March 3, 2001

Terrible to see all the animals being destroyed in the UK due to disease. What is it with English people and the way they care for their animals? Are they just unlucky or are they doing something fundamentally wrong?

I've been really calm since resigning from work last week. I met with my headhunter who is really bullish on my prospects. We had a nice lunch and talked for two hours, and he seems to really believe in me. He's putting me up at a number of companies, and beyond a dreamjob at IBM or DoCoMo he's got some intriguing ideas for me at Accenture and The Gartner Group.. I'm willing to design my future over three months, 'cause it's time now to get serious about career. I've worked too hard since leaving school to mess it up now.

Conspiracists alert: something very odd is happening in Columbia. Watch this space.

(still taking photos in the East End)

This place is full of holes. Holes in time, in the fabric of the modern world. Sometimes I fall through one unawares and find myself hanging between centuries, as if I had entered one of the ghost stations from below, climbed those dark stairs untrodden for ninety years and emerged into the old world..

But it's easier than that. At night this whole city, off the beaten track, loses its modern trappings entirely. Keep walking, and suddenly there are nothing but ancient buildings around you, grimed with the soot of years. Pavements slope, cracked with age, old cobblestones gleam, worn shiny with the passage of centuries. The sound of children's voices echoing on stone singing the same rhymes they chanted during the Black Death, while the echoes bounce from churches built upon the ruins of churches built upon the ruins of Roman and pagan temples, so old the tombs of fourteenth-century noblemen within them seem almost modern. The past settles on these deserted byways of the city by night like the heavy London fog of the old films: the back streets are so dimly lit the faint orange glow of the few street lamps looks like gaslight, and fantastically elongated, Jack the Ripper shadows loom on glistening black walls. They never caught him. He was never more than a figure of shadows, of rumour, of pieces of yellowing paper bearing ill-spelt messages. But he left his mark.

And the marks of his passing glow yellow on my maps in the gaslight. Four maps: 2000, 1900, 1888, 1812, following the trails of the ghost streets where my ancestors walked, lived, read about the murders. A tracery of names and places still familiar, oddly unchanged in places. Superimpose the maps and they show the holes where one can slip through, into their world. Like Jack the Ripper, they leave nothing now but shadows: yellowing records in cramped copperplate hands, blurred photographs of ghost places, old tales extracted painstakingly from faded memories. But the streets are still there, and the shadows remain. The past is all around us, in these old European cities. It's easy, sometimes, to slip out of time.

It's typical, it's kinda normal... Who am I kidding, it's cliche. The male that can't make his mind up. He's 'confused'... Riiight. Oh well... For once I really am.

By best friend has a point. I'm too much of a good person - so much so that I find loopholes to slip through my ethical quandarys. So I end up somewhere in between... I've very rarely been hipocrite or directly hurt or damaged other people, but I've left alot of damage in my wake and I'm a barren wasteland myself. Really makes me think...

And I don't think I've ever really made a decision and had the balls to carry through with it... Yeah, sure, I broke up with someone or I told so-and-so how I felt about them but it wasn't really my conscious decision. The situation arose and I jumped, or had a specific reason to do it. I can't ever really remember self-motivating myself to a decision - my decisions are a product of the world around me.

So what's that leave? My decision at the moment is to be with "the ex" in some form of exclusive relationship, even if it's going to be short-term. Of course, there's always a but.

My reservations... I don't have any deep feelings for her. Yet. Our lifestyles are radically different, as are our social habits. Sometimes I just wanna chill and code or something and clear my mind, she needs to get out of her house and do fun stuff. She smokes, I don't. She enjoys a signifigant recreational drug use, I'll be damned if I smoke a blunt, let alone a lil' joint. I have feelings for someone else. She hurt me pretty bad two years ago, and after two years of servere dislike toward her it's tough to imagine her as my girlfriend. Girlfriend? ACK!!! WTF?! I don't want a girlfriend right now! I can't handle it...

But, my friends think she's at least a little right for me. She'll get me out of the house, I'll meet new people, I'll give her some much-needed stability and affection, and we have alot of fun. Emotions may grow.

The there's her. I don't want to burn that bridge. I don't want to even move away from it... But she doesn't need emotion right now, she needs to fool around and enjoy herself. She's still young.

In the mean time I've been leading one of them around and acting pretty weird toward the other. I don't like doing either, but I've needed to collect my thoughts... Right. I don't think I ever wanted to make a decision - usually time decides things for me.

People say I'm lazy but I think I'm just scared.

In other news, I finished that dreaded PHP/SQL script to calculate my total hours! I've never gone up against such a challenge and prevailed... I felt amazingly great after walking out of the office today, like I had not just accomplished something challenging, but kicked the living shit out of it. ;) Life ain't that bad all the sudden.

PS: before i forget. beanies and the scatman are having a dinner thing tomorrow at cactus club. I wonder if i should go blah blah blah. We'll see how it turns out. heh.

Okay, maybe I just don't get it.

Is it possible that I just can't grasp the reason behind E2?

I typed up a couple of writeups about "The Mole" and I figured that they were decent enough (here and here). They aren't earth shattering writeups, but they have some information in them.

I wake up this morning and there is a /msg from one of the esteemed editors that my writeup wasn't important because "no one will remember it in 5 years". And I think he/she downvoted it too.

Huh.

I was under the impression that E2 was like a giant encyclopaedia, containing the existing knowledge of anyone who adds information. So wouldn't adding information that will be forgotten a good thing? Isn't the preservation of knowledge more important than rehashing information that is/will be common?

Maybe I just don't get it.

Meanwhile, my boss continues to parade his ignorance. During a conference call with one of our important customers, he says, "99.5% of Severity 1 problems with our software are solved by a hard-reset of the machine." I have a hard time believing he actually thought this. The opposite is actually true. The only times we had to resort to this barbaric measure was when we had faulty hardware.

I suppose one reason he might have thought this is because we do speak a lot of wanting to install remote power-cycling devices (Baytechs, in our case). But goodness gracious, wouldn't you think he would verify his assumption by talking to his staff before uttering something like that? I guess that means he doesn't think rebooting is such a drastic or strange measure to have to take. (Scary thought).

It's 6:30 pm and I've made it through today (so far) without chocolate, without escaping into nothingness, without any addictive behaviors (ok, there's one, but we won't talk about it here). And the pain has been absolutely searing. I am so sick of crying and feeling so fucking blue. Thank God (who?) for friends and acquaintances who really care about humans and want people to be happy. Cause there have been enough of the evil ones in my life.

So I am going to a party tonight, I don't want to, but I am, just to get my mind off of the pain, and hope it doesn't backfire in my face, like it does half the time. With any luck - I'll have a good time. Now I have to find something to wear.

After the never ending shower, I subdued the pains in my stomach with a large glass of sugary juice and a bowl of raisin bran. This morning was worse than it's been recently. I never got the chance to call my surgeon while I was home, and I go back tomorrow. The mystery pains are getting worse, and I'm still not as worried as I should be.

I woke early this morning in order to make an appointment to have my car inspected. Its last inspection ran out a couple days ago, and since I've been driving exactly the speed limit and following each and every traffic law to the letter. I also had two bad valve-stems which resulted in two of my tires needing air each time I filled my tank. While my car was being poked and prodded I made my way over to the Denny's next-door and nursed a cup of coffee and some pancakes; two breakfasts today, and both before 8:30. After an hour or so my car was ready, with a shiny new inspection sticker and two (hopefully) properly functioning valve-stems.

Spent the rest of the morning reading the aforementioned late Christmas present. Being wired on the three-plus cups of coffee I consumed at Denny's, my plans of taking a nap were thwarted. I was left a very alert tired person. Currently I feel like someone has cruelly turned up the dial on my personal gravity.

By noon I met James at work and bought him lunch. Had sushi for the first time in a month (bliss...). I would stock up and bring said specimens back to the Frozen North, but an effective method of long term sushi-storage continues to elude me.

Half of my family is away at a swim meet in another part of the state, so it is just mom and I this weekend. James was gracious enough to accept my mother's invitation for dinner, and the three of us dined on my mother delicious and infamous Mostaccioli. Incidentaly, this is my favorite home meal. Culinary bliss twice in one day; I don't know what to do with myself. I'm loath to return north and back to institutional food. So it goes.

After dinner James and I went to see (don't laugh) Dude, Where's My Car? at the dollar theater. He was very excited about this movie, having already seen and enjoyed it. I'm sorry to say that I only made it for about twenty minutes before I had to leave. I took an extended bathroom break, and was going to go back when He appeared--pissed--and we left. I felt horrible as he was all excited about it. I still feel selfish and rude. All in all, it was a horrible film. To give James credit, he can see the finest details in anything and point out how amazing something can be regardless of its outward appearance. He has done this many times in the years I have known him, and for the most part he is always right. Tonight was the first time I had doubt regarding his radar, and now I just feel like a jerk for disappointing my friend.

I'm so tired, yet I feel the day is not yet through. There is something that still needs to be done, although I'll be damned if I can figure it out. I know that when I hit the pillow I'm out for ten hours at least, it is so tempting.

Tomorrow I make the jaunt back north to feign my enjoyment of bitter cold and responsibilities.

Someone had a green laser pointer which they had flashing around during the whole show. Those green ones are really bright. Too bad they're $300.