October 18, 2001

Man why do I do this shit to myself? Talk about a disgusting fucking afternoon! The pressure at work just keeps building up, and I add shit to myself by making contact with my ex-wife. WTF? What the hell was I thinking? No this time when I stick those hot rocks up my ass, it's going to feel different. As I type this, I see dexmon's node Kwitcherbitchin comin' down the pipe, so I will. Suffice it to say, I'm going to drink a lot tonight. All nodes by me from here on out today should probably be nuked as the drunken invective they will be.

You have been warned.

I can't take the initiative.

95% of men can take initiative just fine, I should be able to ask a girl out, even for coffee as friends. But no, I find myself writing some sort of evolved version of those high school notes people used to pass to avoid the awkwardness of overt speech. There's a girl at my college, she likes all the same things I do. I want to be her friend; I don't know the expectations or assumptions girls make in this environment. Is it still either all or nothing? I believe she is mature enough to not assume anything, I just want to honestly vocalize my intentions, saying that I want to be friends, with no allusion to it evolving into anything beyond that. I never would want her to think I am only her friend because I expect something from her.

It shouldn't have to be clouded with any sort of relationship politics or games. I like her because she likes John William Waterhouse and John Woo movies. I want to be her friend because she is the most intelligent person I've met on campus. I want to know her because she is what I want to be. I don't know how to become that person that she can turn to, any time. I have a painfully underdeveloped mastery of subtlety. I always try too hard. I'd say I've got nothing to lose but I have so much to lose, a potentially marvelous friend.

Today was a rather interesting day, mainly because of some of the boys in my life.

I woke up late because I didn't have my philosophy class. I really hate that class so this was a good thing. I went to math and probably failed a quiz. Then I went to my philosophy discussion and got a B on my last paper. This made me happy. Well then off to linguistics where my professor said "Well, there's not much you can do with beavers," and then he started laughing and then the whole class started laughing. That guy is hilarious.

I got home and checked my email. I had three messages, which is more than I ever get at one time! One of them was from Jesse. I wrote him a letter last night briefly telling him about the dream I had about him yesterday. I said that it made me sad and I still cared. We officially had stopped talking, but I wrote him anyway. This is how it works with us. Well he wrote me back and it was actually nice. He said that he thought about me sometimes too and he might even dream about me but he doesn't know. Of course I wrote him back, telling him more. I don't want to miss him, he's the only one I've ever loved....

If you're really curious about the other two emails, one was telling me that I had debit credit so I could do laundry and the other was some forward. Oh well.

Then I called home, to tell my parents to give me more money, and I actually ended up talking to my brother for a while. He is 15 and we never really talked much when I lived at home, so I'm glad we can talk now that we can't fight over the computer, or the last granola bar, or who didn't leave the door open so the cat could (hopefully) run away. I miss him too. I love my brother.

I'm happy because my friends and I went grocery shopping last night at 11 and I bought 40 dollars worth of food just for me! It was a far walk and I didn't think I could walk back uphill with all those groceries, so we almost stole a grocery cart but decided to be good citizens. We were rewarded for our good behavior because some random people listening to Johnny Cash really loud drove by and offered to give us a ride. My faith in humanity has been partially restored.

I've been without an internet feed at our new home for three weeks, a lack in my life which was gloriously rectified yesterday, when the Telstra linesman attended to hook up our moved ADSL service. Needless to say, several administrative and technical fsck-ups had been in the pipeline, quietly and patiently awaiting their opportunity to wreak havoc on our longing for bandwidth. A happy resolution, however, by early afternoon the pipe had been opened and the internet once again was gushing into our home and lives.

Having a connection at work, when combined with my pretty straight-laced work ethic, meant that my participation in E2 has been limited to all-too-brief snatches of peeking at /msgs and the odd 5 minute voting session. It's been odd, having an enforced time-out from this place. Having dinner with a good noder friend a couple of weeks ago in Sydney I was amazed to hear of Professor Pi's research on noder stats, and the proposed Honour Roll. As an information addict and a deep supporter of E2, that I was so out of touch came as a shock.

Anyways, ADSL yesterday meant a really cool night last night. I rushed to finish my work and was home by 18:30, and after giving Gemma's spunky new white iBook a little techsports, settled into the sofa, a maltese dog on either side of my laptop, and hit E2. Was most chuffed to recieve some welcome back messages (being a complete leonine attention seeker), and also to see the long-absent --OutpostMir-- back online.

#everything was like a warm bath last night. I love those folks. Was stoked to see a picture of break's new classic drum machine (which I had ignorantly presumed to be a synth slap!), to hear from flamingweasel that the Weekend Sound Track project is now set-complete, to learn that Kenata is actually not a washed up 46 year old divorcee, and that graceness loves caramel. Yeah, all trivia, but being a (small) part of these cool folk's lives is just so rewarding to me. I wish more nodists would come to #everything...

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In other news, the new house is still really enjoyable, and we're settling in pretty well. The kitchen is totally sorted, except that Gemma is demanding a section of the big pantry for her stuff (hehe) and wants me to completely reorganise all of the contents of all of the cupboards (not much to ask really...). The office is okay, but still stinking of the horrible stuff in the wood from my over-zealous use of the hole saw last weekend. The dogs are loving the back garden, 'cause it's nice and grassy and there are lots of interesting places to hide.

Work has been okay, but the lack of resources is starting to really get to me. We lack much of the most basic office and IT equipment (I work with a non-profit now), and while this was an interesting challenge in resourcefulness for the first couple of months, it's getting to be a drag now. The project challenges are pretty fulfilling though. Basically I'm here to re-engineer every process and procedure from the ground up. As Visio is my witness, I do solemnly swear to shake shit up before the next adventure...

Thoughts go out to the innocent victims on all sides of the troubles in Afghanistan. Our government committed troops yesterday.

I'm starting to realize that I must be one of the most unremarkable people on the planet. I get along with everybody. If I were at all interesting, I'd piss somebody off. I'd motivate somebody to call me an asshole. But no. I get along with everybody fine. I've been this way since I dropped out of high school.

You'd think that this would be a blessing, but no. Once again, I've found myself in the Sweden situation.

I make friends with one girl last semester (actually had the hots for her for a while), then completely separately made friends with another girl this semester. Totally unrelated as far as I knew. Then, wham. It turns out that they're mortal enemies as the result of an annoying Melrose Place-style love-triangle. Or something like that.

The end result? I get to sit around with them (at different times), and listen to two really cool people trash each other.

This is not the first time this has happened, and I doubt it'll be the last.

My day so far, well I woke up at 5:00 for some strange reason and I was really cold, so I decided to make a hot water bottle to warm me up, I started to listen to VAST (Visual Audio Sensory Theatre) and fall back to sleep when I noticed a cold wet feeling on my side, apparently the water bottle had been leaking and it made a huge wet spot. I get up and change my clothes and cover the wet spot with pillows, lucky I have a double size bed so I could just sleep on the side that I’m not usually on and avoid the wet spot.

I finally get up at around noon and before breakfast I go on my computer to start burning some cd’s while I’m having breakfast, * poeau * is my attempt of typing up the sound that my screen made when it blew up! Normally this wouldn’t be seen as a huge problem, but I was already using a spare monitor because my original monitor had blown up and that was under warranty. However the company I brought it off is being difficult and I’m in a legal battle with them to repair my original monitor. So, I go searching for places where I can borrow or hire a monitor, I find a place near me and I decide that since I’ll be in the area I can get my new drivers licence and see if the music shop near there has any albums of ‘The Sharp’.

I go to VICROADS (the place where you get licences) and find out that they’re computers are down and nothing can be done, great! I’ve just driven all the way here for nothing, I hope I have better luck at JB-HI (the music store).

I enter JB-HI and check out the selection there, look at some new car stereo’s with cd players since my cd player is always giving me the shits, I can’t seem to find any ‘The Sharp’ albums in their shelves, I go ask at the desk, they say they don’t have any in stock but will look it up on the computer to see if they can order some in, they check, everything is marked red, that is, all their stuff has been deleted and it is unable to be ordered. Great! I’m having such a great day, they tell me my only chance of finding their music is looking around at second hand stores so they give me the details of the local ‘Dixons’ second hand music store.

I drive off to go pick up a monitor to hire, the only good news I’ve heard so far, this place has monitors to sell as well, I might have to go back there to buy one since my monitors are basically unrepairable.

I go home and call up the local Dixons store, no, they don’t have any ‘The Sharp’ music but perhaps I can try their other branches. I call a branch that is near my bf’s work. Yes!! They have all their albums!! They have put them on hold for me for a week!!! Wow one other spurt of good news.

Finally I’m back home and I can go online to do my usual online stuff, I can’t wait for tonight, I’ll get to be held by my BigFlufyPupy all night and as a bonus I also get to see a movie. :0)

If I kept with the patten of my day logs thus far, this one would be a rant about everything that happened during the day, all the things unresolved that I could not figure out how to deal with, the whole mess of it. Today is different.

As a result of the people I have met since I started noding and the things they have written, I feel at ease. Sure, there was some stress today, quite a bit at times, but it seems all worked out now. Previously, I might have been sitting in front of the computer at this hour, stressed, tense and tired, not wanting to deal with another day of the same, drinking just to fall asleep. I am still sitting in front of my computer, tired, but not drinking, and with much less stress. Things are not perfect, but now I can look at them in a much more rational way, and with the help of others.

At first, it seemed like all the time I spent on everything when I should have been studying was just wasted. Another stupid web site to waste time at - like slashdot, only worse. Now I realize how good everything has been for me and how much it has helped.

Thank you. All of you.

Laryngitis- that's how my day started. The inability to speak and to make sounds louder than a whisper. There are worse problems I know, but I have a job at a store where I am supposed to be talking to people all day. All Day.

So I called in sick and went to see a doctor. He asked me a series of questions which I answered with a shaken "no" Fever? Headache? Spitting up red junk? Rash? No, etc.

So I will make little note cards to take with me to work tomorrow: Hello, can I help you?-I lost my voice, is there something I can get for you?-No, we don't have a restroom in this store. If I had a laminating machine here I could make a bunch of these. I am starting to think this not be that bad of a deal after all.

In some relationships, the people basically take one day at a time. They enjoy every moment they share, mostly, and find balance. Maybe one of them is waiting for everything to end, some question that cannot be answered or some facet of the union to falter and spark a domino effect. Sometimes, one or both hangs in there just to see if things get better, if they have been bad for a while. I am usually the one who tries to enjoy myself in the relationship but also tries to not expect too much. In every facet of a relationship, there is the capacity to want too much or to not give enough.

When you are on the periphery of another relationship, it is hard not to take sides, not to favor one person over another, depending on which person you met first. The people on the periphery of my longest lasting relationship were mostly his friends, yet they mostly sided with me when the end came. The same thing happened with my last ex; people who knew him for a long time sided with me. While I take these to be good omens that I was a good SO, I tender that with caution, as gossip and updates and opinions readily fly and not many people will stay out of it once they've been hit up for an opinion on the subject. I am also the type who craves opinions and advice, to reinforce that I made the right choice when I ended it. I have ended every relationship I have been in.

A girl I was friends with briefly in college married her sweetheart from her home town; I was with her when they first started hanging out. Another girl I was closer with did the same thing; they both worked with me as tutors in the English department. The former split up after 5 years of marriage, the latter got married last year and have been together about 7 years before getting married. We were all with our own guys all through college together, and the outcomes are all different.

As KC and I drifted apart, her husband and I became friends. We both pondered over the changes in KC over the years and after 2 children, and I guess we both saw that it would all end one day. I knew this when I was moving here 5 years ago and gave them our waterbed (my ex's and mine). I knew this when I heard she had gotten pregnant the first and second time.

It was hard not to feel like some traitor because I talked to him in confidence and not her. This feeling grows when I realize that our mutual friend Evonne knows the news now too. The female friends of KC's will rally her, and I will not. Maybe because like Jake, I mourned the changes in KC and was angry at her for shutting me out. I could see Jake's point but not hers. Also, I have a brother who had his own issues with his ex wife and because I look up to my brother, I often sided with him. He is blood, and she was never close to me anyway.

However, it is still hard to accept. Jake will likely come to visit me and Evonne and I will likely not talk about KC at all, unless I ask. KC will further slip into shadows, and there will be one less person from my memory that I can conjure up.

Suzy, Bryan, Ken, Carson and I went out for dinner at Juan's last night, then watched Fight Club and had a few beers over at Ken's. It's odd when we all get together, because it's so rare and infrequent. Ribbons of conversation get tangled up across the table. Sometimes it's comforting just to have a handful of bodies in a room staring at a TV screen, and sometimes it's apparent that if we hadn't all met on E2, well, we would never have met. Oklahoma, Mississippi, Maryland, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, Virginia. Suzy, Bryan, and Ken have been here the least amount of time and they seem to have filled up their lives quite nicely, while Carson and I seem to be always falling behind in meeting people. We are all looking forward to the gathering next weekend. We are all looking to the future with hope and longing.

I think I am going to go for it, keep seeing Angela. She told her husband the complete truth about why I stopped seeing her last week - that I realized how limited our relationship would always be, and I'd have to share her heart with others. That she was crazy about me and was devastated. That she had really fallen for me; and I for her. He was very responsive and supportive and said that he would be open to having me move in with them, if things ever developed to that point! And he was fine with everything, and very serious, she said. And that has made all the difference in the world to me.

That floored me, that she was so open with him, and that he was so accepting and supporting of her falling in love with me. She has been honest with me from day one. She has in turn been honest, more honest than ever, with her girlfriend and her husband than ever. She spent part of last weekend crying and her girlfriend knew why.

This is a whole new world. I have a feeling that every bisexual has to decide what they are going to do about monogamy or polyamory at some point early on. I have been trying not to decide, cause it is so difficult either way. If I stay monogamous, and demand that from my partners, I am cutting off either women or men, something that feels really awful to me. How could I live without a woman in my life in this way? That sounds terrible. And men - it's just not the same. I don't want to go without a man either. And if I accept polyamory for myself, than I can't very well demand monogamy from my partners, now can I? (And get away with it, that's the main thing.)

And I have such huge mega-trust issues, how I can move beyond the basic insecurity of "does she really love me?" is a really gigantic question. This feels like the beginning of a real relationship with her, the first new one since I've integrated. I had nothing in common at all with my first girlfriend, and didn't see anything beyond the present there. Everything was new, and it was all about the newness of being with a woman. I look in Angela's eyes and - I just keep seeing the future.

I feel better for thinking this through to this point, and I'm going to just sit with it for a few days before I make a final decision about seeing her or not, at her suggestion. It is true, I am impulsive, and it always feels like the right thing to do at the moment. So I need to just sit with it for a bit. I am going away this weekend to a burn, not with her, and I'll be away from home and responsibilities. maybe that will help me with perspective.

I have something to say.

I REALLY love E2.

I was just sitting here reading over some daylogs to see what everyone had been doing (yes, and votedumping, but READING too!), and it came to me how so many people here are so similar to me. They even talk like me, write like me, have friends that do stupid things like my friends. Overall they're depressed a little more than I am, but shit happens to them more than to me, apparently, and for the most part they seem to bounce back. I see the way these people write, the way we all have "blah" days and still node about it, the way we, as a group that has an average intelligence apparently much higher than that of the general population, tend to make sense of the world in such radically different ways that nevertheless boil down to a similar understanding. I love you guys. Thanks for existing.

Another fun E2 thing. I've discovered that jdorje and I went to elementary school together. Holy crap. That's pretty unlikely, considering Winter Park Elementary wasn't that big and neither is the population of E2. He wrote a node on my old hometown (Wilmington, NC) and attracted my attention, and through /msgs we figured out we did indeed know and remember each other. Don't remember much except that I think we were in second grade together and I seem to remember we were both prizewinners in some poster contest (I won the grand prize and I think he was first runner up, with some other people) and had our picture in the local paper. Don't know much else about those years, but this is about the extent of my foggy memories. :)

Today I woke up at 3 PM and it was so nice. I am planning to spend some of today downloading the evil AOL 7.0 (shut up, y'all--I work there!) and working on the fourth annual calendar based on my novels. :) (I'm running out of scenes to portray, gah!) I might even read a book or clean something. Ho-hum.

Right now, I'm listining to Figure 8 by Elliot Smith and reading nodes. Nothing extremely out of the ordinary has happened in the past couple of days, but I want to daylog anyway. I'm getting steadily better at playing guitar. I am finding that I have the most fun playing in front of a group of people with someone who barly knows the lyrics singing off key. Mabye I should go to more parties?

I'm so close to getting to level two I can taste it. When I started here, I didn't think much of the XP system and didn't really fully understand it untill a couple of my early nodes got eaten. Now I can't wait to be able to vote. I'm going to try to make it to level two by next tuesday or wensday. This coming weekend will be a busy one; I'll node about it on monday.

I put your tape in, turn the volume up obscenely high, and roll the windows down. It's really too cold for this. Undaunted, I step out and jump onto the roof of the car. Jay’s words are ugly little white worms with sharp teeth and voracious appetites. They squirm inside of me, trying to eat their way out of my head.

Your voice blares from the speakers, ugly and desperate. It hums against my butt and dances in my spine. Wistful, ugly things are welling up inside me.

I grit my teeth, undo the dainty buckles on my heels, and chuck them in different directions. I hear one crash into a flowerpot. I'm glad the frost has already killed the nice green thing that once lived there. The duster comes off next and goes into the rosebushes. Then my cardigan is dangling from the radio antennae. Shivering, I lay down, pushing my body into the numbing metal, trying to drown myself in your voice's anguished crackles... trying to drown Jay’s unwelcome advice.

A single brown moth, disoriented and dizzy, skitters along the shaft of light illuminating my toes.

I am acutely aware of how alone she is.

A day

Its not that I was having a particularly bad day...that was part of the problem. There was really nothing particular about it. At least on a particularly bad day you know why you're angry and have a good reason for moping around. On a day with nothing notable about it, you just kind of mope about with no purpose - that's the worst moping there is. There was nothing special about this day. Hell it wasn't even a Monday or Tuesday - it was just a day that ended in a 'Y': a completely nameless day.

But the sun was shining and the sky was blue and the air was crisp and it was a beautiful 65 degree morning - even on a bad day(which this wasn't) I would have appreciated the weather.

It was about 9am and I had been up since 6pm. We got out of class at 4am, PT at 5, shower and breakfast brought the time to 7. I had been killing time watching TV and walking around outside. Nothing to do, nothing to do. Go to the store, go watch TV, nothing to do. Walk by the Post Office - no wait, it's open. It's never open when I walk by; it seems they base their hours around my sleep schedule, as random as it is.

Walk in the Post Office. 7900, 8000, 8100, 8104. Turn turn turn turn 39, turn turn turn 28, turn turn 9. Pry the stupid mailbox door open with my keys...why did I get stuck with a sticky door? Hey look, mail. Ooh, from Shauna.

I opened it outside, walking towards the store again to kill time, and read the single word sentence on the side of a yellow 3x5 index card. "Smile."

...I did.

Its Thursday.