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March 15, 1998

Very early in the morning!

March 23

Well, it's been over a week since I got anything done with this site. Work has been hectic, application development more so, but the biggest roadblock has been something like depression, or malaise, or I don't know what. I haven't felt exactly on top of my game, unfocused and undisciplined. But things are turning around a bit. This weekend was far more productive, and more focussed, even allowing for the basketball and stock car racing. Great that the heels made it in, and too bad about Duke.
I wrote a long post to the Tribe in response to the bisexuality thread and had a long and pleasant exchange with another Triber about a mutual interest. Got a few things straighter in my head.

And of course I am writing this, which pleases me. I really do want to get better about giving myself the time to write. And on that note I think it's time to head for other activities and get some more things complete and off the to-do list. Bye for now!

March 25

Another day, another dollar and some thought provoking correspondence on a list serve. The programming went well today, even though I really don't feel all that great. Two all-nighters in three days is the kind of dumb behaviour I expected of myself when I was in college. But it seems, in these days of dramatically expanded leisure that they promised us would be the future, we are working not just harder, and not just smarter, but all the damn time. I really do not understand how people with children can manage it; when mine were younger (and I was too!), I worked about a forty six hour week for salary based on thirty seven and a half and by running hard could keep up with the kids' activities and my own, and even manage to play a little ball on the side. Now??

Don't make me laugh. With a regular programming job, maintaining the customers I retained from my previous consulting practice, and finishing the beta development of a commercial app, it's more like ninety hours a week. Still get 37.5 hours pay though! It's lucky that I love my job, the things that I do, and the people I work with otherwise I think I would be hard put not to go postal.

Being a long time fan of bumper sticker wisdom, the two that work for me today are:
"People are wonderful, work is great, life is fantastic!" and
"The truth shall set you free,
but first it will piss you off!"

April 4

It's the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, and the last day of the Season of Peace; as in all things the end is also the beginning.

How have I observed this season, and more importantly, what will I do, what do I plan to do, to build on this and further the course of peace? No more will the affirmation of the day appear in my email, no more will there be an automatic entry to be added to the 64 Days folder on my disk. But life will go on, and the need for peace, and people to work towards it will not decrease just because
"the season is over"!

Isn't that the mistake we make with Christmas? We build up to it, we dive into it, become saturated and sated with it, and stagger into the New Year suffering the indigestion of over indulgence, complicated further by a hang over if we have bought into the alcoholic rituals of New Year's Eve, and self righteously proclaiming how much better we will be now because the wonderful new year's resolutions we have made will be so good for us. Right, like we're going to keep them past say, noon on New Year's day. So I have no grand resolutions for reaching the end of the Season of Peace, no bromides or panaceas for me or anyone else, just a still small voice that keeps saying "You are better than that, bigger than that petty thought", and when I take the time to listen I realize that it's right, that I am better than that. And therein lies my answer, and my plan: take the time, and the silence, and listen.

Political discourse: a Federal judge in Arkansas rules that boorish conduct by a man, even if he is going to become the President of the United States, towards a woman is not a criminal act. How refreshing, how commonsensical, and how utterly redundant were it not for the savage hunt that politics has become. And what a strange reaction in Washington where the doyen of the Starr Chamber, the man who would be the nation's moral arbiter proclaims that the judgement has no authority over him and his rooting in the sexual conduct of public officials. Gawd, sex in the White House, what next. And in the House Republicans are scandalized by the idea that "public money" in the form of lawyers on the public payroll in the White House might be involved in the "personal defense" of Bill Clinton. Shame. Oh, thirty million plus in public funds for Herr Starr and his minions, that's in the national interest. Fucking hypocrites.

Enough, if I get going on this topic the vitriol will score my, and your, monitor. Suffice to say that my belief, best expressed by Pierre Eliot Trudeau is that "the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation".

April 18

It's been a while since I sat down to write an entry for this journal; Easter has come and gone, and so has another week on the road, creating reports for a client. Life on the road has a strange quality about it, a sense of time warped;
the working part of the day is more or less the same, although the transient nature of the engagement imparts a sense of disconnectedness with the people I am working with. The usual "getting to know people", the dynamics of office relationships, are different. One wanders in and out of the continuity of the site, part of it but apart at the same time.

It is the after-work part of the day that is really strange however. Absent the company of family, the routine requirements of day to day living in one's own home, life gets more peculiar. My tendency is to stay, probably too much, in my motel room. Leave the client site, eat a meal (and restaurant food gets old so very quickly, especially for someone with eclectic tastes and a fondness for cooking!), return to the motel, download the email and the day's posts from the ScribeTribe, turn on HBO and curse the fates that seem to schedule the things that I would really like to see for the times that I am not there, and then retire to the books that I have brought with me (never travel without at least two to read, plus some technical material that needs to be worked on), interspersed with efforts to write, something, anything. Too much time to think and not nearly enough focus on what to think about.

It seems easy to "do something" in the evenings, but my experience is that it is not, and even when opportunity presents itself, the experience is marred by the fact that it is being done alone. Movies alone, theatre alone, sports events alone; the aloneness becomes part of the activity and detracts from it. And as to "social" activity, I find it absolutely depressing to do anything that my love and like to do together without her there. I also avoid those activities that would tend to put me in temptations way; nightclubs and bars, dancing, etc.
since I have no desire to put myself in play (and little enough experience of being in play) I don't do things or go places where desire of another sort might compromise the decision not to "desire".

So, even though I am doing what I want to do, and not doing what I don't want to do, there is this element of disconnection. And that/this element leaves dissatisfaction in it's wake.

This weekend will be busy (they all are when I go out of town and then return) playing catch up with all the "normal" things that don't get done when I am away, and that somehow seem to pile up. This accumulation of things waiting leads to it's own contradiction: I want to go home, or more precisely to have successfully completed the assignment so that I can go home, but the anticipation of the pile of "to-do" items is a disincentive to actually getting there. Odd, very odd.

But enough for now, other interests, a new page to develop, calls my attention. So, off I go to investigate an aspect of myself that is crying to be investigated, and perhaps, perhaps not, to appear in it's own time in this space.

June 20

Damn, two months since I've been here! To paraphrase Miss Manners, fear not gentle readers, I have not abandoned writing, or reading for that matter, I just haven't been doing it here. Don't ask me why; it may be because I developed a small aversion to writing on the computer and have worn out a couple of pens and several ink cartridges doing it, like Smith, Barney, the old fashioned away (anyone else remember John Houseman as Smith, Barney's spokesperson. A big rotund man, English, magisterial, with a booming baritone even without raising his voice. Was the law professor in the tv series "The Paper Chase". Anyway enough about that.
So, what's up in my world, a place linked tenuously to other worlds by the minds of the people who traverse it's, and their, borders. Well, a whole lot, and not much. Since I last wrote Sharon and I have had our spring break at the beach; seven glorious hot, sunny, shrimpy, lazy, read until you need to swim, swim until you need to read days on Oak Island. So much shrimp, so little time. Without straining anything except my eyes I read eleven books, and started three others that I just couldn't get into so I abandoned them to the "read another day" list. Got lots of sun (OK the surgeon general advises that the sun's rays can cause cancer. Tough shit! No one lives forever, and I don't want to. I love to play in the sun and in the water, and as a consequence I get tanned and even occasionally burn. Life goes on, and in truth, I like how I look with a good tan more than how I look fish-belly white!)
What else. Oh yeah, while we were down there Sharon and I decided that we are going to remove ourselves to the beach, permanently, and set the timeframe at three years. Then we went looking for where at the beach (after Fran we are not really interested in being right on the ocean!). As someone with a scientific bent and education, I am all to aware of the risks for those who "build on sand". Anyway, to make a long story short, we thought that we had found exactly what we wanted, went through the process of making the decision, and then when we had made it were told by our (buyer's) agent that an offer on the lot had been accepted one short hour before we called her. Bad news? No, in discussing it we became acutely aware that our decision on what we were going to do was fine but that we had to fill in more than a few blanks on how we were going to do it (fine tuning the objective without being rigorous about the means of attaining it.) So, we are going to the beach, we are spending a fair amount of time looking at house plans, drawings, architectural web pages, playing with house design software (now you know where at least some of the hours not devoted to this journal went ), and generally laying the foundation that will bring our plans into alignment with the universe. It will happen when it is right and as it is supposed to, all we have to do is hold the vision (that was of course what we did *not* have when we made the initial decision!) and work on that foundation.

On a topic that arose after the beach stuff, my long-time laissez faire attitude to money finally rose up and bit me on the ass. So now Sharon is doing much more of the detail work around our finances and the result, even over a very short term, has been a major step forward in our financial outlook. This is *good*. I had a bit of a hissy fit when the shoe dropped, but not really that much of one. I have known that I am not very good in that area for oh, twenty five years or so, but kept on doing it anyway. Victim shit by choice? Yup. No more. Got better things to do with my time and energy, and besides, Sharon has a green thumb and if it works for money the way it works for tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers then we will move ahead right smartly. So off to another topic. Have I had my political rant yet? No? Can't think of why not; the health care community has decided it will pay for men to get it up but not for women to prevent the consequences; India and Pakistan have have indulged in a thermonuclear display of playground machismo and the hell with the rest of the world; the Baptists tried and failed to convert the Mormon's to a Christian way of life (too bad, the Mormons are now doomed to hell, at least according to Pope Patterson the Portly and his godly submissive missus.). Living in the South as I do, and having been myself a member of the Latter Day Saints (as I was for all the wrong reasons, but that's another tale!)my personal belief is that on average the Mormons are more Christian that many Southern Baptists, if only because they tend not to be hypocritical in their lifestyle. Anything else? Oh yeah, Texas's Senatorial successor to the Rev. Billy Sunday, in his wisdom, has decided that homosexuality (God forbid any sexual orientation that doesn't produce children the missionary way!) is right up there with kleptomania and alcoholism as psychologically treatable aberrant behaviour! Trent Lott, presidential aspirant. Scary, ain't it. Why it's almost as bad as Moses becoming the leader and chief ammo passer for the NRA, the national right to kill club. Say hey Charlton, got a spare clip, I'm right out of Black Claws to pertect mah wimmin and chilluns.

OK, rants over.

Go lightly,
Have a great life until I can wish you one again,
Off to write my collaborative journal entry on how 195 million bucks could affect minor changes in my lifestyle!