jim_p

Pieces of my past, part 1 (long)

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:42:14 GMT

I often believe that I am The Least Interesting Man In The World. That I am less interesting than literally any other man on the planet. This came to a head when I started dating (or trying to) and suffer failure after failure when guys who seemed to have less going for them than I did were still landing partners. To this day, even though I have a lifetime of stories to tell there's still the nagging feeling that nobody wants to hear them because I'm Just Not That Interesting.

I think I first got this feeling when I was in a Boy Scout storytelling circle, and realized I had pretty much nothing to share. The reason for this was at the time my life was pretty limited. Other boys were talking about the time they went fishing, or went out on their dad's boat, that sort of thing. I had school (which nobody in the circle wanted to hear about) and the rest of my life was taken up by the family business, which I was forbidden to talk about.

The reason I could not talk about the family business was because my parents operated from home in violation of zoning laws. They were paranoid that somehow word would filter back to the authorities and they'd be shut down (they were the original "Laws for thee but not for me" folks).

So now I'm going to spill the tea with a vengeance. My parents, Ronald and Norma Paradis of 607 Harbor View Boulevard, Somerset, MA operated a business with machinery out of their home in violation of zoning laws. They were in the direct mail business, and our basement was full of 1960s-vintage machinery for addressing and stuffing envelopes.

Here is one of the machines: a Phillipsburg Inserter. It could automatically stuff up to four inserts into an envelope, seal them, and count them. Stacks of outer envelopes and inserts went in, and stacks of stuffed envelopes came out.

Being a homebased business started on a shoestring, my dad bought used equipment and tinkered with it to get it working. Boy, did he tinker. This thing was constantly jamming and acting up, and so he had to twiddle with various adjustments to get it to behave. I still own the very screwdriver he used to do the tinkering. He was constantly angry, on edge, and cursing up a storm about this.

One day when I was maybe five years old, I had a friend over, and I told her "We have an inserting machine. It's always broken". My mom overheard this, dragged me aside, and laid into me about how we were never to talk about this to anyone. I was just trying to make conversation and mom shut that down. The message was clear: don't try to make conversation in case you accidentally spill the tea.

Being a small family business it consumed our lives. I was frequently dragged in to do various tasks for the business, from hand-stuffing envelopes for small jobs, to operating the addressing machine, to operating this very inserting machine, to operating even bigger machines that I'll talk about later. Of course, having an underage child operating industrial machinery like this was its own brand of illegal, which my parents emphasized was yet another reason to not breathe a word about it to anyone. I didn't get an allowance, I got paid for the hours I worked in the business.

So here it is, the inserting machine that I was forbidden to talk about, for everyone to see (this picture is not the actual machine; it's a newer model for illustration purposes). If you want to see one in action take a look at this short video. This is the kind of story that *could* have made me interesting back then, if only I was allowed to tell it. Which I'm doing now.

Part of me wishes I could go back and drop a dime on my parents...

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"It's so easy for them!"

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 02:16:02 GMT

Coming back to the dreamwidth thang. I keep doing this every so often when I get disgusted with the Big Social Media... then I drift away because the Book of Face is really good about feeding content to keep one hooked and just enough of my friends are over there that I like to stay in touch. Then something happens to my feed and suddenly it's all ads and invitations to follow people and communities I've never heard of before and scams and ads and scam ads and...

Anyhow, this is a half-baked musing about perceptions of how easy/hard people have it. This thought started in my head when someone in another post mentioned one of those folks who are constantly complaining about "those people". Specifically, how all those people on welfare and assistance "have it so easy" while he has to work hard for everything he has. A lot of these people have a really distorted perspective on what it's like to deal with public assistance; somewhere in their cavernous skulls they have an image of a brown-skinned immigrant (is there any other kind?) just casually waltzing into the welfare office and walking out with armloads of goodies, like a cross between an Oprah show and Christmas morning.

It's easy to just dismiss these people as being angry and ignorant, but I think this is another version of the social media phenomenon where we extrapolate from glimpses into other people's lives. As someone said, all you see of your social media peeps is their highlight reels, whereas you have experienced every flub, misstep, and outtake in your own life. No wonder it feels like a struggle for you and they have it so easy.

It doesn't help that media of various types encourages this. I turn on the TV and see a show about Kathy's Cookies who started on their kitchen table and before you know it Kathy has six bakeries, a hundred employees, and her cookies are being sold in twelve states. Easy, right? Anybody could do it. Then I looked at my own struggling business that did well to break even every month and wondered how I could make it to easy street the way "everyone else" obviously had.

I poked fun at this on Reddit recently as well: I mentioned the type of Linkedin influencer who says "I vibe-coded my SaaS on the flight from London to Dubai and now I'm up to $50K a month in revenue!" I asked them how I could get in on this because they made it look so easy...

Not necessarily going anywhere with this other than musing. But if someone knows how I can become one of these "overnight success stories" I'm all ears.

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Niemoller's poem, updated for the MAGA era...

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:43:46 GMT

First they came for the Communists
And I cheered them on because Commies are evil!
Then they came for the Socialists
And I cheered them on because I'm sick of my tax dollars going to the lazy
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I cheered them on because I don't need a stinking union costing me dues
Then they came for the Jews
And I cheered them on because finally they will no longer replace us
Then they... wait... they're coming for me?!
No! Wait! It wasn't supposed to happen that way!
All I wanted was cheaper eggs
And filthy brown people hauled off in chains
And liberals crying sweet liberal tears
And everyone forced to kneel to Republican Jesus
They weren't supposed to hurt me, just all those other folks who deserved it
Where are you taking me?

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Where I slept in 2024, with a 2025 addendum

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 02:29:11 GMT

Most of these are related to home and work; after a year of unemployment I finally landed a hybrid job in February of 2024 which required that I spend a certain number of days in the office in Cambridge. So here's where I slept:

Wellfleet, MA (Home)
Natick, MA (Friends that I crashed with when going in to work)
Westminster, MA (Sister that I also crash with when going in to work)
Tysons Corner, VA (Corporate HQ, two trips there in 2024)

For 2025 we can add Cambridge, MA to the list. Tam and I took a sublet near Central Square, and we'll be living here until the end of March so that I can be closer to work, we can get our medical stuff taken care of, and we can get other business done. We'll be day-tripping to Arisia and maybe Boskone, and it would be great to get together with friends we haven't seen in a while!

We're seriously tempted to take over the lease on this place when the sublet is up, but we're not *quite* sure we can swing it financially. It would be nice if Tam could get some freelance work doing Photoshopping or the like, if anyone has any leads that would be great! If we do take the lease we'd be dividing our time between here and the Cape, just like Tam's dad did back when this sort of thing was more affordable...

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Reviving this journal

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:51:20 GMT

Looks like I'm going to be hanging out here a lot more, especially once I re-build my network. I have been on the Book of Face for a very long time, built up quite a network there, and it was the main way I kept up with my social circle. Even before Zuck announced that he was ditching the fact-checkers I had been less and less patient with what was showing up in my feed... more ads, more communities I'd never joined or wanted to join, and far fewer posts from actual friends. The enshittification over there has reached a tipping point where I'm looking elsewhere. I gave bluesky a try, but it is just not set up for the kinds of discussions I liked to have on Facebook (I never took much to Xitter either).

So anyhow, nice to see everyone again! Stay in touch!

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Trying this thing again...

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 20:51:32 GMT

Okay, so I asked over on Faceplant how one can stay in touch with friends without using that platform, and folks have pointed me over to here. As you can see I've used this in the past but kinda fell away at least in part because the UI is almost, but not quite, exactly unlike LiveJournal. I find it harder to locate and connect with people I know over here; any suggestings for growing one's "friends" list? I see that DW has split what used to be the "friends" function into "Subscribe" and "Grant Access". I suppose that providing more knobs is good from an access-control point of view but I kinda wish a set of default functions could be combined in one button...

Anyhow, if you see this feel free to connect with me!

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