On the benefits of proper diet and exercise…
Blog May 26th, 2010
Postmortem
Blog May 24th, 2010
Working in the information technology field, I have signed my fair share of NDAs. Why did I need to sign them? Who knows. I’ve really never been close enough to any industrial secrets that would be worth knowing. Would they hold the weight of a legal challenge? Who knows. Only one thing is for sure: once my paycheck stops having your name up top, I consider your NDA effectively null and void.
Now that that’s out there, it’s a little intimidating to follow up. I’m not unveiling some secret knowledge of a hundred mile per gallon carburetor or some deep dark secret of the San Jose Mercury News. I’ve got no special proof of faked moon landings or atrocities hidden from view. I… Uh…
I met a girl.
It was nice.
I fell in love too fast and too hard, and I wanted too much. But she didn’t seem to care as long as I agreed to one thing.
I couldn’t talk about it. It wasn’t ever supposed to end up here, she was quite clear.
And now it’s over.
I grew to loathe it. I hate feeling like someone is ashamed of me, which is what that secrecy felt like. It didn’t feel exciting, it didn’t feel “bad” or hot. It just felt like I was that thing at your house you put in the garage when company comes over.
I hate the way it ended, I hate how I feel right now. I’m tired of thinking about it. I’m tired of being up at night. I’m tired of feeling this way, and if anything I could do made me feel any different I’d be doing it.
Comments are closed. Keep your opinions to yourselves.
I just faced all the money in my wallet. It’s something I do occasionally, as part of my regular wallet-receipt-purge-and-sort, which is largely an excuse to get a quick count on the amount of money I’m carrying around. Usually it’s $40, give or take, a twenty and some mixed smaller bills. Enough to buy lunch or hit the grocery store without having to touch my card. But today, there are three hundred and fifteen bucks in there. Now, this isn’t a princely amount, I’m not gonna impress anybody if I make $315 worth of “rain” in the club, but it’s not insignificant, it represents five trips to the grocery store. Ten fill ups in the Jarvicar (more like eight as soon as the weather gets nice). One “holy shit” meal with drinks for my whole family. Three hundred bucks worth of immediate liquid spending power is not remarkable, but here’s what is.
If I lost my wallet today, I would not have to prostitute myself to make ends meet.
Yes, it would suck. Yes, I would probably eat some ramen for dinner, I’d definitely not be buying any Beaker and Flask cocktails at full price, but I wouldn’t be stacking quarters out of my change bowl to buy three bucks worth of gas. As a matter of fact, unless another tragedy struck back to back with this one, I really wouldn’t even have to _think_ about the loss of that money. By this time next month, I would almost certainly have recovered from the financial strain by simply keeping the course.
Thanks to Get Rich Slowly and the debt snowball and the emergency fund and ING direct and The Sun’s Financial Diary and all the other resources I’ve found about taking control of your finances, I have made slow progress to _this_. This is the first time in my life when a small financial setback wouldn’t send me scurrying to sell off a savings bond or max out a credit card (or more likely apply for NEW credit). This is the first time in my life when a failed appliance or unexpected car repair won’t send me into a months long fight back to just-regular-broke. I own my car outright. I have a pretty reasonable mortgage on a place I’m only slightly underwater on in a neighborhood I can deal with. I’ve got a job that satisfies my bills and gives me enough left over to save a little and indulge all but my most ridiculous desires. Most days I don’t even know how far away my next payday is, and when I go to bed I’m almost never thinking about money.
I think this might be what wealth feels like.
My Mass Effect 2 Review
Blog March 15th, 2010
The process of playing Mass Effect 2 goes like this. Turn on Xbox, realize you need to bring laptop out in case you get an email, look down and see metal shavings from project you failed to clean up the previous night. You get the vacuum cleaner, empty it, look around at the floor and see all the fur. Vacuum up the fur. Empty the vacuum cleaner. Forget why we came into the kitchen to begin with. Go over to the couch to play Xbox, brain aching with molten desire. See metal shavings, also notice couch-cover is filthy. Take it into the laundry room. Pick up an old beach blanket and a ruined sleeping bag to cover the couch with, drag vacuum cleaner back with feet. Vacuum coffee table. Vacuum up fur around the coffee table. Vacuum up fur around the TV and Xbox. Vacuum up fur under the chairs and under the couch and coffee table. Empty the vacuum cleaner. Go into the laundry room again because you realize you have a load of laundry idling in there. Sigh about the mess in here. Think about your Xbox. Go into bedroom to look for laundry basket to put clean laundry into to bring into bedroom to fold. Get on computer. Check Twitter. Realize it is now 8:30. This is, however, slightly more fun than _actually_ playing Mass Effect 2. #loadrage #planetscannerminigamesucksballsaftertwominutes
A brief fiction interlude…
Fiction March 6th, 2010
I still remember my first cup of coffee.
I was running, as every Saturday morning, to the television.
I dashed around the house, trying to locate some toy gun and replace its almost-certainly dead C-cell, so that I would not miss one minute of J. Michael Stracynski’s Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, which I was sure was going to start making sense any minute now. I searched feverishly for batteries in all the junk drawers, desk drawers, catchalls, baskets, and bins which littered every room of our house. While racing across the linoleum in the kitchen, desperately trying to remember if there were any batteries out in the laundry room, a gold and black pack slapped down on the counter beside me. Startled, I gawp up at my smirking grandfather, sunlight tracing a thin perfect ribbon of smoke from the cigarette in his hand to the barely cracked window above. I hadn’t even sensed him there and before I could compose myself to reply, he turns back to the gently percolating coffee machine.
“Don’t be so anxious, Eli.”
He waves me over, the ribbon of smoke tumbles apart and he puts the butt in his mouth. He pulls two coffee cups down from the cabinet, one in either hand, handles over three fingers of each hand and sets them on the counter. I’ve seen him do this before, when grandma was alive, or sometimes when mom is up early for work and he makes her take a cup for the road. A practiced gesture, a routine; each movement set to some internal metronome.
I can hear it now, see it in my head, if my head is right.
The swish of the cabinet door, a quiet thump as they hit the cheap vinyl countertop, the right hand slowly closing the cabinet even as the left grabbed a grubby teaspoon we kept on top of the napkin holder – it seemed a shame to wash it after just one cup of coffee – the two step reach into the fridge for the heavy cream – never half and half – a one armed pluck producing a fresh white and pink carton while the other hand grabbed a box of eggs. He deviated from his normal return path and swept hooked a kitchen chair with his ankle and slid it to the counter beside him, a nod at me and then to it. I stand on the chair and he wiggles his eyebrows and crosses his eyes. I grab the cigarette from his mouth and hold it like a dangerous and stinky bug. He ducks beneath, gasping comically for air and then clamps his lips around the butt once more.
He sets the eggs down on the middle of the stovetop, the cream carton dropped at an angle between the two cups. A single gesture where he takes one last drag from the cigarette and without apparently aiming, flicks the cigarette out the kitchen window. Mom hates this, and I wince.
“Bring that chair over here and look at this.”
While I pull the chair over to the mugs, he pours two steaming black slugs of coffee into them, fishes into his pocket for matches, puts the pot back on it’s hot plate and starts the biggest front burner with a match. After a brief root around in a drawer, he puts a little pan over it and dollops in a half stick of butter. Then he taps out a brown filter-end and holds it in his lips, pulls the last cigarette out of the foil, and then crumples it into a ball, which rolls aimlessly around the counter.
“Look at the cup.”
I look down into the steaming black murk, oil shimmering on the surface, and he doses out just enough cream to fill it to the brim. He stirs it and it turns cream colored. I am beginning to worry about missing Captain Power.
“Pretty boring right?”
“Yeah.”
“Now watch mine.”
He pours in a thin funnel of cream, wordlessly refusing the teaspoon I try to pull out of my cup, and in a moment… explosions of white break the surface. What I now know are fractal patterns, thermodynamic phenomena that we can neither accurately predict nor truly map the complexities of. My eyes widen. He dips the end of his cigarette into the blue fire of the burner and takes a drag. He grabs the boring cup of coffee and takes a tiny sip. He pushes the magic cup to me, the disturbance causing a new riot of cream flowing from the bottom. He ruffles my hair and nods back toward the family room.
“You don’t want to miss your show. Go, go.”
I carefully pick up the cup and carry it out, both hands clamped around the hot mug, fingers splashed with boiling overflow.
Through the corner of his mouth, around the cigarette. “If you are patient, and calm, Eli… every morning you can have fireworks.”
The coffee was terrible, but I drank it every time he made it for me.
