Category: Angst

October 1, 2003 /

“Coleman said he remained worried about the ‘heavy-handedness’ of the lawsuits, which carried fines of up to $150,000 for each song shared from their hard drives. When asked whether the fines were excessive, Bainwol said they got consumers’ attention and established a deterrent. ‘Public floggings would get attention, too, but we don’t do that,’ Coleman responded.”

Well played, Senator Coleman. Well played.

Meanwhile, over at Music That Is Free And Also Fricking Rocks, Amanda informs me that Jon has put new songs up on his IUMA page. (I have to find this out from Amanda because someone else never updates his blog. But I digress.) And! They fricking rock! “Later” and particularly “Gun” remind me of the reformed-ELO-fan sound of 56 Kilobit Sentinel, and the lo-fi / high harmony contrast in “Letting Go” might be my favorite moment in a Jon song yet. Plus the outro rocks like Silverchair.

September 28, 2003 /

Audrey and Drew. It’s all their fault. If not for their meddling influences, I could have gone to the craft store with Maria and (Illinoisan entomologist) Annie and spent a mere $20 on new Microns. Ta da! The end!

Except the aforementioned two have talked lots about inking with metal-nib pens and brushes, respectively, and I saw some of that stuff at Michael’s and got all excited and WHOOPS there goes all the money I had next month.

I’m calling it an “investment.” That makes it okay to shave a little bit off the future-budget for, oh, as long as I’m alive.

Anyway, at least I’ll be trying new art stuff. Expect to see shaky new black-and-white things in the Chalkboard as I get my… ink-legs. I guess.

Now: Kruskal’s algorithm!

September 22, 2003 /

“Just imagine squeezing a monkey into a deflated balloon, and then inserting that balloon into another, much bigger balloon, and then filling the space between the two carcasses with strawberry jam. Even though you can’t see its shape anymore, there’s a monkey in there, and it still performs most of the normal monkey functions like picking up pencils and making fun of the teacher; it just has to do so through a load of blubber. That is what I sit by in class.”

Rejoice, ye people, for AUDREY HAS A BLOG!

September 15, 2003 /

There’s a bit of rough going, as you might have noticed, as I try to install my journal software on the new server. It’ll be back, honest idjit. Meanwhile, things I’ve been meaning to talk about:

Sumana has not only been published in Salon, she’s also turned 22 (Sumana is younger than me. I can’t stand it) and written what is possibly the definitive blog entry on spam.
Lisa is back at school, next to Flora, having fun without me and taking my single favorite picture of a door ever.
My roommate Maria is taking about eighteen exams today, over there in dag blasted medical school. Wish her luck! I’m not really worried about her, since (as I recently discovered) she has a photographic memory. Never try to win an argument with someone who has a photographic memory. Or rather, try as you will, but get ready to lose a lot.
The new work-school-rest-school-work schedule is working out very well–it’s a lot of effort, but I’m never as tired as I was this summer, partly because the breakup in my week keeps me refreshed and life interesting. I’m also doing a lot at work. Putting up dummy pages for my journal, for instance. No, I’m not doing anything actually work-related.

That’s most of it. With any luck, the journal will be back this week, but I wouldn’t wager any real estate on it. Meanwhile, if I have any updates of lesser importance, I’ll post in the (again) spanking new forums. Take care. Wear a jacket.

This actually took place about 24 hours ago.

August 30, 2003 /

2212 hrs and Emma Hayes has tricked me into showing up at a party at her house, filled with cool hip extremely professional twentysomethings I don’t know. Emma Hayes herself is predictably not here, so I’ve vaguely procured a 7-Up from her roommate Dawn. I am lucky to have met Dawn once in a parking lot, and to have her mercifully remember me.

Here I am sitting on the front porch of a freshly warmed house, trying to look writerly with my pocket Moleskine. Perhaps, I think, this will politely make it less obvious that I have no idea what I’m doing.

Adventure!

Sumana is not actually the big sister I never had, and would probably be a little weirded out if I claimed she was, but she DID display a frighteningly big sisterish sixth sense in calling about half an hour after I wrote that down. This was wonderful; it gave me a good excuse to laugh for twenty minutes, recharged my ability to talk to humans, and gave evidence that I have a life outside of showing up at parties filled with people I don’t know.

Emma finally did show up at what, 2320 hrs? And it was great to see her, and I got to know some of the people at the party. By the time I hitched home (around 0300) I had actually had a good time. None of this outweighs the first panicky hour I spent retreating into introversion, though, really. There’s a reason for the fact that, in college, I only went to parties in my own apartment.

August 29, 2003 /

Things I Have Made Now:

Chocolate chip cookies. From scratch.
Sweet and sour chicken, finally, which turned out unfairly good.
Real waffles! With our waffle maker!

Actually, all my attempts at cooking so far have turned out really well; I’m just waiting for something horrible to happen, like the time Audrey and I made noodles without boiling water. I guess I could also set the kitchen on fire, which won’t be hard if I keep forgetting to turn the oven off. Remind me to turn the oven off!

August 26, 2003 /

Ten minutes until my very first graduate class, and I only managed to find the classroom by coming into this second-floor computer lab and searching the U of L site. My very first class (Artificial Intelligence) is, as it turns out, in the basement.

Omens. Mmm.

August 22, 2003 /

Bleagh. The facility from which Deep Fried, my current and past webhost, rented its space is filing for bankruptcy. The admin at Deep Fried is going to shut down his hosting operations (and it’s lucky I started trying to track him down, or I probably wouldn’t have known about this until my site suddenly disappeared). I’ve got everything copied over to PHPWebHosting now, but the domain transfer is looking to be a pain in th’ butt. I’m being forced to save local copies of all my journal entries, since I have no idea when xorph.com will suddenly start pointing somewhere new. When it does I’ll be unable to get to the old files, which means no copying. This is dumb. At least I managed to get out of going through the default, register.com.

Anyway, yeah, expect continued hesitations in content. I don’t much like the situation, but hopefully this will allow me to stave off another site move for a few years (at which point I will have a million dollars, and will buy my own damn dedicated server).

August 18, 2003 /

I hated “Too Little Too Late” for a long time. After he picked up the album at Sam Goody in what, September?, Jon left it in his stereo most days; since it doubled as an alarm clock, we’d both wake up to that raucous opening riff every morning, puffy and tired and grouchy. I really resented that guitar, and even though I loved the album, I had to skip the first track to listen to it.

That was the Autumn of Sleepovers, when everyone in our little accidental clique ended up in bed together in some kind of combination. It was all very innocent, except when it wasn’t. And it was all very intimate, and a little desperate, in ways we couldn’t see at the time.

We never had any intention of becoming as self-involved as we did, but that’s the way structures function in small, overeducated, post-adolescent Western society. It tightened until it snapped, and after that we were both more free and more disparate.

I never had any intention of going through an experience like that, either, but I did. I learned a lot when I didn’t think I had much left to learn. I came out the other side still angsty, of course, but I’d grown; I’d also learned how to express myself in cartoons and small sentences. A year later I started this journal, in the small warm shelter of a dorm room shared with Jon and Amanda and sometimes Ken, and the urge to write had some of its origin in the fall of 2000.

I listened to Maroon for the first time in months today, which maybe wasn’t the wisest idea. I’m still at the office, and it’s all very vivid now: nostalgia, unfulfillment and ache.

Amanda, Tara, Lauren, Alison, Rachel, Darren, Ken, and most of all Jon: Forgive me this outburst. I miss you. Come back.

In which I worry and ramble

August 13, 2003 /

My boss just officially pitched me the do-you-want-to-keep-working-during-school question, and I’m torn. Working in a cube isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot more comfortable whatever retail or counter job I’d otherwise have this fall. Plus it looks a lot better to have months of programming experience already on your resume, even if it’s just as a part-timer.

On the other hand, I don’t like this job. The people are great and the environment is comfortable, but the work is boring, boring, boring and I’m only even halfway talented at it. At least if I (hypothetically) work at a bookstore I’ll be busy and competent, even if I’ll also be on my feet all day.

I just want to DO stuff. I want to be minting clean lean extreme code, not patching bugs in this enormous ugly proprietary system. It makes me tired and I look for distractions, and with broadband right here at my workstation, that’s not good for my productivity. That in turn makes me feel guilty about my work ethic, which makes me more stressed, which makes me tired, lather and rinse and so forth.

I know that I’ll probably start out bug-fixing wherever I go, so I should probably get used to it. The other thing, though, is that I have no idea what my workload is going to be like in grad school; my boss would clearly prefer that I keep my job uninterrupted, just dropping down to part-time, but by the time I get to midterms that could very well kill me. I don’t like taking twelve hours out of my day now, and I don’t want to find out what it’d be like to do that with homework. Also, I’m REALLY tired of getting up at 0630. I want an evening shift.

(It occurs to me that I’m posting this from work, and there exists the possibility of a random IT guy picking it up on a sniffer and sending it back to my boss with a cocked eyebrow. Just in case: Hello, IT guy! Your sister was great!)

Forty-five google minutes later, I’ve got a list of ten book or comic stores I could bus to. I think I’m going to make a bunch of phone calls tonight. At least thinking about this got me to dust off my bum and actually start thinking about what I’ll be doing in the fall. Sometimes questions find answers.

There’s one other thing to consider, too: if I keep up my secret practice project, it shouldn’t be too long until I’m confident about writing publishable short fiction. I know the money’s not great, but it beats all my other options until they spit candy. I also know that chances are slim, and that everybody and her grad school duck tries to write short fiction, but I do have one little in: not everybody or her grad school duck knows Nancy Zafris.

At least I’m in process now, which I think is the important thing. I could live on just my student loans, but I’d rather not, and it’s nice to be able to buy a comic book once in a while. I just need to figure out how and how much I can work. Hey, old people, anybody want to tell me what to do?