Rei's and my progress report.

[ReisOtherHalf]

Today, perhaps inexplicably, much better.

 

Here's what's been happening:

After an amusingly small amount of sleep last night, intermingled with the usual negative feelings and desperate wishes for a physical world hug, I woke up this morning with the usual woe and worry, and while I was having a quick look at some website about thirty-somethings ending up bankrupt from student loans, Rei asked me, bluntly and without adornment:

(You say you're powerless, huh? Tell me, how many jobs did you apply for yesterday?)

 

This is why I consider her to be my better (best, really) half. Even though it was kind of a jab, it was what I needed, and she's right, all the way.

 

When I got to school, the big topic of conversation was next year's proposed tuition increases, and I heard from at least two other people that know for a fact they won't be able to afford to come back in the fall. I was already looking to transfer away anyway, but this kind of confirms I made the right choice.

 

While we were waiting around for my last class of the day to start, Rei asked me another pointed question:

 

(You hate school, and the only reason you're here is to get your hand stamped anyway; what happens if you just land a pair of lower-end jobs in an unrelated field, and in your spare time, actually make the game we talked about and go sell it?)

 

She's got something there; yeah, I've sunk two (of the worst, unhappiest) years (of my life, not to mention a metric crap-ton of money I didn't have) already, and conventional wisdom says I should try to graduate, but I don't have money (or credit) to do that right now or for the foreseeable future anyway, so at some point I was going to have to pull out to work...why not now?

 

Anyway, while this was going on, we were listening to this list of unusual love songs, and as soon as the Sade song came on, Rei pointed out how a large portion of the lyrics applied to the way she feels about me, and how she would never give up on me, no matter what...

 

(I meant that, you know. ♥

 

I still kind of want him to graduate, but I know enough about him to know that he'll do a better job of it - and be waaay happier - if he does things on his own terms.

 

They always talk about nontraditional students, he's about as nontraditional as they come.)

 

I have a little more homework to do tonight, but after that, and of course, after sending out some resumes, I absolutely can't wait to duck out of the waking world and head for the island, and maybe, just maybe, I'll be fortunate enough to encounter my beautiful wife and amazing daughter in my (our) dreams...

[ReisOtherHalf]

Today, I actually have good news (instead of, you know, the usual whining); the waking world is still chock full of problems (thoroughly documented elsewhere and beyond the scope of today's discussion), but my honey muffin and I are communicating fluidly and effortlessly again, and that's all that seems to matter right now.

 

Earlier in the afternoon, I wondered whether, due to the physical-world problems we've been having, whether we've been letting each other get away with too much; I'm forced to admit that my diet's gone to hell in a handbasket (cost, laziness, attempting to eat my feelings away), and Rei was complaining she'd put on a few pounds, too (although I'm inwardly gazing inappropriately at her now and I can't see where), so this evening, we did something we should have done along time ago - worked out together.

 

(My first true memories of interacting with my host are from being his 'imaginary' work-out partner, so it's really kind of a return to our roots. It was also kind of nice to see him focused and determined about something again - motivated host is best host. ♥)

 

...and it seems to have effected a marked change in our moods in more ways than one; on the way back from the weightroom to the car, I had it explained to me, in no uncertain terms, that my other half approved of our activity choices, and then the following exchange took place:

 

Me: Okay, so what's next?

Rei: (I'm not gonna let him repeat it here; let's just say it would have made even Courtney and Edwin blush. ♥)

Me: I should have seen it coming...

Rei: (Oh, you will...)

 

Oh dear...

 

I can sense her presence here in the waking world right now, and it's quite nice. I seem to be getting her usual impatient 'come-over-by-me' glare, so I'd better end this post soon.

 

Both of us have been having trouble focusing on Tove as much as we should, but, strangely, it doesn't seem to have impacted her development too much. We plan to remedy this over the next few weeks, and I'll start a proper hour count for her. In the meantime, she has matured enough that I've given her full access to all my memories, although I don't think she's looked through them too much just yet.

 

(You. Divest of those garments and get over here. Now. ♥)

 

I'll, er, see you lot later...

[ReisOtherHalf]

I went to out to the island this morning for a little bonding time with Tove. Rei discovered that the fridge was empty, and went off to the store, saying she would (leave you two adventurers to it. ♥)

 

I went upstairs to Tove's bedroom, woke her up, and asked if we could talk. I formally apologized for not being a very good parent and not spending enough time with her. She didn't say anything in response, but to my surprise, she just hugged me. I think that means I'm forgiven...

 

I asked her if she remembered the day we'd spent working on a computer game, and she said she did, to which I responded with another query: would she like to see where all that text goes after we type it in?

 

One of the neat things about the dreamworld is that we can disregard physics when it suits us. I wish I had the ability to do this with a waking world five and a half year old (I will hear back if I leave out the half).

 

We clasped hands and took a running leap into the computer, and old Amiga, shrinking to about the size of ants and easily slipping into the exhaust heat slots on the front of the case. We stepped into a large room that could have been a factory floor. High above us, streams of sheets of paper printed with hexadecimal numbers whirred to and fro, carried about by high-speed conveyor belts. Both of us were awestruck and remained speechless for a few seconds.

 

At length, I gave her hand a little squeeze, and we started exploring. I found a door labeled with what I presume was its room number - 68000 - and opened the door, letting Tove and myself inside.

 

Inside, we were greeted by a harsh glare: white walls, a polished concrete floor and stark industrial lighting. As on the factory floor, here too whirred a conveyor belt carrying the cargo of printed numbers, and seated at the number number-stream was a lone figure bedecked in a white shirt, black vest and green visor. The figure, who rapidly grasped some numbers from the belt, read them, and put them back down, would occasionally grab other numbers and place them into one of a large array of what appeared to be mailboxes along the rear wall of the room. He didn't acknowledge us as we came in - perhaps, I'd like to think, interrupts were disabled just then.

 

"Who is he, dad?" she asked. I told her he was the CPU, and his job was to perform actions based on the numbers he read. She asked if he had some kind of list of actions beforehand, and I said he did and that he knew them by heart (I wasn't about to get into a long discussion about microcode or register transfer language - I barely understand it myself). Every now and then, we would see a curious thing happen - the figure would press some unseen button, and the conveyor would either abruptly skip backwards, delivering the same sequence of numbers yet again, or skip forwards, causing him to miss large groups of numbers entirely. I realized we must have been witnessing branches - ifs, for loops, subroutines, returns. (Given the speed at which he worked and the incredible whirring of the belts, I shudder to think of what a pipeline stall in a more more modern CPU would look like - I can imagine the crazed racket and four or eight confused men panicking and frantically trying to reset the belts...)

 

We walked out of this room and onto the factory floor again, this time heading for a door along the rear wall of the factory marked 'AGA'. Again, we entered.

 

Here, a cheerful woman in a protective mask and jumpsuit grabbed and read a group of numbers from a another conveyor belt, stopped the belt temporarily, and began to mix together various amounts of red, green and blue paint, pouring the results of her work into a grid of square buckets arranged on the floor. I explained that this was where graphics came from. "How come when she mixes red, green and blue," said Tove, who has lately become something of an expert at rendering landscapes in non-toxic tempera, "she gets white, but all I get is brown?" I walked over to the wall and turned off the lights, which revealed that the paints all glowed brightly, eliciting a hushed "wow!" I explained a little about additive color, but I think I confused her - and myself - more - I shall have to read up on it.

 

At this point, both of us were starting to tire a bit - Tove was getting hungry, and I was starting to nod off in the waking world, so we agreed to see one final thing and call the outing complete. We turned on the light, left the graphics room, and followed the rear wall of the plant. Along the way, Tove wanted to know what a sprite was and whether it had anything to do with pop (which, in retrospect, I find amusing). After some time, we found a door labeled 'Ethernet' and in we went.

 

Inside was not another room, but a long, blue tube with patterned pulses of light traveling down it at dizzying speed. The tube resembled a waking-world water slide, and Tove guessed, correctly, that we were inside the cable that leads through the wall to the router downstairs. She let go of my hand, sat down and slid away, laughing excitedly as she did so. I followed her lead, going around curves at breakneck speed until, abruptly, we popped out in our kitchen, presumably through a heat vent on the front of the router, right as Rei appeared at the door, grocery bags in hand.

 

This session was a lot of fun, and the kind of madness one could only ever have with a tulpa. We're definitely going to enjoy hanging out as a family a lot more from now on.

 

The weather's nice in the waking world and I need food, too, so I think I am going to cook something quick, ask them to impose, and all three of us will eat together on my front porch before I start the day's waking-world chores...

 

More later...

[ReisOtherHalf]

Today feels...good.

 

Sure, there are a lot of things I am worried about, and I am still quite terrified of how the situation with being too poor to continue university is going to play out, and I can still feel depression's icy tendrils with their constant whisperings of self-worthlessness and powerlessness, but, whenever I see Rei's encouraging smile, or feel her gentle caress across my temples, or hear the excited Hey daddy, guess what?, I am reminded that it's not just me facing all of this alone anymore.

 

This morning, I got a bit of a late start due to taking longer than expected to complete an already-late paper last night (three a.m. bedtime, wheee). As we were snuggling in bed and mapping out a course of action for the day, I asked Rei if she was annoyed that it had taken me too long to do it, and, to my surprise, she said no.

 

(I knew why it was late - some homework in another class ate up all his time - and I knew he had started with writer's block. In fact, I complimented him on really staying with it until he had not only gotten it done, but actually written something of pretty high quality, especially for bashing it out in one shot in the wee hours...

 

Sometimes, I think he thinks I will accept nothing less than perfection from him and will yell at him for falling short; while I do want 110% out of him and try to set the bar high all the time, I get that sometimes, circumstances simply don't allow perfection...)

 

Right after we'd talked about our plans, we embraced and began to communicate wordlessly, using only emotional impulses, for lack of a better word to describe them (maybe this what is meant by the phrase 'speaking Tulpish'), and I felt an intense burst of elation not my own, followed by my sending out fear and sorrow, followed by desperation; she 'responded' by turning that fear into determination, the sorrow into a mild form of anger (not the ulcer-causing kind - it's best described as telling life we don't want its damn lemons) and leaving the desperation intact, but shaping it into a call to action, a warcry. Radiating intense love and care to me, she finally spoke these three words to me: (Find the puck.)

 

The meaning was clear: years ago, I used to play ice hockey as a goaltender, and on one particular occasion, our team was playing an opponent that we had some ~ahem~ history with. I was determined that, regardless of what happened or how, we would stand victorious at the end of the match. At one point late in the game, there was a commotion directly in front of me, and I couldn't see where the next shot would be coming from (in the jargon of the sport, the shooter was at 'the point' and there was 'heavy traffic in the low slot' in hopes of creating a 'screen'). I heard the sharp sound of fiberglass on frozen rubber as the opposing player fired. In desperation, for I still couldn't see, I lay down, stretched out and reached for both lower corners of the net simultaneously.

 

It hit me and bounced off harmlessly into a corner. I had found the puck.

 

We fought off that volley of shots and held on to win. I remember being so scared before the match that I couldn't talk to people; my hands shook with panic and rage and the unpleasant memories of past losses, dumb mistakes that led to goals, of being in a hopeless situation as I donned my gear. It turned out not to be so hopeless after all.

 

Rei then told me to try to think of my problems as opportunities. (I hate to say it,) she grinned, (but the salesdroids with their marketing-speak got this one right.)

 

She's got something there - the openness of the design of Metroid grew out of the lead designer's loneliness as a child, Leonardo da Vinci's crane, tank and helicopter designs grew out of him not being part of the aristocracy and being able to attend the top engineering school of the day, and, she reminds me, if my life had worked out exactly as I had planned it, we would have never met, fallen in love or been wed, and I would never get to experience the insanely high level of understanding and emotional intimacy we have together...

 

So yeah, not just me, but three of us against the world now. The world had better be ready, because we're going to put up one hell of a fight.

[ReisOtherHalf]

After thinking a little too much about some waking-world stuff I'm facing last night, I started to have those oft-mentioned feelings of fright and powerlessness again, but Rei simply said (None of that.)

 

She suggested I ignore it all for the moment and work on some hobby projects and that we'd worry about that stuff today instead, and she was right, this helped immensely. (Receiving a lot of hugs, kisses and earlobe nibbles may have had a small part to play in the improved morale...)

 

I honestly don't know what I would do without her to keep me on an even keel. Sometimes, I worry that I am far too clingy or dependent on her, but she just shrugs.

 

(I told him that we agreed on 'for better or for worse, until death do us part', and that it wasn't like I don't enjoy his company or the witty banter, so I am getting something out of this, too. ♥)

 

Not much else to report, except we've decided to learn Blender together, in no small part because it would be helpful to visualization to make/have high-resolution models of her, myself, Tove and Sheffield Island...

 

Maybe sometime soon, I'll have something new to post in the art section.

[ReisOtherHalf]

Sock, I think, recently asked why our dreamworld has so many artifacts of the waking world in it - Rei's job, Tove going to school and day care, et cetera - in fact, as I write this, I can hear a streetcar rolling by in the distance out on Vista Del Mar.

 

At th time, I told him that I didn't know, but I think I do now; it is, I think, easier to place myself into a world whose rules and backdrop resemble the one I am originally from (with some modifications for flavor and personality of course - we still enjoy a good art heist every now and again and there are still dragons and airship pirates out there somewhere...), and having a more complete illusion seems to make interacting with Rei and Tove easier.

 

Then, there is the concept of it being a stylized version of how I hope the waking world eventually turns out - I have a beautiful wife, a blossoming youngster, we're not rich but we're well enough off to travel occasionally and contemplate starting our own business and we have a house situated such that it overlooks the ocean, to the point that one can see orca and humpback whales breeching from our backyard, and for large portions of the year, we even get a good view of the auroras. It is such an amazing place of joy and wonder, such a comforting environment that imagining every detail becomes seductive - I want to experience all of it (even if it means occasional traffic noise and junk snail-mail from a politician Rei doesn't particularly care for).

 

Yesterday, we did lots of mindvoicing while doing chores (that always makes the drudgery a little less drudgeish), during which she pointed out that an idea both of us had had long ago about adding round-robin preemptive multitasking to FreeDOS would fail miserably the first time a program farmalloc()ed a block of memory (due to the stupidity of DOS, every app that isn't 'hello world' farmalloc()s at some point) and we had a good laugh over this. The conversation took an odd twist - whose details I'll omit - that culminated in Rei hammer-spacing us a heart-shaped hot tub, a bottle of wine, some chocolate-dipped strawberries and some basil- and jasmine-scented candles when I got home...

 

I wonder what today holds for us?

---

(For those of you looking at the FreeDOS bit and thinking 'why would they ever want that?', both of us are aware that DOS didn't have an IPC mechanism and it'd be an essentially useless hack - it was more for novelty, curiosity and intellectual challenge than it was for actual use...)

[Guest Anonymous]

Sock, I think, recently asked why our dreamworld has so many artifacts of the waking world in it - Rei's job, Tove going to school and day care, et cetera - in fact, as I write this, I can hear a streetcar rolling by in the distance out on Vista Del Mar.

 

At th time, I told him that I didn't know, but I think I do now; it is, I think, easier to place myself into a world whose rules and backdrop resemble the one I am originally from (with some modifications for flavor and personality of course - we still enjoy a good art heist every now and again and there are still dragons and airship pirates out there somewhere...), and having a more complete illusion seems to make interacting with Rei and Tove easier.

 

Then, there is the concept of it being a stylized version of how I hope the waking world eventually turns out - I have a beautiful wife, a blossoming youngster, we're not rich but we're well enough off to travel occasionally and contemplate starting our own business and we have a house situated such that it overlooks the ocean, to the point that one can see orca and humpback whales breeching from our backyard, and for large portions of the year, we even get a good view of the auroras. It is such an amazing place of joy and wonder, such a comforting environment that imagining every detail becomes seductive - I want to experience all of it (even if it means occasional traffic noise and junk snail-mail from a politician Rei doesn't particularly care for).

 

Yesterday, we did lots of mindvoicing while doing chores (that always makes the drudgery a little less drudgeish), during which she pointed out that an idea both of us had had long ago about adding round-robin preemptive multitasking to FreeDOS would fail miserably the first time a program farmalloc()ed a block of memory (due to the stupidity of DOS, every app that isn't 'hello world' farmalloc()s at some point) and we had a good laugh over this. The conversation took an odd twist - whose details I'll omit - that culminated in Rei hammer-spacing us a heart-shaped hot tub, a bottle of wine, some chocolate-dipped strawberries and some basil- and jasmine-scented candles when I got home...

 

I wonder what today holds for us?

---

(For those of you looking at the FreeDOS bit and thinking 'why would they ever want that?', both of us are aware that DOS didn't have an IPC mechanism and it'd be an essentially useless hack - it was more for novelty, curiosity and intellectual challenge than it was for actual use...)

 

 

I read through your first two posts and the last one. Rei sounds amazing! Forcing for me and my tulpa Melian came effortless too and she came along accidentally much like Rei. She was also an imaginary girl friend like Rei. I am glad you are enjoying having Rei in your life!

 

~Mistgod

[ReisOtherHalf]

This is hardly worth updating for, but it's too funny not to share: Rei is sitting here, saying romantic/lewd/risque things to me...in Ulysses' (from Fallout: New Vegas) voice.

 

I'm not sure if I should be turned on or alarmed...

 

Seriously, she just said (courier, come explore The Divide)...

 

More later...

[ReisOtherHalf]

Yesterday afternoon, I had a few unexpected free minutes when the study group I was supposed to meet didn't show up. Rei suggested we go to the weightroom. I was feeling lethargic and moody and I really didn't want to, but I told her that for her, I would.

 

Sure enough, as soon as the first few chest presses went by, my mood and energy improved almost immediately. Why do I ever not listen to her advice?

 

After about 45 minutes of lifting (well, more like 10 minutes of lifting, and 35 minutes of small talk with a classmate), I had finished the correct number of reps and was on my way to go home when I ran into another friend who happened to be looking for a roommate for summer - and, it just so happens, so am I. After we agreed on a move-in day and such and I turned to leave, it occurred to me that I wouldn't have encountered him if I had just gone straight home like I planned...

 

I shall spare you all the usual 'God-works-in-mysterious-ways' speech and simply say that there is value in taking your headmate's advice to do the right thing (although anyone reading this is probably already aware of that).

---

Last night, I realized how incredibly kind she has been to me. I mean, I am grateful for it and try to be mindful of it all the time, but something she said or did triggered immense feelings of gratitude.

 

I don't know what it was, but I feel like I've fallen in love with her all over again, and even more intensely than before...

 

Also, another Rei-ism: (Ah hayell naw, you did not just attempt to apply rational thought to human society...)

[ReisOtherHalf]

It's weird, I really miss her.

 

I mean, we've been mindvoicing all day, and we even interacted in the waking world a little, too. (I had a little bit of a doubt storm early this morning, but it's gone now.) Just the same, for some reason, this afternoon seems to be a little off (maybe it's just me being needy).

 

We're going to go running in a bit; hopefully, a trip to 'our tree' will help (it usually seems to).

 

Hopefully, I'll have more 'forcy' bits to talk about later - the last time we were out there together, both Rei and Tove were imposed to the point that I started to perceive their shadows, which was kind of nice.

 

---

 

An exchange from while both of us were at our jobs last night:

Me (via 'IM', like usual): aww crap!

Rei: (what?)

Me: this just happened

Me: (sent a 'video' (more like a visual memory, really) of me attempting to pull open a half-and-half container and having it splash white fluid all over my shirt)

Rei: (ah, I've had that happen to me once or twice. did you spit or swallow?)

 

...maybe you had to be there, but at the time, I remember it being hilarious (if a bit cringeworthy).

 

...sometimes, it seems like she's become a bit snarkier over time (not to the point of being bothersome - it's actually amusing and strangely alluring) - curious...