October 23, 2001

Grr, I have to move desks today. I go from my cozy little corner that I've had all year, tucked away here where nobody can really see me, being able to node in peace for the most part, to a desk in the middle of our area, right next to my manager. Bah. Luckily he's not a strict manager, he's a very cool manager in fact, but he still wouldn't appreciate me being on here all day.

But, ah well, I'm only full time for another three months, less than that now in fact. Part time will be good, going back to uni will not. :o/

I need to talk to our project leader about going on leave, because I have to do a subject over the summer semester at uni... but he scares me. Hehe, well, not really, he's a fairly nice guy, but yeh, I'm not good at just going up and talking to people, especially authority figures. I'll do it eventually, but till then I'll procrastinate like mad.

I went for dinner last night, La Porchetta, with Anna, Jay, Janine and Nikki, and had an amazing time. Firstly, of course, because I got to spend time with Anna, which is always amazing, but also because I just feel comfortable with all these people, more comfortable than I do with most of my other friends. As soon as we got there, I got into a silly mood, and started making cheesy jokes about everything, which started off getting just strange looks and mutters of 'you're an idiot', but as everybody else got more comfortable and more silly themselves, we all started doing it.

The best part, though, is how comfortable Anna is getting with her and I acting like a couple in public; when we first got together, she didn't want it to be too obvious (we didn't even tell anybody for a few weeks), but now she's happy with us sitting close at the tables and generally doing what couples do. She told me she wanted to kiss me goodbye when we left the restaurant, and of course I had considered it, but didn't know if she'd be comfortable with it, in front of everybody else. (She would've just gone ahead and done it, except for the fact that I'm a lot taller than her,and it would've been a lot of trouble to just give me a peck on the lips) But next time, for sure, hehe.

Halloween is coming up next week, Anna wants to do something; we'll dress up all in black, and she's going to paint my nails black. (Which I've stopped biting, by the way, a week and a half now. One day at a time.) We decided we'd probably go rollerskating/blading, since we were planning to do that on Sunday until her car got smashed up. So, that should be fun indeed.

OK, I've got work to do. Damn life and it's obligations. (blatant nodevertising)

back to Dreams of October 22, 2001 | on to October 25, 2001

Today was a good day. At first it was bad. I was planning on meeting a good friend of mine after her class. I really wanted to see her as I have really intense feeling on the subject.

However, I was a block away when the last students left the building, so I missed her. I spent the next half hour walking around her campus looking for her, but to no avail.

I had a project to work on in the early afternoon. To make a long story short, I really cut my thumb with my pocket knife. The cut ran from the top of my thumb, over the top, and runs down to the base of my fingernail. The knife went all the way to the bone. Ironically, it seemed as if my day got better when I was at the hospital. I was reading Psalm 38 verse 5. This seemed to fit me perfect.

"My wounds are foul and fastening because of my foolishness." - David

Picking up a friend at the Greyhound bus station yesterday. I am reminded, again, of the remarkable qualities of their vinyl seats. They manage to be both hot, sticky and uncomfortable in the summer and yet cold, hard and painful in the winter. Add them to the general sense of hopelessness that pervades most of these places and it's a pretty miserable place to spend an hour. The soda machines have all been vandalized and are out of use (The sign says "BROKE") and the snack machine is down to fried pork rinds and two packs of Juicy Fruit gum. No thanks.

I have spent time in these stopover places as both passenger and pickup. In one sense restless to get going, in the other, eager to grab someone and leave. The place never seems to contain happy people, even those who are picking up family. Relief seems to be the reaction of those of us who pick up passengers.

You made it, get your stuff-let's go.

My buddy waited till we were four blocks away to ask me to stop and go to a gas station so he could use the restroom. We both knew better than to even try it at the Greyhound station.

I really would like to write something up about The Chocolate War, since that book defined a lot of my personality. I read it nearly 15 years ago, but I still remember just about everything about the book. The writeup there is rather clinical, it lacks any sort of personal knowledge. A mere sentence to describe one of the most banned books in the US.

My involvement with it is so personal, long ago I had to read in aloud in class (along with the rest of the sixth grade reading class). The book involves frequent mentions of masturbation, nothing particularly "sexy" ... But, we're talking sixth graders who will laugh at fart jokes, so having the teacher in the room when you have to say "How many times do you jack off?" (which is nearly a direct quote from the book) was cause for an uproar.

It pissed me off. I wanted to read the book, pretty badly. I knew it was a serious book. And I understood that the main character would have said something, he would have told the rest of the class to shut up, and would have finished reading the book. I wasn't the main character. I wasn't a conformist, either, but I wasn't the rugged individual who would stand up for what he believed in.

To this day, I know I'm not that same rugged individual. I would like to be, since I admire them. The closest I can get is that I will state my beliefs rather openly, but I won't defend them should they be challenged.

I did go out and buy Beyond the Chocolate War with my own money, which was rather impressive for a sixth grader.

I think that since Ronald Reagan had such a good day today, I had one as well. I think I've made a break through here on campus. After signing myself up for counseling last Tuesday, I've made a breakthrough today. I think I've been feeling shitty because I don't eat during the day. I'm so busy during the day that I forget to eat, I'm just doing other things, in class, in library, in computer lab, in my room on my computer (still printer-less), noding, doing something that takes my mind off of my large, yet empty stomach.

More breakthroughs tomorrow, stay tuned.

I'm used to the white padded walls by now. I'm worried it will get too cold here though. "My friend" says I can move into a different room, but you know he wants it for himself. You know he does. At least I know.

I was eating a burrito a minute ago. Actually three. Bean and Cheese. It cost me 75 cents. It makes me happy to think of living so cheaply. Much in the same way it makes me unhappy when I get a statement on my mutual funds. Oh yes, I have those.

Eating makes me happy. It's not just that I like burritos. I do. It's the act of eating. The tasting and the chewing. So different from sex, but I enjoy them so. It's because I'm alive, you see. That's what life does, it conditions itself to enjoy that which continues itself.

What I can't figure out is why anything would want to go from no life to life. Evolution makes a lot of sense for me. I'm all for survival of the fitest. Sex feels good, so does eating. It's so we will live. But how did we go from nothing to a one celled organism even? That I don't get. What advatage does life have over non-life?

I'm not crazy, you know. I just think about things a lot. The only evil thought is that there are evil thoughts. That's what I belive. So you have hang-ups and you don't like to even think of some things. That's not my problem. You think you know so much. About my padded walls and the concrete floors. You know shit.

This amazing woman, who flashes me this incredible smile every day she stops by to pick up booze for her household, was wearing a shirt with Krishnamurti's face screen printed on it. I commented on it....it was a bit different. She beamed, dug in her purse for her card, slid it on the counter to me and said, "I'm Linda. I've been waiting to talk to you, Kir. Call me anytime, I swear." A radio host for WCEU, and spiritual healer....said so on her card. It wasn't until she left, that I realized I was NOT wearing my nametag.....

After Biketoberfest....which ROCKED! even though Bramer had to miss it because he had jobs lined up this weekend, I headed over to Kash's yesterday to check up on her.( Thor and I really wanted to hijack a hog.) I had had an amazingly greaseless breakfast at the old diner I used to work at, (the one where my boss would have a pound of Mary Jane on the cutting table every morning? Yeah, that one....) with Thor and our new little friend, Troy. I was, of course! a good girl the night before when the boys crashed at my house. Even my mom dug having company, and I realized with the two boys sleeping in the guest room, that I have 3 times more guy friends than girls. And I really do mean friends....even if that little Virgo was gorgeous stretched over the wicker swing....and really wanted me to sit next to him in my backless biker attire....I was a little on guard when Thor leaned over to me the night before and said, "If you gave any mind to molesting Troy tonight, I KNOW he wouldn't have a problem with it.....". Jesusmaryandjoseph, Thor, I really have my hands full. So what if he's hot? And smart? And an Intermedia graduate?.....he reminds me too much of Chip, my brother, and did I mention I had my hands full.....this is the first test, isn't it?

ANYWAY, I headed over to Kash's....she had called me the night before....she opens the door and hands the phone to me, "You'll never guess who's on the other line."
"Hello?"
"Kirstin, hey! It's Jacob."
"Oh my god, kid."
Kash: "He's freaking out. This makes three anxiety attacks in a month....help me talk him into coming down."
"You're really thinking of coming down this time?"
"Yeah, I'm really not doing too good. I'm comin'."
"Come down, come down, come down. Now."
There's a little validation for you. A cool guy like Jakey, packin' it in and taking a chance? Kash and I have that boy covered, no problem. He's coming for a stay the end of this week, but if he wants to, he can stay longer( ie move) and we'll help him get set up as best we can. If we could only get some of the others to come. Kevin's down the first of next year, and Lord Bear' coming for like four or five er more? days right after Thanksgiving. Shit's getting crazy as far south as Baltimore,(Jake got beat the hell up) and we want our loved ones outta there pronto. I ain't too worried about the techies, they do a fine job of taking care of themselves, but if they want a rest or break, (You know who you are), we have tons of room. ( 106 acres sound a little tight?). And don't worry about your alcohol supplements....I knew there was a reason I took a job at a liquor store. Finally, those fuckin' city-tough-guys are believing us. Now, I may even have to talk Garryn into coming back down, 'cause he's in Long Island and I don't care much for that. I don't know, maybe it's an opportunity to prove we do fuckin' care? 'specially those people we've scrounged change with, gotten shitfaced with, and slept on the floor with.
"Jake, you're a good guy. We've all been friends for a while. Get your ass down here and we'll dust you off." Tough kid. If he's losin' his shit, I can only imagine what everyone else is up to. Now, I need to run up there, smack Crow harder than whatever the smack is smackin' him with, throw him in the trunk....nab Grrm and the dogs( who's actually doing all right these days...I got an email 4 days ago.)....you see my dilemma? And it goes on and on...

Popping those letters in the mail tomorrow. I promise, no anthrax, and start planning on having a lot more people around this joint. Hey, they may be as dumb as a bag of rocks, and Jake may be a bitch....but I'd rather keep them on my team, thanks so much.

Ha....Talking to Scott tonight, he mentioned, "You are so hard to find! I called your house, the cellie's off, I called your work even! Jeez, woman."
"Sweetheart, you are discovering what so many people already know....I'm hard to pin down."
I guess I was easier to find five years ago? Well then, I guess you'll just have to tuck me in closer, huh, Bramer? No, I will NEVER show him this site. Not that he ever picked up the keyboard again after we broke up all those years ago....but let's just say my last four years will leak out slowly on their own. Oh, yeah, dropped Letting My Cat Outta the Bag tonight, so there's why Windi's had her knickers so in a wad. He's comin' down this weekend, and I'm psyched......he told me we have some plans to make. Yay N'awlins! Little does he know we have to drive to Clearwater again, 'cause I have to see Chip and grab that damn bed again....Did I mention he passed the Onya test on her birthday? You know, when one of your best looking female friends struts around her apartment only partially clothed.....and your guy looks her ONLY in the eye. Yeah, well...he passed. Whooah!

The first day in a new world. Yesterday, my mom was just sick, and going in for some corrective surgery. Now, she's just living on borrowed time.

You see, she was diagnosed a scant few weeks ago with colo-rectal cancer, and everyone had good hopes on the treatment of it. They opened her up yesterday, only to discover they had to remove a kidney, major parts of her colon, and she's got cancer on her tailbone, and liver.

I cried like a blubbering idiot. I cried at the cruel fate of the world. I cried that I am 5000 miles away. I cried the hardest when I realized that there was nothing that I could do.

So here I am, trying to theraputically node in a feeble attempt to get on with life. Of course, this entry will probably get eaten by the node eating script.

Life is really messed up sometimes

I had big plans for that money. I was going to save it up, teach violin lessons to little kids, maybe buy a digital camcorder or a new camera. Maybe some darkroom equipment.

I'm doing the addition in my head right now: maybe $125 for the new locks. The textbook was probably $30, then the bag which I had just bought, $25. The cellphone cost $150 when I bought it, and then lots of miscellaneous things too. My wallet, maybe $5 inside. My bus pass. My agenda. A bunch of pens, an empty Mentos wrapper. A handful of Ricola, a pad, a CD that I burned two nights ago for a project. My brother's old calculator, $25.

$360 of my birthday money, all because I was stupid and lazy and I didn't put my fucking purse in my gym locker.

Ms. Long says that someone was probably hiding in the showers or something, then when we went to class took all the bags and walked away. Not all of them... some of us. The feeling when it skips that house, skips that house, then comes after you.

I don't have any idea who took it. I will probably never get it back, not the cute bag with the peace patch on it, not the note that I got from Mrs. Seiderman when I was accepted onto the Academic Bowl team.

A deck of hotel cards I bought in Philadelphia last August.

It's stupid, I'm stupid. Someone out there has my pretty bag and I don't know what they're doing with it. Sitting at home, dumping it out on a coffee table, shaking the last empty Mentos wrapper out of the bottom? Looking through my wallet, reading the notes inside, maybe reading my agenda and knowing that I had a violin lesson today and there's a bio test on Friday.

Who does this? Was it a student? An adult, sneaking into the girls locker room of a high school for a few hundred dollars? Someone who really needs the money?

Someone with children, someone alone. Someone rich but having fun. Someone poor. Tall or short or scared or anything. Anyone did this. Anger, for me, for them, for someone who didn't help them before, for my parents, for being so self righteous.

"Emily, sit up. Everyone can see in the car."

"I don't care."

"They can tell you're crying. Jackie's in the van next to us, she's looking at you."

"That's too bad."

Work is slow. I'm not complaining too loudly, I knew it was going to be that way today. I have a concert to go to tonite, Tori Amos. The same one I bitched about a while back because Ticketmaster couldn't be bothered to make their web site decent enough for a customer doing their best to get those 9th row seats that the site selected actually be able to purchase them before the 5 minutes was up, leaving me with 33rd row instead.

I'm still excited about going, but I knew it meant that the rest of the day would take a long, long time. And it has, though not as bad as some other days. I spent the morning trying to get some logic written up for the next release, trying to decipher really obfuscated documenation to figure out the message header for sending from one box to another. I still don't know how it fucking works, I'll just have to dig in deeper to find out more, and hope I can get it figured out before I'm actually supposed to write the code for it. Oh, all the meanwhile listening to the mix cd I made for masukomi to verify that it burned ok, and it did. Lunch time was spent working on a artistic little booklet to go with it. My art attempts may be pathetic, but I figured the personal touch might mean something - and what better way to improve than to practice? This afternoon I really should spend some time reviewing other logic for the call processing section. (the guts of the dispatch-type calls for the iDEN system, and it's all in my hands :)

Thanksgiving plans get more and more interesting. My mother invited Chelle and I for the holiday, and fortunately, none of the rest of her family will be there. (They're not bad people, just, well... let's say that a family gathering on their side sometimes feels like a bad episode of Roseanne) Just her and the guy she's engaged to. Well, I had run the idea of inviting my friend K along, which she liked. So then K suggested E, and I checked with my mom again, she was ok, and then had to check with E, who had to figure out her plans and such. Now that S is hanging around us more (and moving in with K soon), we've decided to invite her along too - after all, being from New Zealand, it's not like it's a big holiday for her. My mom is ok with it, just need to ask her... looks like five of us making the trek to her place. My mom's poor fiance is going to be severly outnumbered :)

As far as E2... I've been back in the m-noder washroom again today, after a reminder that I'm apparently given little latitude in the cheddarbox. So best to disappear again for a while, and especially avoid any emotional complaints - those never make things better. And besides, it's nice not having to worry about botching my /msgs.

I did some nodeshell collecting, and a little bit of random node surfing, trying to bring a few more of Webster's nodes into the nodescape.

Today is probably the first good day I've had for a little while. I had tons of time to relax today. I've been completely out of ideas for nodes for a while. I really love making nodes about things I like, but I've got nothing right now. A ton of my earlier nodes were bands and albums that weren't already on E2.

I'm doing better in school right now than ever before. That's a good thing. My interest in music is more than ever now too.

I have nothing out of the ordinary to write about in here, and no one cares much about this stuff, so I think I'll stop dayloging for at least a week. But I need to get to level two before i lose my mind. I need to vote!