I wish I knew right now what I was feeling. My emotions are this tightly knotted mass of disjoint and tangled threads that all interleave into a Gordian Knot, matching the lump in my stomach that refuses to settle.

Shay moved out this morning. Like when Tanya left, I didn't get to say good-bye. I'm not sure I could have. I don't even know if I wished I could. I wish I'd had the option, but if I had could I have not done it? I feel at once like I failed her as a sister, like I failed myself as a protector and guardian, and like she failed me as a friend. Buried deeply beneath the mask she wears is the person I invited into my family, but that person is so deeply hidden that I sometimes question whether it existed at all, and I hate saying that because that can only lead me to question whether asking her to be a member of my extended family was worth the effort at all, which means so many months of wasted effort and so many resources poured into a black hole.

I feel a bit like a failure towards my mate, as well, in spite of the assurances to the contrary. It's not my place to discuss reasons or details, but the short form is that I got very pushy about something that I didn't need to push, then caught the brunt of an emotional blast caused by many more things than just the moment's excess. Things just slowly seemed to slide from there, until finally Jessie and I sort of crawled into bed and I fell apart.

Usually, a good night's sleep is all I need to recover from these kinds of divots, but today I find myself no better than last night. If anything, I feel worse because now I have the sense that I should have gotten better and didn't, and I don't know why. I've had Elton John's "The Panic In Me" off of the El Dorado soundtrack stuck in my head since I woke up, and it certainly hasn't helped.

I'm having a horrible time controlling my weight right now. My height is still upsetting to me, and I have trouble believing that it will ever be "acceptable" to me. At best, it will be "tolerable," but that's hardly the same thing. Unfortunately, at least partly because of this immutable and unwanted truth about my physical form, keeping the
rest of the things I can control in check has been much harder than I would like.

I haven't dilated in months now, again. That, like my weight, is one of those things that I wish would just happen but that I can't seem to make happen by myself, a fact that bothers me even more than before. Jessie used to complain about the effort involved in hair-removal, and I always said that if zie really wanted it badly enough zie would find the will to make it happen, but that's not true and recognizing that makes me feel even more out-of-sorts. I have so many things that, if I had the will, I would simply do, but that never get done for one reason or
another. It certainly isn't that I don't want them. It's that I can never make myself stick with them.

Today is the one-year anniversary of my surgery, not counting differences in timezones and other negligible details. I've only ever made love with Jessie once, and despite how desperately I want to be able to do it again, I can't seem to spend the effort it takes to stay on top of what I have to do to make myself ready for it. I should be happy that it's been a year since I did this. I should be ecstatic that my surgical scars have all healed according to every medical text. I'm only disappointed in my own inability to live up to my expectations.

I still don't have a job. My creative endeavors are all languishing in pieces. One of the players in my weekly Werewolf game won't make it this week and may have to drop out, which might end up killing the story. I
couldn't even look at the scale this morning. My unemployment checks haven't arrived yet this week, and I've got a pile of bills I need to pay. 

It's very hard for me not to feel like a failure right now.

---

It's now 19h00 by my desktop clock, and while I can't say I feel better than I did this morning, I'm not suffering from it in any immediate sense. More than anything, it feels "behind." It's no longer an immediate and crippling sensation but a painful memory. More than anything, right now I just feel sort of blah. I fell back into bed as soon as I stopped writing this morning, and I didn't get up until five minutes ago. I woke up several times during that period, but I never managed to overcome inertia enough to actually go do anything.

I really didn't feel like there was anything to do, I suppose. I had no reason to leave the bed. I'm sure I could've found semi-productive things on which to work, like the renown backlog for my Werewolf game or any one
of a hundred different stories that I have pending for one reason or another, but likely if I had gotten out of bed I would've spent the day spodding with Xenosaga, trying to get chaos to level fifty to see his last deathblow (I
know the game calls them Tech Attacks, but I agree with the people at GameFAQs that say that's a lame translation). 

Spod is a powerful thing. It's any activity that's a timewaster, that you know is a timewaster, that you can do with minimal effort or concentration. By "timewaster," I mean an activity whose goal is ultimately unimportant. Ship-in-a-bottle building or writing JAPHs are not spod; they have some sort of vaguely tangible outcome. Playing pick-up sticks with yourself is spod, unless you're deliberately trying to build your hand-eye coordination.

The typical example of spod is endlessly levelling characters in a console RPG long past the point of being able to beat the game, and I excel at it. Most of the games I've played, I have a save-state somewhere on a memory card or floppy disk that's designated my spod state, and I've likely hit the final boss but have backtracked to some area of the final dungeon or another and just sit and take on fight after fight to pick up stuff and gain experience. Usually, this is to see just how high I can push the experience point counter or the HP counter or some other numerical statistic. 

I've been spodding with Xenosaga a lot lately. I beat the game five days after I got it, but the ending was so phenomenally unrewarding that I keep playing it because I feel like I got no closure out of it. That and, frankly,
I'm tired of everything else I've got at the moment and nothing else new will be out for a while that interests me, and so Xenosaga has been my drug of choice during the long, empty stretches of day while Jessie's at work and I
don't feel like I can be productive at a jobsearch. 

I got Master of Orion 3 when it arrived, as well, but it was a huge disappointment. I like empire-building, but I hate political games, and MoO3 took all the empire-building factors in MoO2 and stuffed them behind a wall
of AI, and took all the political stuff that had been secondary to the previous game and made them the focus, which meant that everything I enjoyed I couldn't do, and everything I found tedious was now the point. It's the
first PC game I've ever returned out of disgust. Not the first game ever, to be sure; that was Legend of Mana. I think honestly I disliked this even more than that.

I keep saying I have things I should be doing. I could be dilating. I could be writing. I could be out walkies. I could be managing my free time in some sort of useful fashion, but I never have. When I've got sixty things I
must do, not only do I get them all done but I manage to squeeze in ten things I want to do in the same time because I turn into a blizzard of productivity, and I can keep that up indefinitely; I did for three years at the end of my stint in college. When I've got nothing I have to do, or only one or two things, they never get done because I turn into a perpetual procrastinator. "I've got all the time in the world to work on it" because my excuse for everything, and then nothing ever gets done. The stuff I should be doing gets delayed because I don't feel like doing it right now and I know I can do it later. The stuff I want to be doing I feel guilty doing because I have things I should be doing that hang over me, but never get finished.

I'm a horrible time-manager, and I recognize it, but I'm never sure how to fix it shy of just doing things, and that doesn't happen, even though it should. I'm such a joyful bundle of neuroses. It's a wonder I'm not in a Happy Coat somewhere singing to my socks.

So, igneous compounds have been observed in a localized occurance of sanguination. More succinctly, the rock bled.

After all the brou-ha-ha I committed about the Evils of LiveJournal and other such neo-Luddite exhortations against my friends, to suddenly be in possession of one seems absurd. Then again, I have an account on FurryMUCK and an AIM account, too, now, and two years ago I was still railing against both of those.

I've said before that I'm not an early adopter, but by now one might think that I'd at least learn from my mistakes. I commented to Joanne on IRC earlier tonight that I'm not "happy" with having gotten an account, but at the same time I'm tired of fighting the March of Progress. I'm also still somewhat embarrassed about having had such a harangue with Jessie over the whole issues, too. To be sure, if Jessie hadn't goofed in a technical aspect of posting something private, I probably still wouldn't have an account, but I blew the situation way out of proportion to the actual issue.

This is now, I think, the third time I've said I had no use for something, only to end up in possession of it a few days later.

The part that makes me laugh, though, is the fact that now that I have all of these things, the call to actually use them has all but vanished. I haven't been on FM or AIM in months. Nobody seems to have noticed, or if they have they haven't bothered to contact me by any of the known reliable media and ask where I've been. I wonder if this, too, will end up being another in a long line of pan-flashes for me. It is said that Albert Einstein once had a friend buy him a can of shaving cream, which he found infinitely preferable to the ordinary soap he had been using to shave. When the can ran dry, he went back to soap, either never remembering or never caring enough to continue using the invention that he had hailed as such a blessing. Inertia won out over innovation.

It will be interesting to see how long this lasts.

---

In other news, I finally have a road-worthy vehicle again, so sayeth the mechanics to whom I took the car. This removes one of the two big things that went wrong on January 8, and means I have a much better chance of correcting the second with ease.

It also means, friends and neighbors, that the planning for the Bash can continue. In fact, the city, airport and dates are already selected, but we need now to drive up to the area and select the best hotel for the job, then get a contract. For that, I fully intend to call in SR, who was invaluable in assembling last year's Bash, 'cause I sure as heck can't read legalese. I click through all my EULAs without reading them on the grounds they're all immoral if not illegal and thus aren't binding. This will probably get me in trouble one day.

For those of you who feel like starting your plans, the Bash this year will be in Allentown, which is about two hours' drive north of Philadelphia, so chosen because the only thing within the vicinity of PHL proper is a Sunoco
refinery and some highway leading into Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This is not the most scenic part of town. Most Bashers, as a rule, are poor. The ones that aren't are tight with money so as to avoid being poor,
and thus I figure the extra money spent on trying to fly into a smaller airport will more than be saved in car rental and gasoline fees for the people who will be flying to the event. The rest of you, you'll be driving anyway, so it's not even an extra tank of gas difference.

To those of you planning on attending, my apologies at the lateness of the date and the lack of plans so far. Given everything that's already happened this year, I hope you can forgive me when I say "I had other crises to handle first." See you all in three months!

Consider the following scenario:

An overweight woman and her husband walk into a trendy clothiers, and she goes into the back to try on some slinky outfit that she knows is at least a size too small. She comes out of the dressing room looking squeezed and
pinched into something that's blatantly too tight, and asks her husband sitting on the couch, "Does this dress make me look fat?"

We laugh, but there's an important effect at work here. The woman is not seeking an answer to the question. She's seeking reassurance. She has to know that the dress doesn't fit, that her hips and stomach bulge from beneath the fabric like great globs of pork-fat wrapped in cellophane. She can't possibly be blind to the fact that it emphasizes every curve she shouldn't have and doesn't do anything for the ones that she should. What she wants is not to be told whether or not the dress makes her look fat, because it does. What she wants is to be told that, in her husband's eyes she is beautiful.

However, therein lies the Great Paradox. If she asks to be told that she's beautiful, the compliment is meaningless. Having requested praise, receiving it counts for nothing. You got what you asked to be given, and that doesn't
satiate the need for approval. For it to truly be what she wants, it must be unrequested, unexpected. Not undeserved or unnecessary, to be sure, but it must be spontaneous. The husband must say, "Honey, you look great" without ever having been asked for such a statement, because to ask for it is to invalidate the answer.

I am that woman. My life is the dress.

I have this need, this raw craving for real that lurks within my skull like a demon. I can tell you in the abstract what I want. I can discuss generalities, possibilities, and probabilities until my tongue is numb. Until someone asks me for detail, or expresses an interest, that's the most I can say. Anything more, and I've ruined the spell.

If I tell you what I want without you asking me, it doesn't mean anything to me when you give it to me, because you aren't responding to my wishes; you're only cranking the handle on the rote-response generator. You don't really know what I want; you're only responding to my input, like a machine. You aren't real; you're just a mirror, showing me what I want to see. I don't want to see myself in your mirror. I want to see you.

Scenario Number Two:

Your friend holds a party. He says it's invite-only. You've got some vague and tenuous plans for that weekend, but nothing certain. You say as much. Your friend asks you if you want an invitation. You beg off, because of
those plans. Your friend shrugs and goes on his merry way. All next week, you hear everyone you know talking about the party, and how you should've been there. If you'd taken the invite when it was offered, then you'd have
felt like you invited yourself and really weren't part of the crowd, and you really did have other plans, even if they were sketchy. If you'd gotten an invite in the mail like all the other guests, though, you'd have gone, because then you'd have known that your friend really did want you there, and the invite would've felt genuine.

Is it psychosis? Probably. Is it neurosis? Certainly. Is it broken? Yes. Is it confusing? Likely. Is it curable? Doubtful.

I need to feel like I belong. Even as I scream my individuality to the heavens, I need to know that I'm an accepted member of my group. It's worse than the dress. It's the party. Even if you ask me if I want something, I'm not likely to say yes because some part of my skull will rise up an insist that you're only asking me because I've made a nuisance of myself, like all the other people I know that have asked to be let into private affairs. Even to my own mind, I'm no better than the little fat kid standing outside the cool kids' clubhouse asking to be let inside, or worse, making a big show of how much I don't want to be a part of any ol' stupid club, all the while hungrily peeking through the windows, trying not to get caught.

When I receive a compliment without solicitation from a stranger praising one of my stories, it's the most incredible high in the world. Why can't I feel that when someone dear to me offers me something? Why must I reject it? Why can't I believe in its reality? Why does my brain mandate such an important difference between being offered something, and being given that same thing outright?

I guess it goes back to the dress. If the wife walks out and the husband says, "Would you like me to compliment you?" in response to her solitication of opinion, she'd be insulted. She'd probably be even more insulted than if he had told her that she could stand to lose a few pounds. He's taken what should have been an unwritten subtext and made it blatant, and in so doing he's exposed the absurdity of the whole scenario. She wants to know that she's beautiful in his eyes. She wants the unrequested reassurance that he finds her attractive despite her size, and so she deliberately calls her weight into issue by trying on a dress that's too tight and asking if it makes her look bad. She has to know, at least subconsciously, that her actions are childish, but to confess that is to admit her weakness, to acknowledge her lack of self-esteem. What she wants is to win without admitting that she's
playing the game. Asking if she wants to be told how good she looks is bringing the game into the focus, kind of like asking a D&D character for zir alignment.

I can go one better than she can. I can admit that the game exists. I can even admit in the abstract that I play it, even knowing that it can't be won. I'm not proud of that truth, but I think I can take some pride in the admission. I may not be emotionally healthy, but I'm cognizant of my damage and try to take steps to correct it when I can and work around it when I can't.

Nobody stays in Atlantis by faking reality in any manner whatsoever.

I suppose technically that this should be March 5th, but I'm writing it on the extreme morning of the fifth after having gotten up some time on the afternoon of the fourth, so I'm calling it the 4th for technicality's sake. To be fair, some of my Thailand entries are properly labelled and I wrote them at all hours of the day, but the entries I wrote while in Thailand don't match up to anything normal, sane or reasonable. That whole trip is one big bucket of surreal in my head, a symbol that contains no inherent meaning and thus is reinterpreted every time I think about it.

I think what shocks me most about Thailand, even to this day, is the way it lingers in my mind. It wasn't a happy trip. It wasn't a frightening trip. It wasn't a surreal trip. I visited Chloe, XoYo and Mut. I had three major and
two minor surgical procedures. I endured two bouts of food poisoning. I learned to love pad thai. I discovered the 1950s-era-science-reel joy of dilation. I reinvented who I am. I discovered that I'm just like who I used to be, only moreso. It's not that Thailand could have been only yesterday; it's that Thailand could be tomorrow.

The last month has been incredibly stressful for me. Finding a job in this economy has been... well, to say difficult is an understatement and to say it's been hell is a hyperbole. The truth is that all of my work seems to vanish into a black hole of Human Resources drones and technical recruiters who themselves aren't technical people. I had a recruiter tell me "I don't see UNIX on your résumé" when I had listed Solaris, AIX, OSF1, HP-UX, and SCO instead. I've been accused of job-hopping in my efforts to stay ahead of the lay-off curve. I've been told that my years of experience in coding don't count for anything because I'm too specialized. I've been told they don't count because I'm not specialized enough. I don't know how to make my chances of success more, or even less, likely, short of yelling at a recruiter and accusing her of pigeonholing me because of my attempts to avoid being let go by one company or another that's suffered trouble, reinvented itself and discovered it didn't need me or otherwise
found out after hiring me that I wasn't the right candidate for the job. Not that I would do such a thing, of course.

In short, I've hit a sort of use-the-Force requirement. I can no longer plan for my own future, because I don't feel like I'm in control of it, at least not right now. It's horrifyingly liberating, and sadistically enlightening. I'm not reacting at all well to the feeling that I can't provide for those about whom I care, and every day I realize just how much of my personality is tied up in the belief that my value unto others is determined by my ability to provide for them, in some fashion or another. It's a very dangerous belief, one I'm trying to excise from my mind. In the absense of obviously positive cashflow, though, it's very hard to overcome.

Jessie and I finally had to ask Shay to leave. Her last day under our roof will be the fifteenth of this month. I don't want and don't need to go into all the reasons she's leaving, but it's been gnawing at me. I feel like I've failed, though how I couldn't say. Worse, there's a part of me that feels used, even though I know she never intended for that to happen. I gave her six months in Texas. I gave her six weeks when she came to Philly. I gave her a month this time. Every time, she's managed somehow to wear out her welcome by the end of it. Not that she's chosen to leave, but that we've had to ask her to vacate our premises. Part of me wonders why I keep sticking my head in the bandsaw. Part of me can't figure out why she doesn't turn the bandsaw off. Part of me relishes the pain as long as the bandsaw-operator is laughing while she calls 911.

I've been yelling at Jessie a lot lately. The stress is obviously getting to me, but never in ways that seem obvious. Little things that I can take in stride as long as the lights are on come back to gnaw at me when I close my eyes. Jessie locked a LiveJournal post to friends only recently, and I don't have a LiveJournal so I couldn't see it. I knew it was there 'cause I saw Jessie writing it, but it didn't show up in the listing, and I had a conniption because I wanted to know how many other posts I might have been missing along the way and never known I'd missed, just because I didn't have a LiveJournal account, to say nothing of all the other problems I've had with LiveJournal, et alia, in the past.

Those of you who would respond to this by saying, "why don't you just get a LiveJournal account" have not done
your homework. C-minuses for the lot of you. See me after class.

I wish I knew what was wrong with me. I wish I knew how to make it stop. I wish I at least knew when I would have the resources again to make these things go away. I was never like this when I had a job, or was I? Was I
always this petty, this antagonistic, this bitchy-without-just-cause, and I just had enough material comfort and security to patch over the jagged edges of my personality?

Most psych-types that I know have said to me that losing one's job is the second-largest possible cause of stress in one's life, just behind a death in the family. It's a loss of self-sufficiency, and more. It's a loss of self-esteem, of self-respect. I'm sucking on the government tit and hating it, and hating myself for having to do it.

Maybe I should go work at a coffee-bar or something, for the extra cash. I won't lose any benefits until I'm making forty percent of my unemployment check in earned income, and considering what I was making before I doubt I could make that much at a part-time job. Of course, by the same token, taking a job like that while I'm still receiving benefits feels like I'm giving up hope of finding a better job. I joke about becoming a truck driver if I can't find a tech job, but that, too, is giving up. It's just giving up in a different way.

I wish I had a job. I wish I felt like I had the ability to just go get one. Right now, I feel like it's all in the hands of Fate, and Fate is not a master I trust.

---

I feel the need to add this as a post-script, though I know I shouldn't have to say it. I said above that I've been yelling at Jessie. What I didn't say there is how much it tears me up inside when I do. I don't think I could put
into words just how much Jessie means to me. Every time I lose my temper, I feel sick to my stomach. My breath gets short. My paws go numb, even worse now that I've damaged the nerves in my right one. I lash out, and then I want to curl up in a ball and cry because I've hurt someone that means as much to me as my own life. I feel that much worse after having lost control of myself with Jessie, worse than I ever would if I had just blown up at a friend, or even a lover. It's the closest I can get to screaming at myself in a mirror without a reflective surface.

I know I've wished to undo the past before, to change steps I'd taken and do things differently. I know how foolish those wishes are, how they seek to uncreate the person I am today. Never do I wish for that ability so strongly as when I get angry with my mate, in spite of all that. I hope this makes sense.

So. First, I've lost my job. Second, I've lost my car. Third... well, there isn't really a third to that, but the first two are enough. I suppose getting the flu could be the third, but it only makes me feel like diving head-first off of an overpass above the Schuylkill, or however the hell that river's name is spelled. Spelt. Whatever. It really isn't a life-changing event. That's okay, though, because between my means of getting from point A to point B vanishing and my means of acquiring a new means of getting from point A to point B vanishing, I've had it pretty rough.

Actually, there are a few other points, call them 3A, 3B and so on. They're not really "life-changing" but they're pretty nasty. I think I've come down with cubital tunnel syndrome. The ring and pinky fingers on my right paw have been tingling non-stop for the last five days now, and they refuse to relax. About a week ago, I picked up Arcanum, which is this older game for which I finally got a fast enough computer to run, and I treated myself to a few marathon sessions of this new addiction. Only, I hadn't really accounted for the fact that my trackball had died, and I had just gone back to a mouse, and I have this really old wooden-armed chair that my father
made that cuts off the circulation in my hands when I rest my elbows against it for too long. Well, sure enough, after three days of non-stop steampunk action à la Castle Falkenstein, two of my fingers went numb,
and every time I pick up the mouse in that paw, they start to tingle more fiercely, like a dowsing rod for bad ideas. I've tried to keep my arm locked straight as all of the self-help guides have suggested, but that doesn't
seem to do much more than cut off the blood-flow to the other  fingers on that paw, so I've kind of given up caring.

There is a medical solution, of course. Cortisone shots, and outpatient surgery if those don't work. However, point 3B is that my medical insurance is gone. You see, this goes back to the fact that my last company is the
entrepreneurial equivalent of an old man dottering about in his garage. The president is a woman to take advantage of the tax break. The owner is the Vice President of Emerging Business, which is a fancy title that seems to mean "is a personal friend to two-thirds of the customer base." The kicker, of course, is that the company never has more than fifteen people in it, because then they'd have to follow all the rules that apply
to small businesses but aren't aimed at two-guys-in-a-garage. So, no COBRA. My manager was magnanimous enough to offer to let me cover the premiums out of pocket and just not list me as no longer employed for health purposes, but I can't afford USD676 for two months of health insurance when my total monthly income comes to USD1700 right now, ten percent of which is taxed because it qualifies as income. Thank whatever deities may exist that I already budgeted for the full cost of hormones, because if I hadn't someone would've needed an ambulance when my drugs ran out. I just hope that person would've been insured, or we'd all be in trouble.

Finally, 3C, I have two new boarders living under my roof. Now, in a perverse sort of fashion, this is a good thing, because Kelly and Shay are paying a portion of the rent, which means my unemployment checks are going further than they would otherwise. However, living in a two-bedroom apartment was cozy with two people, and with three it was crowded. Now there're four of us, and it's packed. If I had a job, I could offer to co-sign on a place, but I don't. If Shay didn't have an eviction on her record, she could co-sign, but she can't. If Kelly were working two jobs, she'd make enough by herself to pay for a place in the eyes of the complexes around here, but she's already getting stretched at the seams working the one she's got. Right now, none of us really
know how to get out of this mess, but in the meantime, hey, cheap livin'.

It's this amazing clusterfuck of a situation. I'm looking for work, but right now the tech market is TEH FU><0R, and half of my friends are either unable to get tech jobs or are massively underpaid and overworked. I'm trying to avoid the mindset of "I'll ride out my unemployment, then go be a truck driver," but it's a pretty tempting proposition. I've always hated the tech sector; I got into it because I knew I was good at it, not because I liked it. I can't afford to go back to school unless I want to plan on a bankruptcy in my future, which one of my other long-term friends is doing. I've got too much experience and education to be a fresh-out-of-college entry level trainee, but not enough to be the God Of Computing that every place now seems to want because they all know the tech market is TEH FU><0R and they can demand godhood and get it if they wait long enough.

On the other note, the car that Tanya brought me to replace the one I exploded failed its state safety inspection, which is going to make life really fun for a lot of people. I don't have the money to make the repairs it needs. If I'd had the money to repair it, I'd have gone to a dealer and bought a real used car that was already inspected. Instead, I cashed out Tanya's debt on the promise that she'd bring me a car to replace the one I destroyed. The car she brought me isn't street-legal, so now I'm even more screwed than I was before. If push really comes down to shove, I can put the repairs for the car on one of my credit cards and just plan on adding four or five months to the time it takes me to pay off my bills, but that's really not how I wanted to have to handle the situation; see above for why.

I hate living in a holding pattern.

Now that it's behind me, I think I can safely say that yesterday has to be the single worst day in conscious memory.

For starters, I lost my job, the shiny new one I just got two months ago that promised to be actual work instead of sitting at a computer playing Freecell and waiting for the axe to fall. It was a great idea, and everyone involved
thought it was a good move, at least at first. Then I discovered something about my new workplace's development cycle: they don't have one. Instead, they use a time-honored system for creating programs called Write A Quick Hack And Make It A Design Philosophy. In the two months I was there, we expanded from two products to six, and none of them were done right, well, or completely before the code was in production and being used by at least one client, often more.

Now, I like to think that in times of great need and obvious duress, I can whip out code to order that'll serve in a pinch until something better can be written. However, I tend very much to be a code-to-the-spec type of person,
and trying to get anything accomplished in that environment led very quickly to a lot of stress and frustration. After two months, management decided that I just wasn't adapting and they let me go. It's hard to complain too much;
they admitted their environment wasn't conducive to good coding standards or good work, and they also recognized that my programming ability was superb. It was just far slower and regimented than they wanted, and so they cut their losses while they could.

So, on my way home after thirty minutes of managerial meeting and cleaning out my desk in a hurry, my car died. Now, this one I have to say is my fault. I'd been putting off getting an oil change, 'cause mine's the only car for
Jessie and I and we both work non-traditional schedules, so getting the car in and out unless it's some quicky-lube place is kind of a pain, and I could never bother with finding one of those that was open on Sunday. So, the oil got really low. As in, the light sputtered a few times, then in the last few days of the car's earthly existence stayed red. Now, I'd already blown up one car by not heeding the warning lights on my dash, but again I really had no "good time" to go handle the vehicle fix. As I was driving home from the last day at work, I decided that the time had come to get the oil fixed 'cause I'd have the time to do it in the middle of the day, and that's when the car started making this really rhythmic clicking sound.

Now, anybody who knows anything about cars, even me, should know that as soon as something like that starts up under the bonnet, the car is dead. It's now officially a zombie. It could die in a month. It could die in two years. It could survive indefinitely on the gasoline, oil and transmission fluids of other vehicles, sucking them dry to sustain its own unnatural existence. It's a '94 Ford Escort with 157,000 miles on it, for Dobbs' sake. It should've
died long back, but it hadn't. Well, now it did. It's still driveable, but I now can't trust it not to roll over at any random moment, and so at the first possible opportunity, I'm going to have to replace it.

This is hampered by Event Number One. See above.

Now, I do have the means to replace the car. I've got about six thousand dollars in the bank, saved up to be the down payment on the house that I've been trying to buy for the last three months. Unfortunately, if I spend that on a new car, I won't have it for the house. If I don't spend it on a car, though, my ability to get a new job becomes somewhat hampered. If I can't get a new job, we're sunk. Not immediately, to be sure. I should get unemployment benefits, and they'll cover me for a while. Not as nicely as I'd like, but that's because they're a government handout, not a job.

For now, I'm just trying to find another job as quickly as possible, and hope that the car doesn't realize it's already dead and fall-over-boom before I can replace it.

I think I'm going to have to take a vow of silence regarding any issue involving my personal opinions. My fastest mechanism possible for alienating even the people I love and who love me in return seems to be voicing my viewpoint.

The above statement is characteristic of the reasons why the above statement is true. I am a writer. I am not an orator. When I put down prose, I have the time to edit it in successive iterations, refining and improving my language at every pass. The first draft of most of what I write is, by my own view, poorly written. Speech involving another human being is nothing but first drafts.

The best example of this I can give is, I think, the movie Pee Wee's Big Adventure. This movie is, in my honest opinion, an exceptionally artistic film. It shows us the world as seen by an eight-year-old, and it accomplishes
this exceptionally well. However, it uses the character of Pee-Wee Herman, as portrayed by Paul Reubens, to do this, and Pee-Wee Herman gives me the itch. I don't enjoy watching that character, and yet I can think of no other lead role that would have worked anywhere nearly as well, nor could I imagine anyone else in that role. In addition, my eight-year-old world was a painful and uncomfortable place. Thus, while I think the film is brilliant in its execution, it's one I actively do not enjoy watching and have no desire to ever see again.

All of the above sentiment came out as "That film sucked" when Jessie asked me what I thought of it after I watched it. I could barely sit through the movie, I felt I had been pressured into viewing it, I didn't enjoy being
brought back to my own childhood by proxy, and I had to fight down my own bile at that buzz-cutted, bow-tied buffoon's antics on the screen. My initial response was, I hope, understandably visceral, but my method of conveying what I felt came out horribly oversimplified and heavily misleading. The film does not, in fact, suck in my opinion, but the experience of watching it was such that when questioned on my current state of mind, I gave a purely emotional response.

This did not lead to a positive dialogue afterwards. In fact, it led to an argument which didn't resolve itself for days. In true-to-self fashion, when Jessie responded to my emotional expulsion with frustration and disbelief, I
took it as a sign of invalidation and became defensive, leading me to lash out at my mate, who in turn became cold and isolating. Seeing this, I shut down emotionally realizing I had hurt someone I loved, and only then
was I able to say in clear terms how I truly felt about the film, at which point it became evident to all involved that there had been no conflict from the beginning, if only I could've said "this is why I didn't like it" instead of "this sucked."

Unfortunately, as I said above, I am a writer, not an orator. I almost never say what I want to say the first time I open my muzzle, and yet I'm expected consistently to be as good with my words in real-time as I am on the page, and when I fail to live up to the standards my written works have set for me, I confuse and upset those around me. I upset and confuse myself, as well, because often I won't have even been able to sort out what it is that I'm trying to say. I have only an emotion, and I don't understand it; I have no way of explaining it to other people yet, because I don't know what's caused it in myself.

This leads me to my next problem. Not only can I not easily explain what's wrong when I first have to do so, I'm very defensive of my emotions. I've had too often the sense of being told I'm in the wrong for how I think when
I try to voice my specific views on a subject. Much of this, I'm sure, can be blamed on my ex, but that doesn't mean I should do it. Still, there's a part of me that feels that if I break down my dislikes or likes into specifics,
someone will pick them apart or tear them down, but if I present only "I liked it" or "I didn't like it," there's nothing to attack.

All of this, I'm sure, could be forgiven if I didn't feel the need to vent my spleen when I'm upset, as part of the process of working out why I'm upset and getting over things. I bring most of my problems down on my own head, by trying to talk about what bothers me and failing miserably to convey any sort of coherent meaning, leading those around me to look at me in bewilderment because I'm not normally the sort to just go off half-cocked. I have a reason for almost everything I say, but often until I've worked through whatever it is
that's on my mind, I'm incapable of conveying it in a meaningful fashion. 

It's a challenge to myself, sometimes, figuring out what actually bothers me. Often I have to make several iterations through my own head, thinking that one thing is the problem and finding out through analysis that that's not really what it is, but that something is still bothering me. Usually, once I know why I'm upset, I stop being upset about it. It's either the worst case of self-delusion or the best case of self-understanding. Either way, the pain goes away.

In the meantime, though, I inflict my particular brand of insanity on those around me, who either have the option of trying to respond to my neurosis and risk upsetting me further, or trying somehow to ignore me while I spin madly like an out-of-control whirligig until I sputter to a halt. In the meantime, I say the craziest things in an attempt to figure out what my true feelings on an issue are, and may irk any number of people in the process. I'm prone to saying things that I don't truly believe but that at the moment I say them are less painful to accept as true than admitting a mistake. In general, I'm a royal bitch.

This apparently makes me no different from any other woman.

Since I never speak of this sort of thing in the abstract, obviously there must be something that prompted all of this. Of course, there is. One member of my surrogate family made a comment in her LiveJournal about the death of story in modern gaming, which led to a long and involved argument between my mate and I about whether this was a valid statement, whether it was a true statement, and whether it was an important statement. This branched out into what constituted a good game, and ultimately whether or not my view of gaming was meaningful in the scope of the industry as a whole. As I could care less about any "view of the group as a whole" except for how it impacts my own ability to function and enjoy myself, the conversation degenerated rapidly, leading to my state of upset.

I talked with Galen about this lately, but it's something that weighs heavily on my mind. I suffer from a pair of emotional needs that make engaging in any heavy discussion difficult. On the one hand, I actively fear being manipulated or used by those around me. On the other, I fear being isolated or alienated from my friends and family. This leads me at once to try to condemn what the majority of my friends do—even if it's something I want or enjoy—and to do my own thing—and to follow the herd—even if I don't like what they're doing—in turns. I want to be recognized and accepted as part of my social group, but I hate feeling like I'm doing things because the other members of my group are doing them.

This means that in conversation, adding to all of the above, I often try to stake out my position and stick by it, but it means that I feel the incessant need for my view to be validated by those whose opinions are meaningful to me,
even when they don't understand me or when I say things in my muddled way. When I don't get what I need, I get even more frustrated because I feel like I'm being ignored or treated poorly by the people I'm supposed to be able to trust, and that just accelerates the descent into madness.

Some days, it's a wonder that I have any friends at all any more. That makes the ones who are willing to put up with my insanity that much more precious.

I think I finally had the talk with Anji that I needed to have. That we both needed to have. This happened with my friend Mitchell, and I should've seen the signs. People change. It's a fact of life. People grow and mature and evolve throughout their lives, and when you're around people a lot, you see how they change, and you change with them, and you learn over time how to adjust how you deal with those people to accomodate those changes. When you're around someone for a long time, you develop a lot of subtle specialties that key you into how that person feels and thinks, and those too change over time, but you see how they change. Then, if suddenly you're not around that person for a long time, you both keep changing, but you do so in isolation from each other, and those cues change, but you don't see it happening and so when you meet back up with that person, you don't account for the differences and suddenly there's tears and anger and misunderstandings and hurt. We both finally admitted that had happened, and I think we're the better for it.

Mind you, it doesn't explain what to do next, but it tells us where we are and how we got here, and what we'd at least like to see happen from here.

One odd side effect of this talk, however, is that it's left me in this really weird mood, and listening to Bush's "Alien" hasn't helped at all. I feel suffused with this very powerful violence or passion suffused into a fierce protectiveness. It's this sense that I care for someone so much that I would kill to protect that person, without hesitation or regret. Mixed into it is a guilt and fear of this capacity within myself, like I don't quite know or
understand how it got into my head but that I know it won't ever go away. Perhaps I've heavily overanalyzing it, but it's one of the few emotions in my head that, for whatever reason, gets heavily associated with "male," despite the fact that there's no creature so ferocious as a dam bear whose cubs are threatened.

I was catching myself up on my youngest sister's livejournal, and I found where she had referenced me as "den mother," which only adds to the sensation. Is that what I'm feeling? Does it really matter? I know that I get this way from time to time; it's one of the few holdovers from my previous life that I think actively belongs in my head, but I still don't really know where it fits.

I think if I totally understood how I felt, I'd be criminally insane. I think if anyone else ever totally understood how I felt, I'd be forced to kill zim for my own salvation's sake.

Thanksgiving is supposed to be the holiday on which we give thanks—hence its name—to that which makes our lives better. In that sense, I can get a heck of a lot more into Thanksgiving than I can into Christmas, or most any
other holiday. I like the idea of celebrating people's birthdays, as a sign of respect, but that's not really large-scale holiday fodder. The only other days I could see celebrating would be Labor Day and Independence Day, but the former implies "relaxing" which means no working on party-type things, and the latter I can't really dig, 'cause while I love the ideals upon which my nation were founded, I have a hard time appreciating the current incarnation of those visions. It's a damn sight better than most, to be sure, but I still think we could do a lot better. A grass-is-greener problem, maybe.

Right now, I have a lot for which to be thankful. ObTrannie, I'm thankful that the surgery is now well and truly behind me and that I can enjoy the results. I'm thankful to have such a loving and supporting mate who was willing to keep zir paws to zirself while I was still healing but who is now more than willing to put zir paws all over me. I'm thankful to still be employed after the economic meltdown. I'm thankful to still be in sufficient possession of my faculties as to not need to wear the Happy Coat more than once a week, so long as I take my pills like a good girl. I'm thankful to have family and friends with whom to spend the holidays. All in all, my life's pretty good
right now.

To be sure, there are a few dark clouds. I almost had to work last Friday, which would've sucked because it would've cut into my four-day weekend right down the middle. Fortunately, for some definition of fortunate, I had worked four hours a day over the weekend prior and managed to get everything that had to be done for today finished, so nobody complained when I said I would be back on Monday and not Friday. Most of upper management was out of the office as well, so nothing really happened on Friday anyway.

Thanksgiving itself went off remarkably well. A friend of mine from Virginia visited, and my sister Joanne made it all the way from Ohio for the four-day weekend. Tanya came down from Jersey, and Randy and her girlfriend put in an appearance on Thursday. Thanks to a slight communication goof, Tanya and I both bought turkeys, so we ended up with over thirty pounds of roast bird for the occasion, plus a ham, homemade stuffing, mashed potatoes, rolls and egg nog.

Here I must digress briefly and discuss egg nog. I have a great fondness for this concoction, and I have since my youth, but it is horribly unhealthy in its standard form, and with me being on a low-carb diet it's even worse for
me. However, having found a recipe online with which I can work, I did some tweaking and adjustments, and I devised an Atkins-compliant Egg Nog:

• 1 qt heavy cream
• 1 qt half-and-half
• 6 egg yolks
• 2 egg whites
• 1 C Splenda
• 1.25 C brandy
• 0.5 t nutmeg
• 0.5 t cinnamon

1. In a mixing bowl, combine yolks with Splenda, whip until thoroughly mixed.
2. Add brandy and half-and-half, whip until evenly mixed.
3. In a blender, combine egg whites with cream, blend on high until well-aerated.
4. Fold heavy cream mixture into half-and-half mixture, stir well
5. Blend in spices

The total "bad carb" count is thirty-two grams for over two quarts of egg nog, which is a hell of a lot less than most traditional varieties. There's carbs in the brandy, to be sure, but sugar alcohol doesn't get converted into fat, or so goes the theory, so it's "safe". Next I'm going to replace the half-and-half with more heavy cream, but that may make the result too thick, if such a thing is possible.

Anyway, the gathering itself I think went very well. I make a very poor hostess, in my opinion: I love to have people over, but I have no idea how to keep that many people entertained. I can barely keep myself and my mate
occupied most evenings, unless we've gotten a new video game, so having eight people just magnified the problem. I think most nights passed in front of Metroid Prime or Super Smash Brothers Melee, much to my embarrassment. Still, nobody complained too heavily about anything, so I hope people weren't too bored and just not telling me.

All in all, I think Thanksgiving went well. This means I have a year to plan for how to do it better.

---

The other major issue on my mind right now is housing. I decided some time ago that I wanted out of the rent trap, and I'm now in an area of the country in which I could easily see myself settling, at least until retirement, and
so I've started the long and arduous task of finding a house. Of course, with the economy in this slump, interest rates are down, and so everyone else is also looking for a house, and most of them have their finances directly in
order to buy the instant they find something.

So far, I've had four houses sniped out from under me. By that, I mean I see some place that looks nice, tell the realtor with whom I've been working that I'd like to schedule a viewing, and then find out that it's not available in
the time that it takes her to get something scheduled. The fifth place at which I wanted to look turned out to be in such poor shape that it didn't have active power or other utilities, so right now I'm kind of bummed. I know I
have some strict requirements, like a second full bathroom, but there can't be that many people looking at the same thing, can there?

At least my down payment is growing nicely. I got my vacation pay from my old job, very unexpectedly, which added to the stocks I sold very nicely and made up about $2500. December is a three-check month, so I'll be able to add another $700 to that in two weeks, and then my 401K from my old job will cash itself out soon, which should be another good chunk of change. Hopefully by the time the bank tells me I can get prequalified, I'll have enough dosh to pass their tests.

After that, I just have to find a house.

I told someone I had every intent of actually updating this over the weekend, then again sometime early in the week, and as usual I didn't do it, citing too many other things I had to do. The truth is that I spent most of the
weekend sitting in front of a video game console of one sort or another, and most of the rest agonizing over was to follow, but more on that in just a bit.

I quit my old job at ISI on Sunday. Yes, Sunday. Well, early Monday morning, about 01h00. Friday afternoon I had a job interview, and I filled out my employment forms before walking out the door. I originally told my new manager that I'd need a week for courtesy's sake, but then I realized that to give them a week would only be wasting my time and theirs. I hadn't done anything truly productive in the last five months, and it wasn't going to start after I'd told them I was leaving. Plus, it would've been more money spent on parking or train fares, more boring days wasted playing Freecell and wondering if the axe would fall. So, Sunday afternoon I resolved to clean out my desk and leave a farewell e-mail in my ex-manager's inbox. It was a crass thing to do, to be sure, and I'm not saying this sort of tactic is justified or polite, but under the circumstances I couldn't see any other way of handling things that wouldn't have felt like a waste of five days.

I'm taking a slight paycut at my new position, but it should represent an increase in real take-home pay, considering it's a shorter commute and I won't have to pay to park. The job's in Newtown, which apparently is one of the oldest settlements in the country, and obviously is one of the most expensive. It's going to be something of a shock, driving my little Escort clown car in and amongst BMWs and Mercedi. Mercedeses? Fancy cars made in countries whose names I can't pronounce, to be sure.

This alone promises to alleviate most of my stress. My schedule will still be offset from Jessie's by a few hours, and I'm not real happy about that, but I will have an extra hour in the morning that I can sleep, meaning I have an extra hour in the evening I can afford to stay awake with my mate, which over time means a lot more time together. Hopefully if Jessie can get either Saturday or Sunday free consistently, it'll mean a lot more
time we have, which will be extra-bonus.

I got the exit paperwork from my old job today, and I had that signed and returned in the afternoon post. With any luck, my paycheck Friday will have my vacation time on it already. If not, I should get that in a seperate
payout in a few weeks. I'll be closing my stock account over the next week or so; I'm only piddling around with the funds as things stand now. Add to that the 401k payout from my old job 'cause my new one doesn't have that
kind of program, and my income tax refund in February, and I should be more than set to do the house thing.

I know, I know. I should roll my 401k over into a Roth IRA and save those pre-tax dollars and all that investment. Truth be told, right now I'm more concerned with making the down payment on the house and getting that started so that I can afford to escape the rental trap and start building some equity. The fastest track of which I'm aware to financial security is to have a house purchased outright, which drops the biggest single portion of
monthly expenses. With Kelly living with us, and Jessie and I both working, I hope to have a place purchased and "our own" in ten years' time.

Of course, Life is what happens while you're making other plans, so I'm not going to demand this happen or damn the universe if it doesn't. I just think it's within our abilities if things continue to go as they currently are.

We've been getting out of debt, too, lately, which has been a shocking feeling unto itself. Before I was maybe squeaking out fifty a month ahead on my cards, but with Jessie working it's shot up to close to four or five hundred, which means my VISA should be clear in a year, and my MasterCard hopefully in three. Not having any external debts is a good feeling, and I want to get back to that point as quickly as possible.

The old cliché, "the first day of the rest of your life," feels so overused and trite, and yet that's pretty much how I feel right now.

Monday afternoon, I sent my boss an e-mail saying I wouldn't be present. My signature contains a cutesy little perl script, and unbeknownst to me, his mail filters pick up on the code and decide it's a virus and chucks the notice into his spam-box. I get no report of a bounce, but he doesn't know where I am, so he calls my apartment and gets no answer. He gets no answering machine either, which should have suggested he mis-dialed, but no matter, he gets escalates things to his boss, who has HR call me. They reach me on the second ring and ask me why I didn't tell anyone I didn't come into the office. I tell the HR representative about the e-mail, and she asks for a copy. I forward the message to her, headers and all, and she says it looks like I sent it when I said I did and the matter's between me and my manager, not between me and HR.

Thursday, I had a meeting with a different representative from HR, my manager, and his manager. I received a formal written warning stating that I had failed to follow the guidelines established and not properly notified my manager of an outage. During the course of the meeting, everything about which I had been having problems came to light. She said that the manager I had considered to be one of the best I'd ever had was in fact a very poor manager, that my unusual schedule had been his poor handling of my time, that the job for which I had been hired had not been moved to development but had in fact been disbanded for the foreseeable future and that my new job was to be at work on time and handle any tasks assigned to me as they arose.

She even went so far as to say that I had an excellent skillset for many other departments in the company. I've never had a manager try so hard to convince an employee to quit. Every grievance I raised was dismissed as
"a personal problem, not a company problem," and ultimately I had all the blame for everything dumped back on me, shy of the things my second-line was willing to take pride in doing.

My job duties now involve... sitting. I have to be here at 09h30 every day, have to sit for seven and a half hours waiting to see if someone gives me something to do, and then I can catch the train home. I feel like I'm in
high school again.

If the internet weren't filtered at work, I'd be jobsearching on company time. As it is, I play a lot of Freecell.

I hate coming to work now. I hate getting up in the morning, hate the ride into the office, hate the seven-and-a-half hour wait, hate the ride home and only start to feel normal again once I've entered the apartment. I was so out of it this morning that DEVO only made me feel worse and I started crying at a snippet of OMF-Battlegrounds music. I've been more and more prone to random fits of tears for no reason. I haven't been missing any rounds with my hormones, so I don't want to blame that. I'd rather not believe it's stress, but I can't figure out what else it is.

The worst part of this is that I feel like I should do my best to wait it out, at least until Jessie and I have our plans to move into a house finalized and settled next April. I don't want to do anything to jeopardize the chances of getting approved for a home loan. Meanwhile, we really do need both incomes to get ahead fast enough for either of us to feel like we're doing something positive and not just sitting around stagnating in debt, meaning this is something that will be around for a while.

My parents called on Saturday, and I told them about all of this, and they had their own bout of it when Dad was working and Mom was going to evening classes. They survived it, and I think I can, too, but it's still very
difficult. 

I only hope the day does come soon when we don't have to do this any more.

I have decided to become an Employee that Meets Expectations.

I am not a morning person. I have never been a morning person. I made it through high school by having a mother who was willing to wake me in time to get ready, and I was often late to my first class. After a while, my teachers just got used to it, because my grades were exemplary otherwise. In university, I didn't take any class before noon that I could avoid, and I often failed the ones I couldn't because I couldn't wake up in time for the pop quizzes. However, I endured it all, and I eventually wound up with a Master's of Science degree in Computer Science.

Now I am working for a company that expects me to adhere to an 09h30-18h00 schedule, with a one-hour lunch break.

To be scrupulously fair, they said I could start as early as 07h00 if I wanted, and leave two-and-a-half hours early as a result. However, they've insisted I take lunch off the clock, even though I don't eat lunch.

My mate works now. Jessie's finally got a job after over a year of being unemployed. I can't be happier with this fact, not because I want to see Jessie working but because we really do need two incomes to get out of debt
without drastically effecting our budget. The manager at that store is great. The work isn't hard. Jessie's already learned closing and is going to start on opening soon. There's been talk of it becoming a full-time position. It's almost perfect.

The only catch is that it's an afternoon job. 15h30-21h30 five days a week. 

Under my previous manager, and his boss, I came in late and left late. They didn't seem to care, and if anyone above them did I never heard about it. No-one ever said anything more to me about it more severe than, "if
anyone complaints, we'll have to ask you to stop." Nobody did, so I kept doing it. While I was in surgery, the company faced a re-organization, and I came back to a new manager. Same general department, but one with
one level of insulating management removed, shifted sidways on the org chart.

A lot transpired that I could discuss here, but it's really not important. The short form is that I don't trust my current manager, and there's not a lot I can say or do about him. The company's in a hiring freeze right now,
and out is the only direction anyone can move. I went five months without a formal assignment, and I only ever heard from my boss when things were going badly or when I had some five-minute patch to apply. It got so bad
that for a brief while, I was going home crying several nights in a row. I literally felt that the risk of being fired was outweighed by the fear that nothing would ever change.

The day I resolved to go talk with someone in HR, my manager pulled me into a meeting and we managed to clear a lot of the air between us. He asked me why my schedule had been so lax and I explained to him that in the past I'd had no reason other than nobody having a problem with it, and now I had a good excuse for being late. Between my commute and the amount of sleep I need to function, trying to work a Standard Schedule means I only get fleeting contact with my mate, and I told my boss that I'd go nuts trying to live in that sort of situation for long. He said he understood and that he'd present my case to upper management for me, indicating that it should
be all but a done deal. 

Last night he said to me as I was leaving that the meeting with upper management went poorly and that I had to stick to the Standard Schedule, at least for two months, while they see if I have what it takes to stick to the proper routine, like some sixth-grader.

I feel cheated, but I don't know what to do about it. If I try to go over my boss' head to deal with this, I'm only going to undo what little repair I've managed to make to our working relationship. If I do nothing, he's not going to push the issue for two months, but this is something I really do want to get fixed if at all possible. He himself doesn't show up until nearly 11h00, meaning I'd get more face-time if I came in later, but that fact has gone unnoticed by everyone in power.

About the only thing I can think of doing is simply focusing on being at work and making no effort beyond showing up on time and making it clear that my work ethic improves significantly when I'm not treated like a
child. Of course, this could get me fired for unproductivity, but right now I just don't care.

You were the one to invite me into the circle. On the strength of a dream, you looked past the facade and extended a hand to the person within. Brought into the firelight, I felt outclassed, a cub among greymuzzles being asked my opinions. You saw in me what I could only imagine, and you responded to it.

You showed me smoke. You let me play Twenty Questions with the Idiot Savant. You showed me the dot on the wall, and I showed you my pictures of the golem. You introduced me to the others, and through them I saw something about which I wanted to learn more. I wanted to be a part of the fire, a participant, not just an observer.

I never made the time to thank you, for what you offered me. I don't think you'd have done more than laugh about it if I had. I never made the time I should have made to get to know you better. I always said I wished I could, but I never did. I regret that now, but regrets can't change the past.

"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly." Fly with Raven, old friend.

In memoriam.

Has it really been almost a month since I last updated? According to the dates, it has. I won't say that the diary's become a chore, but many times I've had the urge to update it, only to say "I'll get to it soon enough and I'll just post it all at once," with the inevitable effect that I've forgotten a large part of what I wanted to address in the realm of all things new and interesting.

Jessie got a LiveJournal account last night, or early this morning depending on the context. Having run my diary now, in fits and spurts to be sure, for over two years without the need for any special software or such, I look at
such tools with a dubious eye. Perhaps it's elitist, but I wonder what it is about LiveJournal and other tools of the sort that make it so much better than a set of pages.

Of course, there's an obvious answer to this, but for me it's not a positive one: the community attitude. I'll give an example, because I know that seems highly questionable. One of my family has a LiveJournal. She says it's easier to update her diary that way. I suppose, whatever, if it works. I know I just got done saying "I don't see it," and I guess what I should say instead is "I don't see it for me." If others benefit from it, fine. She does, actually; she adds stuff on a fairly regular basis. However, there's a drawback: most of what she says about anything really important is vague and deliberately obscure. I can't always tell to whom she's referring when she says things, and sometimes whole events will be reduced to statements like, "went to visit people" or the like, and a lot of detail that would make understanding what she's trying to discuss will be pixellated and self-censored.

She's actually made mention, at one point, about how she wishes she could be more open about things like that, but she can't lock her LiveJournal to "friends only," because some of the people she wants to have see what's going on her life don't have LiveJournals, and apparently the locking mechanism that LiveJournal uses allows only other LiveJournal members to read entries. This is, in fact, the only reason Jessie got the account in the first place: to get on her Friends list and make it easier to see what's going on with her.

When ICQ first shat itself onto the internet, everyone around me became instant and early adopters. "You can see who's currently online!" That's all well and good for people whose access is spotty, but it did absolutely nothing for me. If I was online, I was reading my email and sitting on IRC somewhere. If I wasn't answering my mail or sitting on IRC, I wasn't available. I don't get online without keeping one of those channels open. Thus, it really didn't give me any added benefit. The code was unstable, and a lot of people I knew had problems with it crashing their computers. Yet, they all clung to it and stuck with it, citing it as this brilliant advance for which I had absolutely no use.

Now, I've gotten myself involved in a GBA development team; Jessie got involved as a musician and then I heard that they needed coders, so I volunteered to pick up ARM and Thumb assembler to add to my list of languages, and at this rate it looks like I'll be taking over the memory manager. The hitch, of course—as if by this minirant you couldn't have guessed—is that the development team meets weekly, by how? ICQ. Well, AIM specifically.
"It's really advanced; I mean, you can set up these group-chats where everyone involved can see each other talking, just like an IRC server!" Excuse me? Why couldn't we use IRC? "Well, we all already had AIM
accounts." I don't, and I run an IRC server. You all have IRC clients, too, do you not? "Well, yes, but you can get an AIM account!"

I will, at this point, grant that I am not an early adopter of much in the way of technology, unless the benefit is blindingly obvious from the word "go". This has happened, I think, twice: once when my primary development language switched from C to PERL for work (I do mostly large-scale textfile manipulations and database interactions), and again when I saw the disk space savings that OGGs would give me over MP3s on my hard drive for the same sound quality. Other than that, I tend to lag behind the curve simply because what I have works, and I'm happier using what I know for as long as it serves my needs.

Now, though, I feel as if I'm being dragged into things not because they actually benefit me, but strictly because the early adopters have succeeded in driving the market in those directions. I have no need of a LiveJournal. I have no need of AIM. Yet, it seems that others around me are expecting me to pick up these things not for my own sake but for theirs, and the price of not doing so is just unpleasant enough to make things frustrating.
They're things that, on my own, I would have no interest or need of doing, but that because everyone else has I feel left out of the loop.

It shouldn't bother me as much as it does, but there's a part of my brain that craves companionship and approval, and things like this always make me feel awkward, for reasons that seem "silly" when stated explicitly. I want to be an active part of my circle of friends, but my friends are doing things that I wouldn't normally choose to do and, it seems, hoping that I'll do them too or at least altering their behaviors because they know I'm not doing them. This leaves me with the unpleasant choice of doing things I don't want to do because I want to be part of my peer group, or not being part of my peer group and standing by my principles. It's a no-win situation on my
end, because any choice is going to leave me feeling uncomfortable. 

So much of my life feels like it's like this sometimes; I should be used to it by now.

---

For a few days, I had made a change to one of the links pages off of my site. I had done it in frustration, and looking at it last night I realized I shouldn't have, but at the moment I did it, it seemed like the least painful
option.

I have a knot of emotion about Lurene that I can't explain except to try to pick loose threads from it and point to the threads and say that they're all part of the whole, but the whole itself remains frighteningly tangled. I still very much care about her and feel that she is my sister, but about six months after she got to college, it seemed like she became someone I didn't know, or didn't want to know. It feels like she's entered this little bubble of unreality vastly different from what I'm experiencing in my own life, or even what I experienced in university, and much of how she leads her life now seems less like the person I came to love in the years I saw her grow from a child
to a mature-for-her-age teenager and more like a caricature.

I can't even say that there's any one behavior pattern that sets me off and says that she's changed, but everything all sums to the viewpoint. Her headfirst leap into "lesbian subculture," from reading "On Our Backs" to using "dykey" as a positive adjective; her habit of punctuating her speech with meows and other "cute-kitty" actions;
her views of Objectivism that seem so skewed from my own; even her advocacy for OpenBSD and seeming hero-worship of figures like Theo de Raadt; all feel to me less like actions of a person and more like actions of a character in a poorly-written novel. She's stopped feeling "real" to me, and in that she makes me very nervous.

We tried to share a room at Anthrocon. At the time, we all thought it was a good idea. Things very quickly went sour, and Jessie and I ended up leaving the hotel to stay at our apartment for every night past the first. Shortly
after that, Lurene cleaned out her account on my server. I don't know how long it was between the end of the con and the purge, but when I found it I just tarballed the remainder and deleted her account. It felt like saying goodbye. 

The most painful part of this is just how much I still do care about her, and thus how hard it is for me to see what she's become and reconcile it with my views of her from our shared past.

When I was in my first relationship, I grew apart from a lot of my old friends. Six years can change people a lot, and in the times between when I met Rod and when I finally had the courage to leave him, both I and my old
peer groups had evolved. When I went back to them, we all tried to act as if we were the same people we had been before, and we all hurt each other very badly in the process. One of them told me my new mate wasn't welcome in his apartment, and I stopped speaking with him for quite a while at that point. Then when we started to reconcile from that, world events blew up in everyone's faces, and my rather unorthodox response led to a whole new round of hurt feelings that isolated us from each other again.

It's like we keep trying to interact with each other as if the intervening years had never happened, and we keep running into discrepancies between who we were and who we are, and learning to reconcile those takes time. Now I just have to figure out how to do that with my youngest sister, if I can.

Has it really been over a month since I last updated this? I keep telling myself that I'm not going to spend so much time away from the diary, 'cause when I do I end up with a batallion of things that I want to discuss, and I inevitably end up forgetting something that I considered utterly vital at one point. However, if I spend all day updating my diary, nothing ever happens that's worth noting. It's a classic problem—the polling problem, actually—in computer science, but that doesn't matter.

Anyway, the first thing of import that happened in the last five weeks was Anthrocon, which went far better than
I feared it would. Being on staff, I think, helped immensely. I even got the chance to help lead two panels with the guest of honor, Lisanne Norman. When the programming director of the con handed me the books and said "Go
read these," I was initially dubious, and the first book took a while to get its sea legs under it, but after that I've found them well worth what I spent on them. Ms. Norman managed most of the interviews herself, but she
said she was glad to have had my help through some of the rougher bits. 

In fact, the only thing that didn't go so well at AC was the room arrangement. The people with whom we were staying brought someone into the room that neither Jessie nor I knew while we were in the shower and then just sat there looking surprised when Jessie and I got miffed at them for not warning us we had company or, better yet, waiting until we were dressed to invite a stranger into the room. Then, they invited a fifth person—another person we didn't know—to sleep in the floor of the room without asking us first. True, their names were on the room and ours weren't, but there's this little niggling thing called common courtesy or so I thought. In the end, we left a check for half the room rate, expressed our disappointment and drove home for Saturday night. We didn't sleep there but one night, so in reality I probably shouldn't have paid more than fifty dollars, but I wanted to meet our "hosts" more than halfway.

They cashed the check and haven't tried to contact me about reimbursing me the extra, so I can only guess they're happy with how things happened.

That one minor scuffle aside, though, the rest of the event was quite fun, even if I did spend most of it running around looking for people and helping out in the Con Ops room. Next year, we're getting our own room and I'm going to try to get the days of the con as vacation so I'm not having to drive to work in the middle of it.

The weekend after that, of course, was the Bash, and that went far better than expected. This year's host and Jessie and I had had some personality scuffles leading up to the event, most of which were successfully resolved
when we had the chance to talk face to face about things. I gave a talk on all the things that nobody had warned me would happen as I transitioned, which went very well even if it did almost not happen thanks to my anxiety
problems—more on that in a bit. The Monday after the Bash is typically a sight-seeing trip, on which I'm almost never interested in going and Jessie only is insofar as it's a chance to socialize with people who're going. We
thought there'd be other people at the hotel with whom we wanted to spend time, but they either all went to Mt. Rainier, or else they went on an impromptu day trip to downtown Seattle, so we spent the day watching television in our hotel room and bitching about the lack of other Bashers. We did get a few rounds of Mao that night, though, which is always a good thing. 

I know I've mentioned my anxiety issues before, and they're no less present now than they were, but the big situations that I feared would lead to my social paralysis seem to be behind me for the moment. I'm not saying I don't want to treat them, but right now I'm going to need to go see my doctor to get any medication to help or find a therapist willing to treat it that will take my insurance. Unfortunately, I have no vacation days left right now,
thanks to the Bash and my surgery from earlier, so now my options are take a day off without pay, try to get my boss to footniblick things to not make me lose any more time, or wait until I get some more vacation time. It's a
crappy set of options, but thanks to how things spilled out earlier I really don't have a better one.

Right now, I'm in a holding action with my own psychoses. Part of me knows I'm copping out and that if I really needed the time off of work I could use my non-vested annual leave, but another part of me is trying to save that for a real emergency since I have no sick time at all remaining until January of next year and there aren't any situations I'm facing in the immediate future that will necessitate me being medicated. I hope.