The last daylog I wrote (August 31, 2000 for those of you keeping track) was a short outpouring of loneliness. It was born of an intense frustration that was quickly forgotten. Nine9 and Luquid /msg'd me with sympathy for which I have not yet thanked them.

Thanks Nine9 and Luquid!

Now I write with an utterly silly grin plastered across my face. It won't go away - even when life requires solemnity from my countenance. No can do. The best I can manage is to press my lips firmly together and even then a kind of giddy grimace will steal across my features before I can act to keep control.

I met a boy. A very, very, very nice boy. A smart, handsome, sexy boy. I like this boy. He likes me too. That's about as far as we've gotten in the week we've known eachother.

I am happy.

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Jesus Christ. I came here to write some self absorbed "I feel sorry for myself" daylog, and what do I see? Arrowfall thanking me and making me feel a thousand times better! Thank you, man. Seriously. I hope you and your new bf find true happiness.
So here I am on a Saturday afternoon clearing out my desk. The project has been cancelled and its time to move out. I put all my personal stuff in a box and throw out the ridiculous amounts of paper full of suddenly irrelevant information cluttering my desk.

I 'sanitise' my PC. I delete megabytes of files. I delete hundreds and hundreds of emails - 6 months worth of accumlated electronic correspondence blinks out of existence. With them go all the emails from her and all the ones I wrote to her. The simple expostulations of love among arrangements for dinner on some long lost evening, innocent of what was to follow. The later tortured ones full of insecurities and helpless apologies. The ones where every word was agonised over and yet still could not quite convey what we were trying to say. The ones that actually caused physical pain in my chest when they arrived. The ones from before the time when we finally just stopped talking. The ones that I have kept for no reason that I understand. I delete them now. I have to resist the temptation to read them all one last time. It wouldn't be a good idea. There - now they are gone.

So tomorrow I fly out to Chicago to teach a training course for 3 weeks. This might be fun, but somehow I think it will just be tiring. Im doing it mainly to buy time while I try to decide what to do now. I have not liked my role on this project - I decided a while ago to look at resigning from this firm and moving on, and now things are coming to a head. I got two job offers yesterday and I also explained things to an associate partner with my current employer and he promised to get back to me with something that might convince me to stay.

I have some decisions to make.

Kung's US daylogs next

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It's been a while since I've noded. Some of it is from a lack of motivation, some from being busy, some from laziness.

I've begun my second year at RIT recently. With the school season is the loss of a great majority of the people I hung out with. I'm left to scramble and find people every weekend, as a few of them have remained at local colleges, just in the dorms. Here's a quick run-down of some of the new stuff that's happened:

  • I got a palm reading done by a friend of a friend, while at work, about 3 weeks ago. For future reference, I will marry within 4 years, have 3 children (first is a boy), be wealthy, change my profession to that of public service in ten years, and die young of a genetic disease within my family. Generally I am a skeptical person, but somehow this reading really struck me. I actually believe it, and that frightens me. Oh yeah, I know my future wife already.... so who is it?!
  • Psycho ex (see a broken heart never heals, et al.) and I have spoken a few times. She now goes to my college. We've finally talked a little about some of the stuff thats happened in the past. She still thinks that some day we'll be close again, possibly see one another again down the road. I strongly doubt that, I can't trust her at all and we're alternating between friends and enemies every other time we speak. I visited her tonight at her dorm when a few of our shared friends wanted to go see her. We didn't really speak much, and we just sat around. Her first boyfriend came over and picked her up, so we had to leave early. I imagine he wasn't too happy about my being there. Oh well. I still am nuts about her, even though I can't show it, but he can have her. She's lies, cheats, and does anything else you can imagine that pisses me off.
  • My confidant, that is, my cousin left for college in Buffalo. She should be home every weekend, but I'll have to compete with her boyfriend for time with her. I dunno what I'm gonna do if I can't talk to her on a regular basis.
  • Wicca. A belief I don't necessarily hold, however I'm gonna try something out. The friend at work (who has the palm reading friend) is Wiccan and has convinced me to try and cast a "spell". She's casting one for short-term love for me, and I'm gonna do one for inspiration/creativity in the hopes of writing a good song. It can't hurt, so why not? I'll just have to do it when my parents aren't around, because they'll be a bit nosy.
A little escapism never hurt anyone. The key is moderation, right? Ummm... sure. That's just peachy talk, but in actual practice it isn't always easy. So, have I been overly escapist lately? Yup. It beats the hell out of mundane everyday crap. Procrastination can be beneficial, but too much causes problems. At least the main tasks get done... eventually...

I wouldn't have even left my house this week if it weren't for my son's PT/OT/ST appointments. Plus, he needed diapers. Heck, I even tried to go to one of my A.A. homegroup's meetings this week, but got royally aggrevated. Why? Because too many well-intentioned (or just plain nosy) people there wouldn't simply let me be just another recovering drunk in a meeting. Nooooo... It seems like all they want to talk about is my increasingly obvious pregnancy. I politely tried to discourage those discussions to no avail. I'm just grateful that I didn't need to be at that meeting!

Maybe I'm just overly sensitive right now, but crap like that borders on being rude. For example, if one were to meet an amputee on the street it would be stupid to say, "Dude, you're missing a limb!" Like, no shit, Sherlock!

Maybe it's not just the day-to-day stuff I'm trying to ditch. It would simply be refreshing to talk with people about other topics for a change. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why I enjoy E2. Love youze guys! {{{hugs}}}
I spent my morning at the beach today. I was not sunning myself or splashing about in the ocean. I was with my geomorphology class. We dug a pit and analyzed the structures within. There were layers of seaweed a meter down. Then we took a beach profile using a laser level. That was interesting...much faster and easier than an optical level. Then we took samples of the sand at various elevations of the beach for a grain size analysis.

We arrived at nine a.m. There was a large storm straight east out over the water, you could see the rain pouring down below the clouds. It was quite a surreal site. I wish I could have sat and watched the storm as it slowly moved north.

While waiting for my groups turn with the laser level, I began sculpting a small sea turtle out of sand by the water...the sea was beginning to lick it when we left at 12:20 p.m....
Slappy's Smoke Log:
DAYS WITHOUT A CIGARETTE: 0
Smokes Today: 0
updated 1735 9 Sep 2000


I know it's been a while.

For those keeping score, I've been at 5 per day on weekdays. Hunh.

Thanks to social_inadequate for letting me know my typing is shitty.

Crikey: what a day. I installed Mandrake 7.1 on my home box, complete with kde 2 beta, and xfree86 4.01. It was a pain, to say the least. If I ever get my hands on the idiot at mandrakesoft who decided that the gtk-devel and xpm packages don't need to go on the CD, it won't be pleasant. I think I have it all fixed up now, except for a few issues. Yay for kde2, it kicks ass.

Saturday. Work. Now I am quite readily reminded of how much I love Oakland University, even though I'm not sure where I'll find the time to do my homework.

I came into Everything today to find a smallish XP hit, as well as more writeups required for the next level. Whoops. Guess I didn't find things to submit nukies for fast enough...

Like I said, I should really get down <strike>and boogie</strike> and get my homework done... but it's getting late, I gotta get up early tomorrow, and work goes from 1-9:30PM. Arrg...

Today Emily came over and asked me if I wanted to ride around on our bikes for a little while. I jumped at the chance to get away from my agrivating little sister and headed off.

She took me to a creek way off on the far end of a nearby development. We sat down and talked for a while, laughing and being just plain silly. It was probably the closest and most intimate moment we've ever had together. I know for sure now that she's one of my best friends here in Murfreesboro, that she honestly cares about me (and vice-versa).

As if to balance out how happy this made me, I came home to find out my friend Tori wasn't feeling good and that she wouldn't be able to go to the movies with me. Oh well, there's always next Saturday...

Today marked migraine #4, left side (they alternate). I was in the Marlton Trader Joe's and things looked funny, then the right-eye Chinese-kites bit started. I gobbled some aspirin right off the shelf...It bugs me when I see people walking around in a store eating, but believe me: I got over it...the speed that I tore into that package made the $20-plus price that people pay for a single dose of prescription Imitrex seem cheap.

There is always an evil time gap between the aura and the hammer, and this time I thought I had beaten it. Nooooo. Wha-bam: It was motrin and nap time when I got back to Philly. Missed out on the fringe festival bits: many interesting folks in Old City today--it was almost an urban Burning Man.

Historical bits

Migraine #1 happened less than a week after the lecture on migraines in medical school, in 1996 or so.

#2 happened just after a medical mission trip to Juarez, and was shared (!) by my GF at the time. I think alcohol was our only common food item the whole day. We luckily had some Imitrex among the leftover drug samples, so it was not a big deal. The TB exposure from that trip caused six months of unhappiness and sobriety while I fucked up my liver taking isoniazid.

#3 was just random, and I stomped on it with imitrex and ibuprofen before it got rolling at all. Viva free drug samples! I wish I had kept up my migraine paranoia; tons of stuff at home, not doing me any good there.

Insomnia. Sort of.

For the 6th day this week I was unable to sleep more than four hours. I need nine, usually get 7, and have been as short as two for a few days recently. Y was also unable to sleep more than 4 hours, so we got up, ate lunch, and watched part of Sneakers.

The apartment complex where we live has a new concierge, and they had a party at the clubhouse Saturday evening to introduce him. We went for the food, mostly. The concierge is about 5'4, talkative but not energetic, and drives a blue Miata. Apparently his job entails watering plants and driving people to the airport. We're fairly certain that he's a friend of Dorothy.

So we got some rice and fruit and sat down at the back of the pool area. A man and a woman sat down near us a few minutes later, with their baby. She said "Hi, I'm Robin, and this is my husband Jeff," which I repeated afterwards every hour or so, after we left the party:

Hi, I'm Robin, and this is my husband Jeff.
Hi, I'm Robin, and this is my husband Jeff.
Hi, I'm Robin, and this is my husband Jeff.
Hi, I'm Robin, and this is my husband Jeff.
Hi, I'm Robin, and this is my husband Jeff.

Jeff is a pediatrician. Robin likes the Linens n' Things store and had a huge bruise or removed cyst on the backside of her left thigh.

Another guy sat down next to them a few minutes later. They ask him what he does, of course, and he said that he works on cars.

Robin persisted in using "y'all" to talk to this one guy, saying later that she was born and raised in Delaware but liked to say "y'all." It's plural, Robin. She left to get cake, and the car guy then asked Jeff something about the baby, Abby. Jeff said "Yeah, she used to have even more hair than this. That was before the chemotherapy."

I knew he was joking, but the other guy was silently freaking out, you could tell. He said "Really?" And Jeff said, no, not really. Holy shit, what a comedy killer. A pediatrician joking about his own baby going through chemo. Ha ha.

I won 6 movie passes in a raffle. Yay!

After the party (which was barren, considering how many people live in the complex), we went to the store. I'll skip that part. It wouldn't be amusing, not that any of this day log necessarily is.

After picking up some water and pretzels at the store we went to see The Godfather at the Museum of Art's outdoor cinema. We took two pillows and a blanket. Y was asleep through most of it, and I had a few catnaps though fortunately did not miss the horsehead scene. I had completely covered myself with the side of the comforter so it looked like we had just come there to sleep. Then we left early and I went to work.

And here I sit at work, trying to hear my Audio Paragon 80s music while getting blasted with the manager's Dirty Dancing soundtrack and Neil Diamond CD.

Sydney. Went to Hollow Man at a cinema on George Street; and after it, outside, saw there was something happening near the Town Hall, half a block away.

It was 3.15 p.m. There was a double row of mounted police facing north at the intersection of George and Bathurst Streets, and as I went by I saw they were facing a large conglomeration of people who were occupying the roadway outside the Town Hall. This was Reclaim the Streets, which seemed to be a motley bunch of what the city's residents think of as inner-city types. A mixture of punks, anarchists, hippies, alternative lifestylers, musicians, students. Babies and small children, a couple of people on bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards. A large ramshackle nuclear-missile-seeming object on the body of a wrecked car, propelled by people pulling it along on ropes and others pushing behind. A van playing loud techno and with a large pink flag flapping above it. The red, black and yellow Aboriginal flag. Other people waving flags that looked like old striped bedsheets. Somebody with a microphone proclaimed that they were reclaiming the street for pedestrians and from automobiles, big business, petroleum concerns, the Olympics hysteria, and I forget what else. At the south end of the block were the mounted police, and the north end was a barricade of police cars and coppers. Police looked on from the top of the Town Hall steps and from the sidewalk at both sides. Traffic was being detoured into parallel streets. There were more spectators (including a couple of foreign media teams) watching from the sidewalks than there were Street Reclaimers squatting on the macadam. Today was a good day for it, with athletes and international media in the city. Maybe next Saturday, the first full day of the Olympic Games, would have been better, but the security would have been tighter.

After an hour or so the event began moving south down George Street to someplace called Victoria Park. The police on horseback had now come north to be at the end of the procession, and while they were waiting for it to get moving, behind them was the façade of the Queen Victoria Building--the scene looked as if it was waiting to turn into the Storming of the Winter Palace. But it stayed peaceful. The Street Reclaimers hauled their missile-like vehicle south down George Street; the rest followed behind, with the police at the rear. It was a parade, accompanied by pedestrians and more police on the sidewalk, tourists with cameras. I walked with it as far as Railway Square, then stopped and watched them pass me; police halted traffic a block back, people in the nearby high-rise hotel came to the windows to look.

On a corner of Railway Square was a secondhand bookstore, and I went in and found old copies of Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth for A$19.95 each. That's as much as a new paperback costs! Then went to 2 retail bookstores back in the city center and saw The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt Volume II selling for $71. Maybe that makes sense with the exchange rate: A$1 equal about 37 pence sterling or 56 U.S cents. Bought Edward W. Said's Out of Place, and The Hulton Getty Picture Collection: 1940s.

How Sydney has changed in 7 months. When you look down main streets you see two rows of blue "Sydney 2000" banners (advertising Olympics sponsors like IBM and UPS) hanging from light poles and converging to vanishing point. White Olympics banners outside the Town Hall. Boxes of potted flowers have been brought in to add color. The bus lanes in the city center have been painted red. There're a lot more signposted directions for tourists. Stores of various kinds have been demolished to make way for apartment blocks and modish eating-places. It's easier to find a café or restaurant here than a post office or bookstore. There's a Starbucks, maybe the first in the country. Seemingly-permanent cracks and potholes in road surfaces have been fixed. City residents have had to live with the noise of roadworks and construction until midnight and starting again at 6 a.m. The price of movie tickets has been slashed by a third just for this month. There're gigantic videoscreens in public places. Endless Olympics-related commercials on TV. More people everywhere, more black people; Olympics officials wearing large plastic IDs around their necks, athletes wearing team tracksuits. More traffic. More UPS trucks, which used to be non-existent. There's a sense of excitement, but less than there was in December 1999 for New Year's Eve. Then, it was pure anticipation and exhilaration; now, it's mingled with cynicism: too many questionable things have been done for the sake of the Olympics--some of the things Reclaim the Streets was about.

Seeing Reclaim the Streets made me feel happy and lucky--being in the right place at the right time. But, as ever, after a while it depresses me to be in a city with so little history. Scrape the glamorous surface and there's not much underneath. People tell me to stop thinking and just enjoy Sydney for the surface, the moment. Maybe. I'm lucky to be here right now, to see it all.

September 12, 2000
September 14, 2000
September 15, 2000
September 18, 2000
September 24, 2000
September 29, 2000
September 30, 2000
October 1, 2000
October 2, 2000

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