September 5, 2002

Two weeks, and two days have gone by now.

I still don't know how I should feel right now. The place that I have always called home no longer feels like home, and it's like I'm out of place and lost.

But I know it will just take time to get used to being back here in New York at school...what's unfortunate is that I hate that I will eventually "get used to it."

I don't want to get used to it anymore than I want to go to Modern Math class on Tuesday nights from 6 to 9....I don't want to get used to it, I just want to get it over with.

So I go to class, go through the motions, do the whole "school" thing, and hopefully the time will pass unnoticed. That sounds bad I guess, especially because I try and live in the moment...but where I am from, and the life I enjoy here, it's hollow. It's hollow compared to the life I lived in Ireland, and although I love my friends here, it is not the same.

I can even disregard all of that shit even and I still wouldn't want to stay. The politics are so fucked up right now in terms of both our domestic and foriegn policies. And I see a future of censorship and restrictions...and what is worse, the Amercan public will go right along with it in the name of "National Security." I don't want to be a part of a country that has so much power and yet does so little good with the power it has.

But this is getting off the point, the point is I feel empty and out of place. To think I went an entire year never feeling that way at all.....

I love you ScApE.....

Today, I found my cat batting a Five-lined skink about the front hall. How the skink got in the house I don't know. This is a strictly indoor cat. I rescued the lizard while the cat ate the thrashing blue tail. Yummy ...probably to be followed by puking after midnight.

Mr. Half-a-Tail skink is now in my neighbor (the nature lady)'s lizard/frog abode with a warming rock and a bowl full of meal worms.

What is it with my family? We had a gerbil with a "degloving injury" to its tail, requiring an amputation. My son just adopted a 3 legged kitten (car accident). The attack cat is himself has a sideways knee cap on one hind leg and an ankle full of hardware on the other. They have all done well. The gerbil had many, many babies before retiring from her active social life. The kitten is as frisky as any kitten I've ever know. Even though my lizard tail eating attack cat is orthopedically challenged and can't jump due to his multiple hind leg injuries he seems happy. Hope Mr. Half-a-Tail Skink fares as well. Mr. H-a-T Skink should be OK if he doesn't get an infection from the wounds.

Here is a totally ripped off but appropriate to the day joke
(from http://www.gmee.com/jokes/diet.html):

"A Feline Diet:
Most diets fail because we are still thinking and eating like people. For those us who have never had any success dieting. Well now there is the new Miracle Cat Diet! This diet will also work on humans!

Except for cats that eat like people -- such as getting lots of table scraps -- most cats are long and lean (or tiny and petite). the Cat Miracle Diet will help you achieve the same lean, svelte figure. Just follow this diet for one week and you'll find that you not only look and feel better, but you will have a whole new outlook on what constitutes food. Good Luck!

Breakfast: Open can of expensive gourmet cat food. Any flavor as long as it cost more the .75 per can -- and place 1/4 cup on your plate. Eat 1 bite of food; look around room disdainfully. Knock the rest on the floor. Stare at the wall for awhile before stalking off into the other room. Lunch: Four blades of grass and one lizard tail. Throw it back up on the cleanest carpet in your house.

Dinner: Catch a moth and play with it until it is almost dead. Eat one wing. Leave the rest to die.

Bedtime snack: Steal one green bean from your spouse's or partner's plate. Bat it around the floor until it goes under the refrigerator. Steal one small piece of chicken and eat half of it. Leave the other half on the sofa. Throw out the remaining gourmet cat food from the can you opened this morning. "

Oh yeah, my kitty loves to eat moths too and sniffs distainfully at tuna and liver.

During class today I was looking at my home computer with VNC. I was chatting on AIM. But then something happened today, I typed to a friend,

we should hang out some time btw, life is too dull with out annoying you.

This is a line that I sent my friend. Yes it is bad English. Yes it is odd. The reason it struck me as perfect though is that it is an interesting line that explains something I never was able to say before. Many of my friends and myself are a little odd, we say weird things, and we annoy each other. We are geeks, the socially awkward, and the undatables. We are not the lying boozing jerks that you see in the bar, but rather the guys who you believe stare at their computers all night.

Each of my friends are special though, and they are cool in their own way, but all of them grate on my nerves. I hate, and love each one of them at some point. They can play NES games on our old system with me at one point and then chant "Microsoft loves you" the next. We can be hanging out watching Cheers, and then in the next minute, they will say, "Get out of here there is a girl coming". One of them will tell me how five friends are coming into town to pick him up and how I can’t come even though he will be the only guy.

Perhaps the perfect example is when we were watching the Super Bowl, between the Patriots and the Rams. One of my friends turns to me and says in front of the whole room of us "You’re probably rooting for the Rams you loser." I stormed out of that room fast and didn’t talk to him for a couple months.

What is my point though? These are my friends, these are my buddies that I hang out with, and every time we piss each other off, we somehow grow stronger. Time after time we will find some way to annoy each other, and that just shows our connection, that we know each other's strengths and weaknesses, the good along with the bad.

The one-year anniversary is coming up fast.

It's been 11 months - the exact time it took for me to wait for my new car.
My friend, whom have asked me to provide him with information on places to go in Ottawa is going to be married sometime soon. He wanted the information so that he can plan his whole itinery with his girl. I told him of the places in the Gatineaus - places I've been with her. Luskville, on top of the rock (where our most passionate kiss took place) is where he will be doing the deed.

It could have been us.

Alas, I cannot hope for a better past. Too busy for nostalgia. But I still leaf through the maps of the Gatineaus online at work, recalling all that we've done in those times, those past six years.

My heart fills with warmth, knowing that I can achieve these types of memories with another person.

I appreciate my life.

In a job interview, you can sometimes tell when the people interviewing you aren't really interested in you and are just marking time and asking polite questions until the interview can end.

Maybe you said or did something early on, and you can see the doors closing behind their eyes. Maybe they were never truly interested in you as a potential employee -- they had their choice picked out a long time ago, but company or organizational rules dictate that they have to bring in a certain number of warm bodies for interviews before they can officially make their decision.

You never had a chance with them, not really. You never had a real shot at this job -- a job which pays less than your old one, but which requires more technical skills. A job which, after six months of unemployment, you really, really need for the psychological fortification of knowing that you're a productive member of society. But most of all, you need it for the income.

Boy, do you need it for the income.

And you knew the moment you stepped in the door, dressed in your interview best, that you didn't have a chance.

I had an interview like that earlier this week. And it's been bugging me ever since, because there's this nagging little voice in the back of my head telling me that maybe, just maybe, if I'd known the right thing to say or the right way to smile, I could have made them interested in me.

Last week, though, I had what I thought was a very good interview for a job at the research division of a local hospital. They'd gotten something over 100 applicants, and they'd brought four people in for in-person interviews. After I talked to the various researchers I'd be working with, they told me they'd make their decision by late this week. I felt really good about my chances.

Today, while I was out, my roommate intercepted a phone call for me at 1:30 p.m. from the hospital's HR person. She left her name and number, but no message.

I found out she'd called a little after 4 p.m., and promptly rang her back. The HR department secretary coldly informed me she'd already left for the day, and wouldn't be back 'til Monday. And she'd left me no messages. I left a message with the other lady who coordinated interviewing me, but she hasn't called, either.

Ack. Now I'm going to be on tenterhooks for the next three days.

So I’m at work. I’m doing the thing I’m getting paid to do, giving books to kids on scholarships and generating tons of paperwork. I’m minding my own business, the business of 12 scholarship programs and hundreds of strangers, when this cop comes and sits on the fuzzy shelf next to our desk. He’s sitting about 4 feet from me as I’m doing the filing. He’s not taking up much space as far as my eyes are concerned, but he’s occupying major real estate in my brain, somewhere around the intersection of Uncomfortable Plaza and Nervous Twitch Lane. I’m trying to file casually, walk casually, evict him from the Hotel Panic when I realize that, like most cops, he has a gun.

Guns make me very uncomfortable. I think probably that’s because my only experience with them was when I got shot. Well, that and they’re dangerous. Anyway, I’m glancing at this cop who’s occupying space in my brain, and I’m trying to be nonchalant about it because one of the last things I want is police attention, and I notice something about the gun.

The gun has a smiley face on the butt.

A little round smiley sticker, yellow in color, standard design, approximately an inch in diameter, slightly faded along horizontal lines. A smiley face sticker on the gun.

I’m scared of someone who has a smiley sticker on his gun.

I start thinking about that. How messed up is it to be scared of someone who has a smiley on his gun? How messed up is it for this guy to have a smiley on his gun? He’s carrying a deadly weapon with a happy face on it. Is this a kinder, gentler use of force, or is it some kind of Kubrickesque commentary? Is he trying to say that he’s a nice cop who wouldn’t shoot anyone, or that he loves the gun?

Obviously, the thing to do here would be to ask him what’s up with the smiley on his gun, but I’m sure he’s going to shoot me right there in the university bookstore if I so much as look at him wrong, so I keep my mouth shut and continue filing.

Is there anyone scared of bookstore clerks the way I’m scared of cops?