0004 Yortera 07: Delivery

Wow. A week into the new year, already. Normally, I would've taken great pains to commemorate Thilafa, but events have not favored it. That's a pity, really; I do what I can to mark the holidays and important events of the Lapinian Calendar. After all, if I'm not going to use my own calendar, who will? And yet, that's the drawback, too. Because nobody else is using it, nobody else accounts for it unless I make a big deal of it. I imagine it's a little like trying to get Yom Kippur off from work without using vacation days. "You celebrate what? That's not a federal holiday, is it?"

Ceci n'est pas une blague juive.

Yesterday was the first beta run of the puzzling event that we're hosting, and it went far better than it could have. I'd be lying if I said everything ran without any problems whatsoever, but that's what beta-tests are for. More importantly in the short term is that the fundamental theories of everything I wrote will work. I'm working on some revisions, but my contributions to the event should survive in something close to their present forms. This is a good thing, as the live event runs in a little under a month. Now is not the time to have to rebuild anything from scratch. I've got a few revisions that need to be made, here and there, but they're all manageable, and I've got every confidence that things will go well for the real thing.

Less confident at the moment am I of how well I'll be at interacting with humanity at large for the next few weeks. In the time leading up to the beta, I had a lot of late nights, and near the end of last week, it started impacting my ability to get enough sleep to function at work the next day. Under other circumstances, I probably wouldn't have cared so much. However, I'm down to the last week-and-a-half of the quarter and my big Get-This-Done project doesn't look like it's going to complete in time, for reasons that have some to do with me and a lot to do with other people's Get-This-Done projects that kept them from being to help me with mine. What this ultimately means is that even if I can't get my stuff together on time, I need to at least look like a dedicated and hard-driving employee, trying everything possible to meet the target, so I can say at the end that I really couldn't have done anything more. Showing up late and hopping around in a daze won't help my case.

It's not even really that I care about this particular project itself, so much as the fact that my boss is using it as a benchmark against my ability to do team-lead and project-manager-type work, which is the big path to promotion right now. Making matters worse is the fact that I really can't do any of the technical work myself, so I'm having to juggle other people's availability to accomplish it. It's highly frustrating, and it's made this quarter... well, to be blunt, it's sucked. I don't want to be a project manager, so much as I want to be team lead, and apparently at T-Mobile or at least for this manager one implies the other. So, I learn, even though I'm not sure I'm very good at it.

Outside of the work complaint itself, I'm just feeling oversocialized right now. Those of you reading this who're extroverts, go ahead and skip to the next major heading; you're not going to understand this part, and that's okay. I've had to hook up with the same small group of people multiple times over the last week to work on this event, culminating in roughly three miles of walking and taking notes in the cold yesterday. Then I went out to dinner and we talked about everything that had happened over the least ten or so hours. I really haven't had a chance to get much downtime in a few weeks, and as we get closer to the live event, that's really only going to get worse. I know that at least one weekend I'll have to myself between now and then; Orbus and Mufi are going to Norwescon, which happens to be the weekend before SNAP, but outside that break, I know I'm going to be seeing a lot of people I already kind of feel like I've already seen a lot of, without much chance to recharge in peace.

Nobody plan on talking to me on Zelera 2 or the weekend of the 9th. I won't be here.

In other completely unrelated news, the sibutramine seems to be doing exactly what it seemed like it was going to do when I first started taking it. My weight this morning was 346.1 pounds, down from 364 when Dave weighed me two weeks ago. I'm eating between 1200 and 1300 calories a day, and while I'm hungry from time to time I never really get the yawning-chasm food cravings that used to plague me. I don't feel the urge to eat when I'm not hungry. My weight situation is actually improving for the first time in eight years.

Now I just have to go back for some bloodwork so that Dave can verify that my liver is still functioning. Ha-ha, only serious. The odds are small, but it's worth checking. After that, I should get a refill on my prescription, and that should set me for a while. I'm not sure how often the blood tests are necessary, but for now, I'll take it.

Jessie mentioned to me not too long ago that apparently I've been carrying myself better since I started seeing a positive change in the scale. I believe it, but it's surprising to me. I'm still obese, but I'm finally feeling like I have a plan and that that plan is coming together. I'm starting again to feel like some of the things that I want are actually going to be able to happen, if not today then soon. I'm looking forward to feeling comfortable about myself again, about making clothing decisions that look good instead of simply covering the necessities. Dobbs help me, I'm actually starting to seriously consider a fursuit... and some other things.

This is, in its own way, all tied in to the big talk that happened during my last Portland visit. These are all interconnected parts of a whole. I've all but quit City of Heroes; all that remains at this point is the install on my hard drive and the automatic payment on my account that I haven't deactivated in case the next big release interests me enough to return. I haven't exactly been vegetarian, per se, but I've been close enough as makes no odds, and the few times that I haven't stuck with it have been either necessity or a minor step outside, with no real urge to walk away from the path I've chosen. I'm even starting to rediscover a lot of my sexuality. It's embarrassing to put it that way, but even I have to admit that the weight gain hurt my self-image considerably, and seeing the progress, I'm starting to feel confident in my existence as a sexual being again.

In that sense, I've actually been looking at porn again, both creating and consuming. In specific, yes, I've been after the furry bondage again. Most of it is a wasteland of I-can't-help-myself and you-forced-me and the like, and the context is as much a turnoff as the subject matter itself might be intriguing. Every so often, the search does turn up a gem, but by and large it's uninspiring, which is a shame because I know what I like and finding it is a challenge.

Last night, as I was winding down for bed, I happened across A Private Heaven. In a strange way, this is perhaps the worst thing that could've happened. I wanted something fairly quick, fairly arousing, and easily forgettable. What I got was... well, read it. Go on; I'll wait here.

Finished? No? I'm serious.

So, now that you're done with it, let me tell you about how it made me feel. I talk a lot about wanting the characters in the media that I peruse to invite me into their heads. That's what I got out of this. Ignore the exposition; it was bad, and it was handled clumsily. Ignore the insertions; the names could've been changed and I don't think anyone would've noticed. Ignore even some of the individual aspects of the scenes that you didn't like. Some of them were cheesy and others were highly improbable. All of that aside, this story touched me, because I saw on the page and in my mind the words and the ideas that I had had before then, that someone else had made concrete, albeit fictionally.

I could go here into detail about my headspaces and what I do with them, but in the nine years that I've been keeping this journal, I've already done it before and I don't much feel like going into it again right now. Perhaps later, if the time is right and the mood strikes me. What's important right now is that for all its faults, I felt as though the characters were telling my story as much as theirs, and that moved me. It excited me, sure, but more importantly, it impassioned me. It wasn't validation from another person, but it was pretty close.

If nothing else, it gave me ideas of what to strive for, and on the nature and shape those ideas could take.

Welcome to my private heaven.