Keeping old videos rolling

I have a collection of old videos that originally started out as VHS and Beta videotapes, which I copied to digital formats mostly with a Top of the Line Sony DVD recorder and Top of the Line VHS tape deck.  When copying from analog formats, the quality of the equipment used makes a big difference, so I always used the best.  The quality of the copies often seemed better than the originals which were loved regardless of how good the original recordings were--and they were variable but sometimes very good.  All, of course, in Standard Definition Video now known as 480i.  While this is not as good as High Definition, few people even stop to realize that the most ubiquitous video format we have--DVD--is also nothing but Standard Definition.  To get High Definition on disc you need Blu Ray discs, though cable, satellite,  and OTA broadcasts may also be High Definition.

DVD and through it Standard Definition are as popular as ever, and Blu Ray didn't take over everything as the industry may have hoped.

With erotic video especially, and especially of the softer forms I favor, experience does not bring boredom or disgust.  I can watch the same videos over again and still get the desired effect, sometimes even better for all the earlier viewing.  Nor does the resolution matter much; it's the content that is king (or queen), even here, ironically where it's all about sensuousness.  Even more fundamental are the words and images whirling in one's own mind.  What's on the screen is just inspiration, a koan.  And I do not want to lose those koans.

Over the years, I added additional recordings, sometimes just a few minutes of OTA television, then loads of similar recordings by others on Youtube.  I look for women with big boobs and women with super strength.  Nothing X rated required.  Even a woman from a commercial might be appealing.  I also joined a number of paid and free websites from which I could download original videos, sometimes with more skin exposure.  Roll through 20 years and you can see how I have over 200G of Standard Definition videos in my collection, not counting standard movies on DVD and Blu Ray.

Legally it was permissible to make analog copies of some videos "for personal use" as had previously been decided for music on the radio.  The ultimate destination of my accumulated videos was DVD's, which circulated in a 400 disk DVD player where I could mix commercial and the home brew re-recordings described above.  At the same time, many videos remained on the first HDD/DVD video recorder I bought, a Sony RDR-HX900.  Now some videos remain on my Pioneer DVR-LX70 also.  (I just learned that Sony DVD recorders were actually manufactured by Pioneer.  The Pioneer had features like combine chapters/titles that Sony did not.  And no reason to believe the Sony's were better…though my HX900 does have component video input which the later Pioneer lacks because of somebody's attempt to limit your recording options at least a bit.  Also as explained below, sadly one feature was dropped from Pioneer's own last TOTL model, and the one I have, the LX70.  Strange.  Right after that, the original Pioneer collapsed financially and was bought out.  Coincidence?)

Sadly, two key players over the last decade, the Sony RDR-HX900 DVD and Harddrive recorder (2005-2013) and since just last month, my Sony CX995 400 DVD/CD/SACD carousel, are now dead. When the Sony recorder first lost it's hard drive, I was shocked to find out that there wasn't a replacement model available.  It seemed to me then that nobody made Harddrive/DVD recorders for sale in USA (I was wrong…read on).  I managed to fix the hard drive, but within a year the DVD drive failed as well, ordinary service is unavailable, and replacement involves hacking an alternative part to work according to a procedure published on the internet.  Even when the DVD drive replacement was sold by Sony, it was $300 for the part alone.

I was almost as shocked last month to find that Sony no longer sold 400 disc carousels.  The 400 Disc DVD players have not been made or sold new for a long time, while 400 Disc Blu Ray players were only briefly available at stratospheric prices around 2009 then disappeared.

I remember when VHS (and Beta) were initially coming out at high prices and few people were buying them.  The movie industry didn't like VCR's because they supposedly threatened movie revenues.  It turned on a dime, and precisely when the lawsuit over VCR's was won by the public right to fair use recording on VCR's.  Once consumers could legally record, sales of pre-recorded cassettes skyrocketed.  Coincidence?

The next time around, DVD's were made recordable by the general public, and not just computer users, in fairly short order, and the DVD format was a hit almost immediately.

But now, standalone DVD video recorders have almost entirely disappeared.  The major manufacturers such as Sony, Pioneer, and Panasonic* do not make any for sale in the USA.  Nor Blu Ray recorders either.  Sony makes those for the Japanese home market only.   It does seem JVC makes a Blu Ray video recorder (actually, several) which even has analog inputs and 500G hard drive--and it typically sells for $1400 (and up to $3000) while the Japanese-only Sony's, thought by some to be better, are under $1000.

*Panasonic does still sell DVD recorders for sale outside the USA which can be purchased in the USA through specialist dealers.  These lack the current ATSC tuner required to receive US stations, but work OK for copying video streams such as from VHS players to disc.  Still available Panasonic recorders have some of the best disc editing features, including fit-to-disc where the compression is adjusted to fit the video perfectly to the remaining space on the disc.  Titles on a playlist are automatically converted to a single title when written out to disk--this is a big one for me since I have lots of short clips that typically get written as separate titles which is very inconvenient.

Pioneer recorders of a particular vintage could also combine titles on the main Navigator list and also on playlists to write to disc.  Those now sell for high prices on the used market.  My Pioneer LX-70 only goes part way.  I can combine titles on my Pioneer LX-70, but only on the playlist of titles to be written to a DVD.  So that only goes part way.  Plus if you have lots and lots of titles, it's a big pain because you first merge the first and the second, and then the first-second with third (which is now the second) and so on, with each step taking some time.  The Panasonic approach of just making everything on the playlist part of the output title is far easier.  Panasonic even lets you edit each title in some ways as it is written out without changing the HDD copy, for example always.

This decline in the availability of such products is all part of Progress, otherwise known as planned obsolescence.  But the lucky people, you know them, have all moved on and left this old "garbage" behind.  Hah.  It seems more of an industry plot to rid of us of our recording devices, our own independent streams of content.  Now you are supposed to subscribe to a video streaming service for your videos, pay monthly.  You are not even supposed to have a personal collection of anything, except as a playlist of videos maintained by someone else, perhaps on a Cloud so you can watch them anywhere at any time on any device, so long as you continue subscribing to the service and the service continues to exist and offer those particular videos.

But even at best, this will not give you access to everything.  Much of what I have in my personal collection is not available anywhere, even on YouTube and Amazon.

So the Occam's Razor of Progress is an Occam's Razor of old content and old compilations as well.

I hope you are offended by this planned obsolescence, rights and capability stripping, and content erasing as I am.  Holding on to our Standard Definition videos is more than a practical matter to me.  I feel very strongly about it.

But we were granted One Exception to this harsh dictator.   Funai, under the brand name Magnavox as well as it's own (Funai is licensing the name Magnavox from Philips), has made several Standard Definition DVD video recorders for 8 generations so far.  (We seem to be in a stall right now since 2014 and it's unclear if Funai is going to repeat for yet another generation.)  These are reasonably priced at $299 and have been widely available, notably at Wal-mart and Sears.

Recently I deboxed a NOS Magnavox I had in reserved and decided I liked it enough that I'm going to buy the latest model.  The Mag makes a good "final destination" for SD videos because of the 1tb drive.  Also Funai has made parts available at reasonable prices, and repairing a Funai made DVDR is relatively easy compared with repairing DVR's from Pioneer and Sony for which many parts are unobtainable.  Even when Sony did make replacement parts available they were extremely expensive.

My current plan is to have two Magnavox DVR's with 1Tb drive apiece in the master bedroom, giving me 2Tb online storage or about the equivalent of 400 DVD's, same as my old 400 disc player.

In the kitchen, which is my Audio Video Editing Room, I will continue to have my Pioneer LX-70 but will be adding a  Panasonic EH69--which has more useful ways of combining titles for output and other unique DVD writing features.

The Sony DVDR-HX900 I have will probably be retired.  The hard drive still works fine (I replaced it a few years back) but the DVD burner is out (and though repair is possible, one has to modify available parts to get it to work, which is somewhat difficult).

Having two DVDR's in each room also means I can copy videos through analog connections from one to the other, though with some degradation.  It's always best to copy digitally by reading DVD's or doing a Fast Write.  Doing a slow write means the video is being re-coded which is almost as undesirable as going back to analog.  But for display-only, as in the bedroom, copying through analog is often "good enough" and saves far more time consuming procedures.  And sometimes it is the only way to do things.

Bionic Woman on DVD

Regardless of my gripes, the entire series is a must-own for me.  A beautiful actress delivers an Emmy award winning performance.  But there are a lot of such things, I don't own, why this?   However intentionally and frustratingly limited the erotic potential may be, it's still there.  It's a classic in the Female Strength genre (even if it plays that in the least erotic way mostly).  And by this time, I've watched and recorded it so many times, I feel like these characters are part of my family.  But only now with a DVD I have pristine digital video quality and not old VCR copy.

The video quality is so much better than I remembered, especially from recent years when all I had was videocassette recordings (SuperBeta and VHS) of low grade analog cable tv in the 1990's.  Actually, pondering way back to 1976 when I had a 17 Sony Trinitron TV, I remembered it as being perfect video quality.  I got the Trinitron just in time to see the ending episodes of the first season--at it was a big part of the motivation.

With this incredible video quality, and perhaps the assistance of greater maturity, I notice several things.

1) Lindsay Wagner is so beautiful, stunningly gorgeous.  But she also appears tiny (perhaps due to comparison with the handsomely suntanned 6'3" Richard Anderson, in real life married to the pickiest of daughters of Hollywood movie legends) and she is almost flat chested.  She looks like A cup.  In the famous Fembots in Los Vegas episodes, the regular and fembot Callhan might be as much as C, with the sexy tall thin dark brunette could be no more than B, and those are generous estimates.  They might look bigger with poor reception because of how very thin they all are.

2) The clothes are perfect.  Everyone, female and male wears perfect and perfectly fashionable (ahead of the curve) clothes.  Most everything is clean if not perfect as well.

You'd think that fashionistas has created the show.  They were certainly well represented in casting and production.  Everone thin and healthy, sexy only to the degree that they are also perfectly fashionable.  There is no sex, of course.  And though the premise sounded erotic to me (hence my extreme interest in the show) the actual theme was a kind of feminism, the feminism of participation in wage slavery, in this case, wage slavery for empire as a covert operative empowered to take extra-legal actions, though I didn't interpret it that badly until the 90's.  In short, Women can Do It Too.  Fine, but as always, the issue the "issue laden" show never much discusses is the It--why must we do It?  OK, this omission in commercial TV is universal, as boosting the service of empire (internal or external) but rarely is it so bald faced as here.  Oscar Goldman makes me think of the similarly tall and onetime tanned CIA director George H.W. Bush, who held that very position during the production of the show (and guess where he was on the day of JFK's assassination?)  So this is kind of a similar hagiographic treatment as was given the FBI in the FBI series of the 60's and 70's.  But being secret, and moreso stuff we are not supposed to think about, the show presents a bogus government agency in an otherwise used location and far from the actual Intelligence agencies.  There is actually an OSI, but it is nothing like the OSI of the TV series.

While saying that this candy coats the real government covert agencies, the wonderful personas presented are very comforting, and do a good job of modeling the ideal, which is better than doing nothing more than the opposite.  Oscar Goldman is as perfect as a Director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence could be (except possibly for his missions).  He's gracious, charming, honest and helpful as much as he could possibly be.  When in the 80's I heard such criticism of government agencies, I thought to myself, but what about Oscar Goldman?  Oh, wait.  He also has that kind of aristocratic or patrician or something like that style (along with Can Do, No One Left Behind, etc) that shows the old Oh So Social in the best possible light.  We would hope things would be like that.  Maybe once in a great while they are, at least in a limited way.  But the real benefit to us, if we can ignore the lack of resemblance to reality, is the comfort and thence calm given to us, and the model of what one kind of goodness would be--it's worth emulating in some ways.  I'm sorry to sound a bit like Mien Kampf in praising a positive (if fake) presentation as useful for instructing the young.  But there is some point, anyway, of at least showing what a good person might be like, once and awhile.  This hardly justifies the bandwidth or bits, the show gets those mainly from other areas, but at least its a small plus, and something never seen anymore with our cynicism drenched orientation.  Rudy seems just like an extension of Goldberg for better and worse.

Lindsay is fabulous, of course.  Is her cutesy winking at the audience valid acting?  Does she play the Independent Woman thing too far, considering that we know the character also is married to the lead of another (far inferior) TV scifi sitcom--who we hardly ever see?  Who cares.  She's beautiful and fun.

But the eroticism delivered was typically disappointing to me, often very disappointing.  If it hadn't been for slow motion (which my Super Beta 900 delivered) and stills it was mostly the just the thought of the program, afterwards, which might deliver some faded pleasure.  While watching the show, if you wanted to see the great feats of strength, which I know I for one frequently find erotic, you often had to endure many minutes of the aforementioned mind shaping.   Typically you did get some previews up front, and then possible a cool strength feat, but then the next one would typically be more than half way through, and there might not be many.  Before slow motion and still frame, it wasn't much worth it.  I ultimately came to see the show as candy coated medicine, with the medicinal flavor lingering far longer than the joy of the candy.

I had almost stopped watching the show in 78 when I happened to see a few key seconds from "Fembots in Las Vegas" on the TV's in a TV showroom.  I saw exactly those seconds where Callahan (more curvaceous and overtly erotic than Wagner) bends a beam off a big truck--one of the more erotic strength scenes in all 3 years of the show, perhaps the very top being Callahan, again, bending a vault door lock apart).  Well that got me back into watching the show again, and I became dedicated to recording every episode on superBeta during the 1980's when I got a superBeta machine.  But from an erotic point of view, it was mostly wasted time.  In the 90's I dubbed a few of the best scenes from one VCR to another.  I made two "SuperStrength" compilations, each lasting about 15 minutes, made from clips of the Bionic Woman and many other shows.  Those compilations of clips were very enjoyable…but a huge effort--still barely worth it in the end, and doing such is illegal now with digital media.  Now that we can do these things perfectly (in the 90's I struggled to do them merely acceptably) we can't.  It would still be a huge effort, even moreso today if we could do so, as today's video editing programs are even more complicated to use than yesterday's VCR's.

Speaking of which, the factory DVD further makes this a slackening experience.  You are forced to watch about 5 minutes of Previews every time you start the disc anew.  Isn't it bad enough that the program itself is basically propaganda and product placement, and you paid a typical amount for the fairly popular discs?  (If you leave the disc in your machine paused, or switch off without losing your place, you can avoid this for awhile.)  I had trouble getting the show to display in the proper 3:4 size, and had to watch those Previews about 5 times until I got my machinery adjusted for the proper aspect ratio.

But it is nice to be able to freeze the DVD frames forever and not worry about burning a spot in the tape before the 5 minute limiter cancels pause on a VCR.  And fortunately my Oppo DVD has very nice multi speed slow motion.

Back to the surprising flat chestedness of the women (including Lindsay) in Fembots in Las Vegas.  The one way all these women are extremely special is how thin they are, NOT how busty they are.  They are less busty than average then (and moreso now) but far far thinner than average--while still being very healthy looking.  This is even true in the Las Vegas dance scene (which makes me strongly believe this was under the control of the aforementioned Hollywood fashionistas--at the time the greatest thin-fetishists in the world) where the dancers are all quite flat chested, but even more thin.

This is also true, by and large, and more and more since 1980 when Hugh gave up the Magazine editing reins to his daughter, of Playboy Magazine's Playmates.  They are far less busty, by and large, than people seem to think in common conversation.  They are less busty than average even.  But thinner than average also.  Not so much as on Bionic Woman, but at least a step in that same direction.  Only once or twice a year before 1980 we were treated to the likes of Candy or Cynthia Myers, and after 1980 I believe it was less ever.  And I can't recall any I'd think were G cup, for example, E being about the biggest, maybe F once in many years.

Lovers of curvaceousness like me were bound to be disappointed.  I subscribed to Playboy in my teens but switched to the Big Bust specialty magazines around 1980, Gem, Gent, ultimately Score.  You could get G-K in those magazines, even if professionals (why do I need amateurs?) and often enhanced.  BTW, the best eroticism with imperfect enhancement might be a tad of clothing or even basically fully clothed--I find clothed women as erotic as otherwise and often moreso, and IMO enhancement is OK but I'd rather not see the stretching parts that clearly make enhancement look certain, just for the sake of seeing all the clothing off, which I don't need anyway.  All my favorite magazines were posing magazines where the women just pose as models, showing off their bodies.  Why do I need to see other people fucking?  That's like sex ed, not eroticism.  And since I've moved off hardcopy magazines mostly (I still have a mountain of them) I seek the same from websites, often run by the models themselves.

Gender Equality

A first tiny step toward equality would be this: women initiating as much as men.  The fact that males almost always are the initiators of new conversations, dates, relationships,  etc., means precisely this: females are the rulers.  The first rule of negotiation is that the one who goes first loses.  Which should obvious from evolutionary biology as well.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to change.  Practice makes perfect it is often said.  But it should also be said that perfect would take as much time as a hundred monkeys writing all the works of Shakespeare by random keystrokes.

Fear of rejection is often seen as a small thing, easily overcome by any good male.  Well people who suggest this haven't a clue as to how arrogant and cruel females can often be in rejection.

I'd like to see females walk a mile in my life history of 100,000 rejection.  Few may have been seriously hurtful, but those are the ones always felt each new time.

Though I would like to considered an honest kind of pickup artist anyway, and I have had a few successes, the dominant message of pickup artist material is this: suck it up.  Ignore all the basic unfairness in gender.  Ignore the fear and pain, and keep trundling forwards.

At least two generations of so called feminists have added insult to injury by painting the picture backwards.  Only the beautiful late Ellen Willis gets it mostly right with her Peo Sex feminism, now becoming an ignored footnote in the history of these  mostly misandric movements.

The  unreservedly positive regard of the original neoliberal anti porn and anti sex feminist Gloria Steinem makes me very angry.  Ellen Willis wrote the best putdowns of Ms Steinem decades ago, and I have tried to continue the tradition, but nobody but me seems to be aware of it all.

Bra Sizing

Here's some interesting information on bra sizes on (of all places) a teen website.

It says, no surprise, 80% of women wear the wrong size.  Also no surprise (I've heard this before) the average bra size is 36C.  But of those women wearing a 36C, it says they should be wearing a 34D, 34DD, 32DD, or 32E.  The TRUE average bra size would be 34DD.

So they are saying, basically, the average strap size is too big.  IME women really don't like a bra strap that's too tight, and it's easy to imagine why, so it's not clear to me that the wearers of 36C might indeed be happier with that than the "correct" 34D or 34DD.

Later on, when detailing how to do the measurements they say to round up the under-breast measurement if it's odd, but then possibly to skip to the next whole size if even.  So it seems their measurement method is already moving the band size up, just as it seems most women prefer to do.

It really gets fun where they tell you to remember the cup sizes available in the UK, from AA to KK.

Sexiest woman I ever dated

It was around 1985, and into 1986.  From the moment you saw her, she was HOT.  Curvaceous, really big boobs as I have always loved, tight pants...  OK, she was no lightweight, possibly weighed about as much as me, but that's fine, great really.  And we met in a Mensa Car Rally driving her Corvette.  And she took me to more than one Chargers game, where she had season tickets.  And I remember when we walked into a bar, all heads turned to look at her.  Somehow this made me very excited too.

But all the same, I fear I never felt all that comfortable with her.  After dismal experience with L in college, for example, the girl who gave me a stern scolding for touching her hand on the first date, I was rather fearful of touching women.  And asking might be worse.  A real man would know when and how, take the chance, and accept rejection gracefully.  But I was struggling with when and how.

So I can't remember how much we touched, and so so so bad (I wouldn't have made this mistake again) I didn't propose more dates...before she ultimately (and very nicely) told me she was marrying another guy, and introducing him to me...

But before that, and I hadn't been seeing her much if at all by that point anyway, because of that comfort thing.  And because we never seemed to make any progress toward anything like sex after our dates.  I felt then (this was before I dated the lady who wouldn't kiss me 100 times) that if we weren't progressing toward sex, she wasn't really interested in me, and so I was just wasting her time as well as mine.

At the end of every date, I took her back to her apartment, we certainly hugged (I believe not kissed) and that was it.  Perhaps once she invited me in, and we talked with her kids.  We also talked with her kids at some fast food place.  (Was that some kind of test?)  But we must have had 10 dates, or at least encounters, and it seemed to me we weren't getting far.  Now of course I wouldnt have given it up in a heartbeat.  I would call her every day.

True, many reasons, it would probably not have worked out.  Turned out the guy she married was from her same church, a new age (?) Christian church, or perhaps they had chosen that together.  I was agnostic/UU (now I'm atheist/UU).  So I don't know.  Funny we talked little about politics (I recall she feared Dukakis because of some murders on furlough...and I was and still am a Democrat).  So we didn't really match at all, it seems now.  But until near the end, when I was really feeling like the guy "looking in" to a world I didn't belong, it was cool to be with a hot lady.

Prostitution is Better than Love

At least in principle.  I must say, I've never hired a prostitute, and mostly for safety reasons and low expectations, I've been afraid to do so.

But every uses "prostitute" as a terrible slur.  One friend said recent "Marriage is just like Prostitution."  I could have added, and that's the good part.

Anyway, at least with prostitution, the guy can actually get sex when he wants it.  Or maybe at all as opposed to none.  With love, you're up against the natural tendency of women to want far less sex (perhaps once a month, or once a quarter, if the relationship is going well, zip otherwise, and none with most strangers of course) and men to want more (since I masturbate daily, daily sex would be fine to, but I could get by with every other day, twice a week, hell I haven't had decent sex since I was in college in the 1970's, because only a very few women out of the dozens I've dated since then (expensive dates mostly) has ever wanted to, so just about anything would be better than that, even monthly, but oh well).

By the way, many of these sexless dates were anything but first.  I dated one lady in the mid 80's about 100 times, going to jazz concerts mostly, but also wild animal parks, and a few things like that.  After all this, she would not let me kiss her on the head.  We hugged, and that was as far as she would go.

So it went with dates both singular and highly multiple, mostly.  Out of several hundred dates, only one or two was a stinker where we didn't get along.  In most cases, we were on the best of terms, and getting fairly personal (I wouln't think so by my current standards, but I was in my 20's then after all).  If I didn't continue, it was because I felt I was just being treated nicely out of compassion, the date didn't really care for me that much, or probably wouldn't be compatible in some important way(s).   But nothing like sex, as much as I might have wanted it (yes, still my #1 hope and dream in life, I hope to have really good sex, better than the still crappy sex I had in the 1970's because of greater knowledge and compassion, someday, maybe I might even sex that would be more satisfying than masturbation, I still hope that's possible, though I haven't seen it yet, no sex I've had has been beyond level 2 and some masturbation has been 9 with average about 6).

There's a lot of tension here too, even with guys who really do it.  I once spoke to a pretty lady who said sex once a month was good for her, but her guy (and she usually had one or two serious guys) would have to be very nice, bring flowers, buy an expensive date and dinner, and then, just maybe, she might consent, if she felt like it when they got there.  All those maybes have a tendency to turn into no's.  Getting things just right may not be all that easy.  So all night, the guy may be wondering, is this going to work?  And that leads to tension, performance anxiety, and poor sex, if there is any at all.  So much better to be with someone who you know is in it for the ride to the big orgasm, and won't decide they have to go back and walk their dog instead.

Now it would seem to me, that if Love were Love, it would work both ways.  That women would feel men's pain, rather than just expecting theirs to be continually intuited.  They would feel men's need to have sex.  They would feel the pain of someone like me, perhaps not the most forward, but who kept on stumbling through the dating process, hoping one day it would pay off.

But no, I have never felt that, or heard of it.  Women own the treasure, and the treasure speaks, perhaps once a month.

By the way, most primates have lots of sex.  Bonobos are sexual champions, doing it all the time (as I sort of think humans should be doing).  Only a few are celibate, and when they are, they are really celibate (not like us at all).  Beyond that, primates do the most wonderful thing.  They comb through each other's hair constantly, removing fleas.  That's just the thing that primates do for friends, even friendly strangers.

It's easy to see from this where and how humans have fallen from grace.  We separated, compartmentalized ourselves, cutting ourselves off from physical contact others (except in structure groups, which we are the master of, but these groups almost never involve touching and sex).

And US Americans are the worst.  And among Americans, there are New Yorkers.

The Leaf Mulcher

For assorted yard work, and reorganizing the kitchen, I offered to pay my then only half employed friend O at generous rates, $20-$40 an hour.  For one hour of actual weeding, I credited her $40.  After the first week of 3 days work, one hour or two per day, no more than 5 hours, I obtained $120 cash.  I tried to give it to my friend, but she refused to take it.  She said I didn't owe her anything.  Finally I grabbed her purse and stuffed it in.  She ended up taking it.

But shortly thereafter she called and insisted that I never ever do that again.  It made her feel too badly.  We argued about this.  It was a very heated, relationship threatening argument.  I said she was totally entitled to the money.  Finally she agreed I could keep an account of her work, not to pay me now, but possibly later.  I then devised a virtual "account" I would credit her work to, which she could draw on at any time.

Over the next couple months, she did more work, and I credited all of it to her account.  I made a point of crediting all the work, though some of it was arranging things to her preferences, and not necessarily mine.  And the way she did things was sometimes completely counter to the way I wanted them done.  But I figured, that's the way it goes, that's the way it would go in the relationship I hope for (more like dream of) and so it was fine.

I kept offering her the money but she refused, though once taking $40 cash.  Her account ultimately built up to $425.  Many times I asked her to take the money, I didn't really want to keep it.

Then one day she asked me if I would get her a leaf mulcher from her account.  I quickly agreed.  No problem, I'll go right to the store.  But then she asked me if I would use a leaf mulcher.  I said, no, I mulch leaves using my mulching mower.  I don't myself need a leaf mulcher.  But I said I'd be glad to get one for her anyway.  She then said no, if you don't need a leaf mulcher, don't get one.  I said several times I could get one for her anyway, but she ultimately insisted I not get it if I wasn't going to use it myself.  After having been through the previous argument after I stuffed money into her purse, I wasn't game to try disobedience.

So now, several months later, she brings up this episode to prove to me how false I am.  I promised money, but never delivered.  I'm "just like other men, making promises and not delivering."  I then promised to get her the money right now.  She again refused, saying "You weren't there when I needed you."  Apparently she had done her leaf mulching by other means, fuming all the time about how cheap I was, and somehow not remembering that it was she who insisted I not get the leaf mulcher.

Since this has just occurred, it's memorable, and I'm sure I've got the details right.  This is to my mind clearly a case of passive aggression.  I believe this has happened before, but I can't remember the details right now.  But when I mentioned some similar case to a psychologist friend, he said that yes, that happens a lot.

I feel like I'm a very generous person.  I've donated tens of thousands of dollars to various charitable and political organizations.  Every year I give undirected money to United Way, even though it does nothing special for me and I wouldn't agree with many of the groups funded.  Just this year I donated a new garage door to my next door neighbor, and not the cheapest one, and just today I gave him an extra $60 loan for gas.

As far as my friend O, I bought her a cell phone and paid for it for a year (and resisted having her pay, but she ultimately insisted on taking it over, then somewhat coincidentally, I started getting fewer calls and our relationship started getting rocky as it has continued this year).  I got her two seasons worth of tickets to the symphony.  And perhaps not entirely related, but at least partly, I've spent $50,000 on improving my house in preparation for her to move over.

But I'm only mentioning these things as context.  It's not that I feel owed anything.  I took her to the symphony because I liked having her with me.  And I gave her a cell phone because I loved getting those calls.  However, whenever I try to mention context like this to her, she gets very angry.  She did in fact refuse to have me buy her symphony tickets for the first two seasons.  She got her own cheap seat up in the balcony.  She insisted she liked that better.  I had to argue for two years until she would accept my stage front seats.

What I want is not to have someone feel they owe me something.  What I want is just a little respect.  I freely spend money for other people.  I try to help.  Those are the kind of things I'd just like to get a little respect for.