Idaho died.
Category: Landmarks
Apparently I define myself by bloggers
Coincidentally, my farewell lunch was scheduled for the same day as Emma’s, and my last day would have been the same too–except I’m not leaving after all. I’m going to keep working here part-time, Mondays and Fridays, with class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m counting on that break in the middle of the week forcing me to get some work done.
This wasn’t a decision lightly reached. I talked about it to three people I respect a great deal–Sumana, Maria, and (the other) Emma (from GSP 2001)–and finally came around to staying after a lot of thought. This isn’t my dream job, but it’s a good job. My next best option would be a possible opening at The Great Escape, a really neat comic / music store on Bardstown Road, but a) it’d pay less, b) I’d have to have a driver’s license and c) it wouldn’t look nearly as good on my resumé.
So I’m going to get to know the people here a little better, and I’m going to pay my crap-programming dues, and I’ll be able to breathe a little easier financially. I’m going to be putting a big chunk of my pay into a savings account every month, and that account is going to be reserved for exactly one thing–Amtrak, California, Comic Con, Stephen Maria Lisa Will (Ian?) Sumana Leonard Graham next summer. You gotta believe!
In which I worry and ramble
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?
It’s the Talk To a Terrifyingly Quick Standup Comic in California on the Phone Game!
- Premise: You have been contacted by email and phone, so as to double the super top secretness of a responsibility with which you have been entrusted. After such secretness is secured, your contact will call you back later and you’ll end up talking for like an hour.
- Imagine the conversation as a cooperative race, in which the object is not to reach a finish line, but rather to match pace with the other conversant.
- For the purposes of this scenario, you have an old bicycle, the one from when you lived in Georgetown. It has pink flowers on it, and one squeaky training wheel that likes to make you turn right.
- Meanwhile, Sumana has a street-illegal Ferrari.
- Sumana is a kindly driver, and will cruise along comfortably halfway up the gear train, in eighth. You will attempt to pedal along at speeds matching her train (er, car) of thought; if you were on a real bicycle and not a metaphorical one, this would cause your tires to sublimate.
- Now–and this is important–try to make it look easy.
- Seriously, I did get to talk to one of my role bloggers on the cellular telephone last night. Layla cut us off a couple of times (I think she was cranky, and maybe jealous), but it was still pretty great, and my face hurt from smiling afterwards.
- I think I’m going to have to make a California road trip next summer after all, and hit San Francisco and LA and of course San Diego. Sumana recommended Amtrak, which could totally be a week’s worth of party. Stephen, Maria, you guys still up for Comic Con?
- Oh, right, the topic and such.
Thanks for playing the Talk To a Terrifyingly Quick Standup Comic in California on the Phone Game!
We spent all of yesterday moving the entire world from Richmond and my old apartment into the new apartment with Maria. My forearms are killing me, and our living room is choked with stuff, but my room actually looks fairly good and my bookshelf is full.
I literally did move everything I own this time; I no longer have any possessions in Richmond, and only a few boxes in storage. There was a big ordeal with getting a moving truck (notice: when U-Haul says “your reservation is confirmed,” what they actually mean is “eat a fuck, shitbrains”), but Ian’s roommate’s family had one that was bigger than what they needed and they were kind enough to help.
So it all worked out eventually, but the process took so long that it was 2030 hrs by the time Mom could head back home. Needless to say, it was also a little late for me to go home and pick up the half-day of work I’d wanted. That’s why I’m in the office alone on a Saturday, putting together my presentation for the CEO ‘n’ company on Monday morning. The fact that I’m in the office is in turn the only reason I can post this, since we have no interweb at home for the moment.
Why isn’t there some source of free crappy broadcast interweb, like there is with TV? Ad-supported. Big networks. Come on, it would be so convenient for people who just moved in.
Also, why not make cell phone rings work like my cell phone’s alarm? It starts off by vibrating, then gradually makes its beeping louder and louder until you wake up. It obviously isn’t hard to do, and that would give you a little notice so you could go for the phone before it just jumped in at the same annoying volume immediately. I hate cell phones. I love my cell phone.
Probably no more activity until Monday at the soonest (although of course I make all my posts from work now anyway).
So the design isn’t quite done yet, but here it is: NFD now bruises its news with some of the neatest software I’ve ever had the chance to yell at. The archive navigation is a lot different now, but one thing I’m actually pretty proud of is that all the old permalinks will still work–if I’ve done it right, there’s a little script that will redirect you right to the newly bruised entry.
I actually started working on this over a week ago, and once I’d started using NB to post I couldn’t go back (which is why there hasn’t been anything on the old NFD page for so long). Switching my journal software was like walking into a dealership with a wheelbarrow and driving out with a red Ferrari, so I’ve been writing, but in here instead. You can read like two weeks of the stuff starting on June 27 (although I think this next one is my favorite yet).
The front-page design has been trickier, since I wanted to finally have something on this site that was valid XHTML and built entirely with CSS. I think it’s pretty close now, but the design still looks better in IE than Netscape. I also tried to tidy all the old code in the conversion, but I’m sure I missed something; if you find broken links or funny-looking entries, let me know.
So enjoy the calendar, the searchability, the randomnymity and the category madness; pretty soon there should be something else up top, either a random quote or a Today in History feature. Expect entries to be rather more frequent but correspondingly shorter, as now updating isn’t such an ordeal that I feel I have to save up my material. Expect also at least two more of the secret projects I’ll be developing this summer, involving obsessions and imperatives.
I really do hope you like the new NFD (BC). And I’d love to stay and type more, but today is Blood Drive Day and I’ve gotta go faint.
Landmark
Just moments ago, I, Brendan Adkins, closed my first issue! And promptly got busted for blogging at work. I think I’m a real professional now.
6.16.03 1731 hrs: I’m standing here at the pseudo-bus stop nearest my job (1944 Goldsmith) and whoop, the bus came. On cue.
6.16.03 1745 hrs and Bus 21 has hit the end of its route. The kindly tired driver is taking a three-minute cigarette break and then telling me I should take 23, not 17, to get home.
6.16.03 1759 hrs at the stop in front of Taco Bell. This is rapidly degenerating into the kind of minute-by-minute narratives I would write about every six months in grade school, when I got a diary for my birthday or Christmas and get inspired, sometimes for a whole day.
As pulling out the notepad has failed to magically produce a bus this time, I can talk about my situation a bit. I ride the bus now, or I say I do, since it’s my first day doing it and I’m not even home yet. As someone who’s depended on the kindness of strangers for transportation his whole life, though, I kind of like it. The buses are clean and, so far, uncrowded, and they have a neat acronym. TARC. It makes me want to rename this thing TARCblog (Ken gets that).
6.16.03 1808 hrs and I’m on 17. What the hell, it got here first.
So this is how I go from place to place now, here, being someone who lives on Bardstown Road. I’ve plunged into this and I’m glad, because I LIKE it. I am infatuated with Louisville. I want to understand the Highlands. I want to grok TARC.
6.16.03 1919 hrs: home, showered, redressed, finally posting again. And here’s this: I MADE IT THROUGH MY FIRST DAY.
Talk about the last week point five (a million years) soon enough. For now I have to get back out and do things, here, in this bright green shoppy place where I am. I have a boss and a cubicle. I have a kitchen stuffed with food. I have the interweb on cable. I can walk to the ice cream store and the comic book store and the CD store, and I have friends and a phone and summer.
I am unjustifiably lighthearted. I can’t believe how good it is to have this, my big new happy perfectly ordinary life.
This is how I graduate: the only Centre commencement in living memory on which it has rained, in alphabetical order yet in the middle of the pack, ending up shivering in the library halfway to the auditorium, which was in neither the sunny nor rainy day plans. Our baccalaureate speaker was a fervent liberal and our keynote speaker a stolid conservative; hackles were raised at each and both. I tried to dry the rain off my glasses and found that polyester robes don’t soak up much.
My apartment has been messily slaughtered, furniture shoved and stolen and hidden mold revealed. One more time I’m the last one to move out. The walls are bare, and most of what I own is in piles on the floor. I’ll never live with Jon or Amanda or David again.
I said goodbye and soon to many, many people, and went to my uncle’s house to see Ken, Jon and Emily one more time and to be astounded by the generosity of my family. I fell asleep sitting up before we came back here. I’m going to pack all night and leave in the morning, which I was explicitly told not to do.
Those of you who know me from my first Governor’s Scholars Program will be gratified to know, I hope, that I brought an umbrella onstage with me at the ceremony. As we were leaving, I ended up facing the wrong way and didn’t notice I was supposed to be moving for several long seconds after the rest of my row had gone. I jumped and cursed onstage (at my own commencement) and scrambled out. I was so flustered I forgot the umbrella.
On my way out to meet my family I stood for a few minutes on the stage in Weisiger. That was the first place I found myself on the first day of GSP, here at Centre; I stood in the dark, having come in out of the rain, and wrote about quiet stages on a chalkboard. Later that night, Milton Reigelman would point it out in his opening convo speech, and I would feel a strange mix of shame and pride at having something I’d written read.
This is how I graduate: I am bone-deep nothing-left weary, and I have miles to go before I sleep. I know my time here is done and I am satisfied with it, and I’m ready and willing and glad to go. I’m hurt and hollow, childish and scared. I want desperately to put off the deep wrench I’m feeling, because it means I’m really leaving home.
Can’t post this yet because our interweb is dead, but let it here be recorded that today I got a full-time summer internship. It pays eight bucks and it’s working with databases, and in no part of that can I see anything bad for my resume. Plus I’ll get used to the (possible) monotony and stress of having a real job, which will only make me more grateful to be back in school in the fall.
Also today, I got the CS department’s “outstanding senior” award. What?