know I'll have to replace it with a new one and they'll return some day soon and steal the new battery as well.

2. My car and one other that was broken into two weeks ago don't have car alarms. Easy marks. And my car is the first one in the garage leading from the lobby. So maybe it was just a target of opportunity.

3. It's personal—someone inside the building with easy access to the garage directing spite towards me.

You know, I'm trying hard not to be paranoid, but there are some indications that it might be personal. And Yuri likes this idea. He was speculating as much himself yesterday. "Inside job, Pamela." Of course, if it's an inside job and personal spite that lets him and the owner theoretically off the hook as far as liability for lousy security is concerned. That may account for some of his liking, but it also plays in well with Yuri's inherent sense of melodrama.

The only neighbors in the entire 30-apartment complex that I have had problems with live directly upstairs from me and they've recently received an eviction. They have until the end of the month to clear out. She works and holds down a steady job, maintains a discernible pattern—but there is not discernible pattern to Boyfriend's comings and goings. And Yuri told me he caught Boyfriend vandalizing apartment property once already and the Girlfriend broke the lease because, well, Boyfriend wasn't on the lease. He moved in afterwards without clearing it with the manager/owner first. That and the vandalism are a large part of why they're being evicted—but not the whole story. They've been a very noisy pair, often on weeknights late at night. Many have complained and for the last 4 months or so they've been fairly quiet. But I am not one of the people who complained.

However, I was stupid enough to go upstairs a couple of times to have talks with them about noise, thinking we could work this out as adults. But hey, they aren't adults. And Boyfriend often retaliated after these talks with even more noise. Until Yuri put the squeeze on them—which I'm sure Boyfriend felt was my doing. Boyfriend is a spud—an immature little spud who can't take responsibility for his own actions so he's got to strike out at someone. I may be paranoid, but I can't help feeling like something of a target.

On the upside, they'll be gone by the 1st. On the downside, that gives him 2-1/2 more weeks to hit me again if he's so inclined. On the other downside, it may not be him and this may not be personal.

Sigh. This feels like such a morass. I should move out of this apartment complex because it's been sliding slowly downhill, but. . . I'm $200 under market and not likely to get a comparable apartment on the Westside. For the first time in years I've actually been able to do something other than scrape by. This year I actually got to do some fun stuff. Right now the hassle/benefit scale is swinging up and down quite a bit. It's hard to know what to do. But if the problem isn't solved when Girlfriend and Boyfriend move out, the slow attrition rate on my car may tip the scale into negative balance. Only time will tell and I'm relatively helpless here. All I can do is pray—and look into getting a car alarm.

I also wanted to say something about how we tend to romanticize thieves in fiction.

When I pulled today's quote out of the quote file I thought it appropriate to what I'd gone through and had to laugh. Sometimes the synchronicity of my random quote file is just too funny. I illustrate the quotes and put them up on the bulletin board at work every day and folks like it enough that when I'm not here they complain to my office mate that there aren't any new quotes. I enjoy finding images, sometimes ironic juxtapositions, sometimes appropriate to theme. So today I was using google to find images relating to thieves.

I found all kinds of images, all right, many from the fantasy genre, and almost all of them portraying thieves as romantic anti-heroes; slightly bad boys with hidden hearts of gold; or else lovable rapscallions—always up to mischief, but dashing and handsome.

Furthermore, their victims are always portrayed as fat, complacent partridges just waiting to be plucked; or semi-greedy rich folk who deserve what they get. Unless, of course, our thieves are thieves of the heart, and then their marks are beautiful young women fainting longingly into their larcenous arms.

To repeat: thieves are people who get on in this world by victimizing others. Mostly they are venal little creeps—stupid, uneducated people who have only ever found one way of making themselves feel superior than others. By ripping them off, putting one over on the straight folks. I know because my family encompasses one or two of these venal little creeps and trust me, there isn't a damned thing romantic about them. They're bone-lazy and mean spirited and slimy.

There are other levels of thieves who aren't stupid, but not in the "boost a car battery league." They may have started out with petty larceny when they were thirteen or fourteen, but soon graduated to higher levels with a grander scale of victimization. Some of them are con artists. Some of them even have MBAs. But the basic personality type is the same no matter what level of thievery, what level of education, we're talking about. They are all venal little creeps who make themselves feel superior by victimizing others.

And most of those victims are not partridges, not greedy rich folk (who often have much better security systems in place). Mostly, they're just averaging working stiffs living from one pay check to the next, getting their car batteries ripped off, or having their pension plans suddenly disappear because the company big boys decided to use it to build themselves mansions on six continents. Although I will make a slight concession on the fainting young women bit. Some women are stupid enough to buy into the romantic thief archetype and believe that their victimizing, unemployed, bastard Boyfriends are naughty rapscallions, dangerous in an exciting way, but underneath it all have hearts of gold. Even after he causes them to get evicted from their apartment.

If I ever, ever write a romantic thief character in any of my fiction I am hereby authorizing all my writer and non-writer friends to rear up on their haunches and slug me good and hard.

There is nothing romantic about thieves.