Category: People

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 28, 2003 /

I didn’t write anything Wednesday, because Wednesday was Secret Project Day and I’m sorry but you’re just not cleared. Talk to Ian–I’m sure he’ll have something for you eventually.

Today was my second day of classes. This morning, I hadn’t quite done the reading for my first class (Artificial Intelligence). I hurriedly flipped through it on the bus, worrying that I’d be behind already in my first week.

Then I got to class, which turned out to be about… truth tables. The fourth time I’ve learned truth tables. I know, they’re important, first principles, et cetera, but four times in four different classes? They should just have a one-day truth table seminar for everyone who declares a major related to math or philosophy and have done with it. I demand an end to redundancy! I demand an end to redundancy!

During my last class (Object-Oriented Information Technology), it started raining really hard. Like, New England hard. I had to walk several blocks to and from the bus stop; by the time I got home I was actually soaked directly through my underpants. At one point, the wind was at my back, and that and the rain were so hard and horizontal that I appeared to be going backwards through hyperspace.

August 26, 2003 /

The day went very well, actually. Object-Oriented Software Development is going to be hard and a lot of fun; AI and Algorithms are going to be hard and… well, basically just hard. I managed to buy my books and a lunch and backpack. Oh! That’s a great excuse for a gimmick, because I was actually buying said backpack for Maria, and I had biked to class and had only one way to carry it. That’s right: for a few hours, mine was a metabackpack.

That biking was the first time I’ve ever actually done a real bike workout, and it was pretty cool. (It’s also longer than I thought; now that I’ve scouted the route, I think I’ll mostly TARC it.) At times I felt like an escapee of TRON, whizzing through lightfields with limitless dexterity. At others, such as when I ran into a chain link fence within five minutes of leaving my apartment, I did not. And at still others, I tried to stop, ha ha, whilst riding with a misaligned brake pad and fifty pounds of new textbooks. The other thing I learned today is “inertia.”

Also! I returned Sumana’s call and ended up talking to Leonard, who was gentle and solar-powered, the way I imagine dimetrodons. I babbled a lot, at one point, I think, engaging in extended discourse on the subject of avocados.

Yeah. I lived through one day, and tomorrow it’s already my weekly Hump Day Vacation, wherein I do nothing but hang out with Ian and get excited about secret projects. Also, try to find a longer CAT5 cable so I can get Yellow Puppy out on the interweb. Ph34r! My… vastly underpowered new computer!

August 26, 2003 /

Sumana recommended weeks ago that I read “In the Beginning was the Command Line,” a very long essay by Neal Stephenson about operating systems and Disney World and nuclear weapons. I’d heard of it before, and I like Stephenson a lot, although his direct-address form is so clear and dry that I spend a lot of time wondering if he’s making fun of me.

Anyway, today I got bored at work, and I read it (213k of plain text; I was very bored), and it got me all excited and I went home and dug out my reject iMac and now, a few hours of downloading later, I’m watching it brainwash itself with Yellow Dog Linux. This is way too easy. I want it to hit a snag now, so I won’t be won over.

You hear me? I won’t be won over!

I don’t know why I have such a grudge against Linux. Maybe it’s because my first experience with it was being thrown into the cold water of a bad implementation of Debian–a hacker’s imp, done by my hacker of a first professor, running chill and unfriendly in the basement that was the old Centre CS lab. (The new lab was still in the basement, it just ran Red Hat instead. I was shocked to realize Linux could do 24-bit color.)

Or maybe it’s just because I’ve been using Windows for such a long time, and I hate admitting I was wrong. Bleagh. Oh well.

The install’s 18% done, and I think I’m going to crash soon and let it run while I sleep. In the morning I should just about have a Linux box, as is only fitting for my first day of CS grad school.

The only problem now, really, is figuring out what I’m going to use it for. I’ve got my desktop publishing and image processing pretty well taken care of on this old warhorse (my PII), so I didn’t install any of that, but do I try to set up a friendly ftp server? Learn to write Xwindows apps? Run a MUD? Suggestions are welcome.

Pork-barrel entry-end tagalongs: I baked my first batch of chocolate chip cookies from scratch this evening, waiting for Yellow Dog to download. And they’re GOOD! I’ve been strutting around all night thanks to that. Also, The Devil’s Dictionary does in fact have an RSS feed, and its author, a Mr. Kn____, is apparently some kind of referral-log ninja. And I owe Maria big for letting me download and burn like a gig and a half of computer-geek stuff on her shiny new laptop, since my CD burner is still dead. Thanks, Maria! Get a blog!

August 21, 2003 /

I had two fears come true in the last twenty-four hours. This morning, I wasn’t looking, and for the first time ever I got on the wrong bus for work. It took me another three hours just to get back to where I started. I don’t know how late I’ll be here tonight.

And last night my fish finally winged his way to The Land Where Fish Are Eternally Blessed. I don’t really know why–this was about the best his life has ever been. I’ve been changing his water regularly, feeding him once a day, and he hasn’t been moved in weeks.

When he first started acting oddly, Maria and I googled frantically for betta diseases, and checked him for all the symptoms. There was a little while when we thought he had a fungal infection, but we proved ourselves wrong. For all appearances, he was a perfectly healthy fish, except didn’t swim around–he just hovered at the top or sank to the bottom of the bowl. He was still breathing when I left for work yesterday morning, and he wasn’t when I got home.

I never liked the idea of flushing fish, so we gave him a burial, in a small cardboard box lined with paper towels. Maria suggested putting some of his things in with him, which we did: some of the red glass stones from the bottom of his bowl, and the little ceramic tank goblin.

We closed the box, said thank you and goodbye, and slid him into the trash chute. I think it came open on the way down, because it made a lot of noise, like stones hitting the walls. I was proud of this; he went out like a rock star.

He was only a fish, but since I’m a human, I ascribed to him more importance than fish usually get. He was a constant in almost-a-year of rapidly changing roommates. He was a dependent at a time when I very much needed to take care of something, as a means of being okay again myself. This was something Amanda knew, magically, empathically. In three years of gifts, he was the best she ever gave to me. I very nearly named him Hope.

I might get another betta eventually, but not until I have a bigger tank, a heater and a water filter. Some of the stuff I read while I was looking for symptoms the other night made me wonder how he lived this long at all (but then again, I’ve wondered how he lived through a lot of things).

He only started really flaring at a mirror a week and a half ago: he was learning to stand up for himself. When I had loud music on near him, he’d dance to it, out of time. He was quite a lot like me, or what I’d like to be: shy, red, beautiful, effortlessly able to forget.

Ken and Jon were right

August 20, 2003 /

Afer at least a dozen different samples, the Gender Genie firmly and consistently identifies me as a girl.

Yup.

Update 1947 hrs:

Well, don’t feel anxiety about this. I went to the site and typed in a Hamlet soliloquy and guess what — Shakespeare was a girl!

Deb

Apparently I define myself by bloggers

August 20, 2003 /

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!

August 19, 2003 /

I’ve been lucky to have automatic deposit for my paychecks from work, because ever since we moved into the new apartment I’d been kind of worried. Living with DC, my Fifth Third branch was only a block away, but downtown I didn’t know where to find one. Eventually we learned that there was an ATM for my bank at the Kroger, maybe a couple miles away. I figured I’d just have to use that.

Then, a couple nights ago, I was looking out the darkened window of my room and finally realized what I’d been looking at for a week–the bright logo on the skyscraper that is Fifth Third’s regional headquarters, maybe a block away.

It takes me a while to catch on, sometimes, yeah.