This isn't what I wanted.

Life should come with an instruction book. Or at least a pamphlet describing the major points. I feel like I can never figure out what I want, and whenever I'm confronted with something that I think I want, it's either unobtainable or it turns out to be the complete opposite of what I thought it was. I can and usually do play out the situation a million times over in my head, each time with a different outcome, and I can never seem to get that thought process going in the direction that reality actually takes me. When I think I've covered all the angles, the real world shows me that I don't know what I'm doing. I know that it's my own fault; my imagination is overly active and I can't see through the cloud.

It's amazing how the mind works, really. The other day I lost something, and it made me feel empty, but the amazing thing is that it was never mine to begin with. I didn't actually lose anything. It was all in my head. All I could see were the positive possible outcomes, because that's what I felt that I wanted. I didn't, or couldn't, see through the cloud. This isn't the first time this has happened to me, though it is getting exhausting to go through time and time again. I've never handled rejection well. The way I've always kept from getting rejected was to never run the risk of getting rejected. The few relationships I have had have been all but disasters, making me ever more leery towards new endeavors. I keep thinking that things have to get better soon, that I'll find something that I want, or even just figure out what it is that I want, but soon comes and goes and it stays the same. All the more depressing is my ever-diminishing trust in the idea of fate or destiny. I've never really believed all that heavily in predestination, but for most of my life I've felt that there is something or someone for everyone. As I grow older I can't help but realize that it's all random, and it's amazing if anything does actually get done. Actions are so often performed without any thought or reasoning behind them, it's all just rationalization after the fact. People end up together all of the time not because they love each other or compliment each other in that oh-so-perfect way, but because they are scared. Scared of being alone, scared that they won't do better, scared that they'll disappoint somebody, scared that they won't get what they want. And it is scary. I'm scared. But that fear turns otherwise smart people into morons. They put themselves into bad, self-loathing situations - situations that, if viewed from the outside, don't make any sense - and rationalize that it's for the best. "He hit me but I deserved it." "He said he was going to get help for his alcohol dependence and I believe him this time." "It's my fault for finding out about her affair, I shouldn't be so untrusting." I shouldn't even be calling this bullshit "rationalization" because that would imply that it's rational. With this kind of thing going on all around me all of the time, it's really hard to keep myself honest. Hell, it's hard to keep from vomiting.

I'll feel better in a few days, mulling it over in my head about things I should have done differently and things I should have avoided. I just have to change my mind about what it is I think I want again and everything will be like it was before. I'll have exactly what I had then, just not as much of it.

Reindexing AVI files

Today I had a video file that was giving VLC some errors and causing the program to hang up at a certain point in the stream. What I usually do in this situation is use AVIDemux to fix it using it's Rebuild Frames option, but this certain file was also causing AVIDemux to crash when loading the file. After a bit of searching, I found a way to reindex the avi file through mencoder, which seems to handle things the other toys can't.

mencoder -idx input.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi

I'm posting this so I'll know where to find it in future endeavors, more than anything else.