Sunday, June 17, 2001

Why I'll never be a successful blogger: When I have some time to be online or to take a nap, I'll choose a nap anytime.
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Saturday, June 09, 2001

I watched The Lady Eve on TCM last night. It's probably my favorite comedy of all time and it was a surprise to find out that it was on and that I had time to watch.

I'm starting to wonder if I haven't been going through some sort of depression that is finally beginning to lift, if only because I really am starting to experience pleasure again. A couple of months ago, I'm sure that I wouldn't have turned the TV on, even if I had known that the movie was showing. Maybe soon I'll start listening to my CDs and being interested in music again, too.

This past week at work was stressful in a way, but good, too. I got my knickers in a twist at one point when I was working with this woman who is a real perfectionist and who would obviously not have been pleased with anything I did. She was not going to give me a break, even though I'm brand new and really am just learning. At first I was really upset with myself for not measuring up, but then I realized that was ridiculous. The whole situation has helped me to let go of some of my own insanely high expectations of myself and just go into beginner mode. I also spent the rest of the week working with very relaxed people who weren't intent on molding me and shaping me into clones of themselves to meet their own standards. They felt no need to edit my e-mail, for example.

At this point, I feel a certain amount of compassion for that woman, because I am sure that she doesn't know a moment's peace. If nothing I did satisfied her, I think that even more so nothing that she herself does satisfies her. Or maybe I'm just reading my own reality into the situation. Nevertheless, I ended the week knowing that I did the best I could and that it wasn't perfect. And that I don't have to worry about it when I'm not there.

I'm moving from weeknight classes to weekend classes to accommodate my work schedule. They start in a couple of weeks and I'm going to go through at least one more quarter, but I might bail out after that. I've gotten a foothold in the computer industry now and I'm not certain that an MCSE is either wanted or needed. Since I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up, maybe it would be nice to just go to work, learn to do well there (and thank God daily that it's not a fundraising job) and then come home to do what I am really interested in.

Part of my struggle over the last year has been thinking that I need to love what I'm doing to make a living in order to somehow be fulfilled in life. But perhaps I just need to like it, just need to not be absolutely miserable, and find my joy and fulfillment in other areas. It's kind of cool to have everything be such a blank slate now; I've got some degree of economic security and I've started moving out of the fear and depression.

Maybe I'll even go to the movies this afternoon and see something that I haven't allowed myself the enjoyment of seeing before now. That would be a big change.
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Sunday, June 03, 2001

I keep mentioning "those who might be checking" because I know that people from my former place of employment have been reading this regularly, far more regularly than I actually post. I would imagine they are doing this to see if I a) badmouth them or b) reveal where I'm working now. I got fired from that job because of some posts I made here (which are long gone, so don't bother looking for them) but I know that those morons would continue to make trouble for me if they could. This is where I officially put all that crap behind me and ask Gail, Ed and whoever else might browse through to leave me alone.

I suppose that sounds extremely paranoid to anyone who doesn't know the whole story. The important thing in terms of my life is that being fired gave me the freedom to think through what I was doing as a career and decide that I couldn't do it anymore. I was a professional fundraiser and among other things, I got fed up with the repetitiveness of the work and the general creepiness of a lot of the people I worked with over the last ten years. Not the donors -- people who actually give to charities are pretty amazing and inspiring. But fundraising as a profession is filled with some of the laziest liars I have ever met, who are only too willing to take credit for other people's work and to go berserk if they hear the truth when it doesn't coincide with what they want to hear.

In all of that, I suppose fundraising is no different from most careers.

Since I fell into it accidentally, it was very liberating to take some power and decide I wanted out after the push from my last job and then to actively decide, too, what I wanted to do instead. I had been miserable and depressed at that job for over a year but couldn't make the leap. I had been idly seeking something else in fundraising, but each time it looked like I was about to get something, it would fall through at the last moment. Today, I believe that the universe was conspiring to push me out of the field altogether and it's a relief to be gone.

I have moved out of training in my new job and into the job itself, which has been no little source of stress. It has been a long time since I've had to learn so much and put it into practice so quickly. The first day out was a semi-disaster, but I bounced back after that.

What it comes down to is that I have been freed from some hell of my own fear and timidity and been brought to a place where I can experiment and take some risks in my life. I didn't die during the unemployment crisis, and in fact, it wasn't a crisis except that it forced me to re-examine my whole life. I had been so stuck and seeing nothing before me but 30 years of the same old misery that even the fear and anxiety that I have been through since last July 7 were a refreshing change. I guess when all is said and done, when I stop changing, I start dying and I start letting myself die. I am alive today. And I know that I acted with honor through the whole thing and did not retaliate the way I could have. Sitting here now, I realize that I still feel angry about it, I guess because it feels like "they" have gotten away with dumping on me, but I do know that my former boss is under scrutiny to perform right now. He'll end up hanging himself sooner or later, as will his boss, and neither of them will need any help from me. Although I'll probably end up getting blamed anyway. Heeheehee!
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Saturday, May 19, 2001

For those who might be checking, I'm not dead. I've started a new job, and it reminds me of nothing so much as being the new kid in elementary school. I've been in training for a few weeks and my head is so stuffed with new material I've learned, I think it may burst. I had to take a brief leave of absence from school, because I had bronchitis too (the first week of a new job, last week of a class and a temp of 101+ --- I was hallucinating the whole time). I hope to start blogging more regularly, but then, I've said that before. The problem is, I can't think of anything ineresting to say when I'm actually at the keyboard. Perhaps I'm just deluding myself to think that I actually think of anything interesting to say when I'm away from the keyboard. As the 1940s Wonder Woman would say, "Hola!"
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Tuesday, March 13, 2001

Last night I took and passed the Network+ cert exam. I am still fried. I had not expected it to be so hard, so I'm glad that I really worked at keeping caught up with the reading in class and all that. Typically, I am a very lazy student, because things come too easily for me. They always have and if I've ever had classes where I had to work much, and I wasn't that interested, I'd just half-ass it. Later on, I could always claim that I would have done better if I had worked harder.

So this is a whole new type of experience for me as a student, and I've been a student, on and off, for most of my life (yeow!). I worked hard and when I was taking that test last night, there were a couple of times when I'd look at the question and think to myself, "I have absolutely no fucking idea! I am going to fail this test!" This is not a feeling I am familiar with, I can tell you, but I was also oddly fatalistic and thought, "Well, if I fail, I fail, keep going and do your best." Normally, I am not the most positive of thinkers, so this was tantamount to having an out-of-body experience, as far as I'm concerned.

And then I finished the test and as I waited for the computer to calculate my score, I just held my head and expected the worst. I really hope that I didn't make an embarrassing noise when the screen flashed a "Congratulations, you passed!" message at me. I was astonished. I was still shaking an half-hour later.

Truly a new experience for me. I wonder how I'm going to cope with the Windows 2000 MCSE exams?

At any rate, blessedly, tonight's class was cancelled at the last minute, which is good because my brain feels like oatmeal and I haven't been able to retain anything for the test that was scheduled for tonight for class. I'll get back on that pony tomorrow. Tonight, I'm going to veg out -- read some comic books or something. If I hadn't already started dinner in the (lovely, wonderful) crock pot long ago, I'd grab something quick to eat and just go to bed.

As it is , I had a chance to get some laundry done today and to take care of othe mundane housekeeping. Pretty soon I will get to the point where I actually will run the vacuum cleaner. As it stands now, I don't think that the place has been vacuumed since December. Disgusting, I know, but so what? The only thing that's getting bad is that the dogs keep getting fuzzy bits in their mouths if they eat anything off the floor, and then they walk around gagging and trying to spit. Since dogs cannot spit, so I have to help them get the fuzz out of their mouths. I think that it says something noteworthy about me that I would rather do that than vacuum.
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Wednesday, March 07, 2001

This is weird as hell. I'm using Opera as my browser now and the interface with Blogger is way screwy. It took me forever to try to figure out how to add the "blog this!" feature, and I have yet to see if it will work or not. Oh well, onward and upward with the arts.

I've finished my Network+ class and am taking the cert test on Monday. For some reason, the testing schedule at my school is not really in synch with the class schedule, which has led to not a little bitching and moaning. But there are worse things.

On the whole, I am having a ton of fun. No job yet, but I'm working on that. I've been sick again, with some of the chronic fatigue symptoms and lots of asthma. It would probably make a big difference if I'd just vacuum my damn apartment.

My mom gave me a crock pot for Christmas (did I already mention that? Memory loss--prions--they go hand in hand, just like stumbling and falling down). I love my crockpot. It's like when I got my microwave oven and years later can't remember how I lived without it. Burned a lot of lentils and rice on the stovetop, that's how.
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Apparently the "blogthis!" function doesn't work under Opera, and for some reason the header font size is whacked, too. All this goes back to adding an indexer program (which shall remain unnamed, but is you want to know, e-mail me) to my hard drive and having it frap up my registry and cripple IE (yes, I've reloaded it, uninstalled the indexer, all that stuuf, but IE still won't work well on this computer anymore -- and anyway, I have come to like Opera a lot. Too bad it will make my blogging even more inconsistent than it has been in the past. Not that anyone will notice.)

All this because I wanted to point at this page and say that I think that Dubya looks like a used car salesman with that phony smile on his face.

Hardly earth-shaking.
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Awfuller and awfuller -- stuff posts but won't publish.... is this the end for Impulse Control? Stay tuned!
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Reloaded Netscape 4.something to see if I can make this work. It's not like I had anything else to do today --- NOT!!!!!
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It's not quite there, but closer than it was. Looks like any blogging has to happen through Netscape rather than Opera. Is this the end of Opera as my everyday browser? Doubt it.

Is it just me or is the "publish" function kind of whacked too? I'm not complaining, because I know that Ev has tons more to worry about than Blogger, but is it me or is it a problem that everyone is having?
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Holy simoleons! I figured it out! There's nothing like that feeling of making it work! Too many exclamation points!!!!

Nevertheless, this is proof if any was needed that I was born to be a computer weasel. Hallelujah!
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Thursday, February 01, 2001

Long time, no see. Passed the DOS/Windows cert test, so now I'm completely A+ certified. It even comes with a genuine certificate and a wallet card. I'm actually in class right now -- Network+. Learning lots about TCP/IP. Computer weaselette. I've been reading way too much fiction and not studying enough, though. Also have another bizarre upper respiratory infection and am taking four (count 'em four) antibiotics. They don't seem to be doing a damn thing except ensuring that I die from flesh-eating bacteria someday (if the prions don't get me first -- I am pretty much certain that I've acquired Creuzfeld-Jacob disease from eating beef).

Anyway, I just wanted to check in from school. We have a test in a couple of minutes and my brain is fried. Not from what we are studying, per se, but just because it's February and I'm DAMN TIRED of winter!!! I've actually been writing in a journal daily, so maybe I should just start posting some of that stuff. At least I wouldn't have to come up with fresh material when stranded at a keyboard.

Actually, it's entirely fair to say that I don't have a very interesting life right now. I'm in a class full of men who think that fart jokes and Jerky Boys sound clips are the wittiest things they've ever heard. The computer behind me is mooing and oinking. Save meeeeee!
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Friday, December 29, 2000

I just finished reading this bizarre-yet-oddly-compelling novel which was recommended to me by a friend; it is part of a series that is one of her childhood favorites. The book is Dawn's Early Light by Elswyth Thane; copyright date is 1943 and it shows. This is a very strange book -- the first third or so really hinked me out. It is the story of Julian Day, who comes to live in Williamsburg, Virginia, right before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. It has all the wierdness of a really dated novel about colonial America -- happy darkies and all (no, she doesn't call them that, but that's what they are and that's how they're portrayed).

The first night he is in town, he and his pal save a young girl, Tibby, and her twin brother from their drunken step-father and he takes on a kind of responsibility for them out of a sense of obligation and because that's just the kind of guy he is: noble and kind. So of course, it's obvious from the outset that this girl, who is brilliant but poor, virtuous but uneducated, will end up being his romantic interest. That's one of the stomach-churning parts, because when the story begins, she's nine and he's twenty-one. Creepy.

There are two major narrative arcs in the book. The first is how Julian comes to stop thinking of himself as an English subject and comes to think of himself as an American, which is rather interesting and better-than-average development of the character against the background of the politics and the fighting of the war. The most compelling part of the book is actually the middle part, once he goes off to join the battle against the British army in the Carolinas. That part is straight-out war story stuff, and rather well told. The other major arc is the story of Julian and Tibby, and how he basically shapes her education and molds her as she grows up and how she loves him from the beginning with undying devotion. This is done so innocently (as only a book written in the 1940s for teenagers can be written) that the whole skin-crawly Pygmalion aspect seems perfectly normal, which is exactly why it made my skin crawl. The whole story gets very dramatic and overwrought as the war story and the romance collide, and everyone ends up paired up with the perfect partner, just as Cornwallis surrenders. I'd call this one a guilty pleasure just because it's so innocently repulsive and fascinating at the same time -- well-written and plotted, in a quaint way, but yeow!!! Nine years old!

A personal reaction about reading historical fiction -- I think the only books I've ever read that talk about how smelly it was "back then" are Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. Dawn's Early Light talks about the smells at least, because Julian can't get over how pleasantly fragrant Williamsburg is in the summer. Shyeah!
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Thursday, December 28, 2000

I am pretty much over my "I hate Dayton" rant, which was really an "I hate Christmastime" rant in disguise. The holidays were brutal this year; when I woke up on December 26, I felt as though a great weight had lifted from my shoulders.

The oddest media moment of the holidays, to me, was David Letterman's show celebrating the US peacekeepers in Tusla, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Christmas in the Balkans with soldiers and such. I just thought the whole concept was weirder than weird and as I have considered it for the past few days (well, more than a week now), I can only come to the conclusion that David Letterman has been replaced with a pod.

That's right, he's a pod person. The David Letterman that I watched in 1984 would no more have thought of doing his patriotic duty by putting on some huge gig for US peacekeepers than he would have ripped his nose hairs out live on TV. In fact, I think he's have been much more likely to rip his nose hairs out.

Does anyone else remember when he used to be really really mean to people and that was why it was fun to watch him?

Erf. David Letterman is a pod person and I got a crock pot for Christmas. How the world changes -- especially since I was the one who asked for the crock pot in the first place.
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Tuesday, December 12, 2000

Very very very very homesick for New York -- obviously, I have been watching far too many re-runs of Law and Order. Or I've just been hanging around with dumbheads in Dayton, Ohio for too long. What I wouldn't give for an interesting conversation about almost any topic under the sun. Since that isn't likely to happen any time soon, I think I'm going to get a solderer at Radio Shack and teach myself to solder instead.
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Sunday, December 10, 2000

I've been working this part-time job doing market research by phone. I won't go into any of the ultra-secret, proprietary material, lest I be hunted down and killed. God knows, I've already lost one job because of what I've posted on this web site.

There are two reasons I even mention this in the first place. One of the funniest things is when I get someone on the phone and start to do an interview with them, and they refuse, saying something like, "No thanks, we don't like to get involved with things like that." What kind of "things like that" do you suppose they are referring to? Marketing? Can't avoid it. Phone surveys? There's no law that says we can't call your home, despite what some people seem to think -- especially the ones who get all indignant because their numbers are unlisted. "How did you get this number!?!" Consulted the magic eight-ball, dimwit. I suppose people don't want to get involved with "things like that" in case I am secretly recruiting for a cult, or because I am somehow casing their house.

I've also become a connoisseur of answering machine messages. Most are short and to the point, giving the phone number instead of people's names, as though this were Great Britain. Most annoying messages are those taped by young children who can barely enunciate. Any parent who thinks this is cute is beyond mistaken and into the criminal. Yesterday I got one of those messages that I thought had gone out-of-style by 1986 or so, where the person says "Hello? ... Hello, who is this?.... I can't hear you, speak up!... Hello!? Well, it doesn't matter anyway, because this is an answering machine." Hardy-har-har.

Here's the scoop. If you say you don't want to do the survey, it's my job to try at least once to convince you. Personally, my feelings aren't hurt if you just hang up, because that means I can keep dialling to try to meet my production goals. Yes, we have evil things like that. The worst thing is the people who feel compelled to lecture me about how evil I am for calling them and asking them questions. They don't know who I am and how I'll use the information, blah blah blah. Generally, I listen to the rants because they can be fairly entertaining. The person on the phone obviously thinks I am a total cretin and have no idea that I am doing something "bad". I had a woman ask for my home phone number the other night (how clever), and go into a rant that ended with her screaming "Quit your job!"

If only it were that simple.

Just don't answer the questions if you don't want to. You are under no obligation to answer your phone if it rings, and if you do without screening your calls, who's the sucker? Are you that important that you have to pick up every call that comes in? Are you maybe expecting a call from NASA or Paramount Pictures? At any rate, most people I talk to for any length of time are perfectly civil and I regret that I have to be fairly robot-like in my interaction with them. The calls really are interesting brief and coincidental encounters that don't mean much of anything in the long run.
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Monday, December 04, 2000

Passed the A+ Core exam. The DOS/Windows class starts tomorrow. I guess I qualify for sure as a mini-junior-computer-weaselette now. Many miles to go before I achieve the status of true computer weasel, though.

One thing that is different for me this year is that I haven't been descending into near-suicidal depression as the days have grown shorter. This makes me think that the misery of the past two winters was much more due to my old job than I let myself realize. Of course, since I wasn't doing anything to get myself out of the shitty job, I have nobody to blame but myself. But then, I really believe that things work out the way they are supposed to -- if I had left that shitty job, I wouldn't have been miserable enough (yet) to say what the hell and change careers altogether, which has been like a breath of fresh air blowing through my soul. I can't express how refreshing and invigorating it is to just start over. I don't feel all depressed and angry and old anymore (well, old sometimes when I realize that I'm at an advanced enough age to be the parent of some of the other students in my class).

So let me just start the Advent season by affirming how much I have been blessed recently and how grateful I am for it. I'm not saying that everything is perfect now, but it sure is much, much better than it was six months ago. And no more Monday morning staff meetings!!!
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Saturday, December 02, 2000

"I think the happiness of a reader is beyond that of a writer, for the reader feel no trouble, no anxiety: he is merely out for happiness. And happiness, when you are a reader, is frequent."

Jorge Luis Borges

Certainly, I am happiest when I am reading, for the most part.

Finished my class for A+ this week and I'm taking the certification test on Monday. I really didn't know jack about PC hardware when I walked into the class, and I've learned an enormous amount. I really can't get over it. I am passing the practice Transcenders and online freebies okay and I haven't forced myself into the boring memorization of IRQs and DMA channels yet. I hate memorizing stuff -- it seems like such a waste of time and space, since you can always look something up if you need to. Maybe it's just that I get bored by rote memorization. I didn't even memorize my multiplication tables till I was in seventh grade, and I only did that then because the math teacher, Mrs. Collier, forced everyone to take quizzes until we all passed. I was among the last, which was pretty humiliating. To this day, I still have to count on my fingers to get 7 x 8 right.
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Friday, November 10, 2000

Well, this is a new thing. I had keyed in an entire entry about what was going on and why I haven't been keeping up with this journal for the past few months, and I thought it posted okay, but it has disappeared into the void.

Let me take that as a sign from the universe that what I posted didn't need to be said. To recap what seem to be the necessary high points, I have decided to go back to school and have started a program in network engineering. I had an opportunity to leave the career that was making me incredibly miserable and start in something else that is more about what I am interested in and what I want to do. The universe has smiled on me in many ways recently.

I am currently three weeks into my class for A+ core certification, which, for those who don't know it, is computer hardware maintenance and installation. There is a ton of material to learn and I have to bust my ass to keep caught up, but I'm really enjoying it and learning at an incredible rate. Now I just need to get the material out of my short-term memory into my long-term memory and I will feel as though I have definitely accomplished something.

I haven't had time to keep up with any of my usual daily routine for a few months while things have been up in the air, but I need to start being online again, back in speeded-up time mode. So we'll see how things go here and over in the blog.

Now to see if this posts or vanishes (of course if I copy it to my clipboard first, there won't be any problem). Here's hoping the universe smiles again!
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