(warning: particularly old content) I don't ask for it to make sense 
Whoops. Totally forgot to upload the one from Thursday night. Ah well.
Oso tired. I delay any writing here about job stuff until the other interview goes down and stuff tomorrow morning. For now, to bed.
OMG. Job interviews. Two in the next two days. I'm not particularly optimistic about either one, mostly due to timing issues (they both want people now now now, I believe, and I'm not done with The School Thang until mid-June), but I figure that interview experience is good. I'm just a little flabbergasted at the speed that these things have come down the pipe all of a sudden.
(eyes spinny) Man. Even if none of the five pan out... still. Today was crazy go nuts.
(gasp)
(cry) Just about to go to bed, and I check my logs. Approximately a million livejournal hits to one of my favorite pictures of Lars from a person who linked directly to the pic in their entry. The entry was a compilation of adorable pictures of kittens... with that picture of Lars at the bottom, with the heading "AND THE GRAND FINALE!"
I've just been staring at that picture for several minutes, tears running down my face. I miss my boys so very very very much.
At least it wasn't a picture of Liam.
I had something of a textbook no good very bad day today, on and off again in spurts. I was cranky for much of the morning, happily content for part of the afternoon, and then right back to cranky. Boo. But it's amazing what dinner, a movie, and some ice cream will do for one's mood. Kung Fu Hustle was amusing, and sweet cream ice cream with double raspberries eaten by the bus stop on a mild spring night rocked my world. Yay.
Today, I finally crested the magic line of 2000 unique IPs hitting zoggins. It's more than a little boggling; I've watched the numbers climb steadily for the last year... I was hovering around ~500-600 hits a day for years, until last summer, when I started seeing a couple hundred get steadily added every month. A good number of those are crawlers, and weird dynamic IP shifts mid-browse, but still. That so many people on any given day are using the The Reference and finding movie quotes they've been looking for and looking for fonts and getting lyrics to songs blows my goddamn mind.
Man. Nothing like waking up direct from an extremely vivid dream where you were crying about your erstwhile cats. Officially unbest way to start the morning, ever.
I was going to write something else, perhaps, but WaMu giving me a heart attack cleared my head. I ask you, do you think that you should have intermediary system-processing data on your live site? So that when there's a ten minute window in which the system says there's a double hold on some huge check, for example, your customers see their balance as $-300.56? Seriously. What the fuck. Keep your goddamn intermediary data to yourself. I saw that and freaked the fuck out! Bad bad bad BAD to show that shit to your customers. If you've got a regular processing period in which your data is going to be funky, you should fucking black out your goddamn services during that period. Don't make poor graduate student choke on their tea and about break their arm trying to get at their phone. That's just not right.
And in other news, albeit one day late: I want to wish happy birthday to my ridiculous diary. Six years ago, I thought I might turn my intermittent rambling into a daily experiment. I've been happy and I've been depressed and I've been silly and I've been cryptic, and /tht/ goes on and on and on... It's a lot more dedication to the whole thing than I certainly ever would have predicted.
I hate me. I'm so supremely irritated with myself right now. I left myself exactly two choices tonight: stay, and get progressively more depressed before finally leaving, or leave, and either stay just as depressed as I was at the fork or get only slightly more depressed. What fucking choices! It's related to the overall syndrome: I run myself into the ground utterly and then have to just feel terrible, because I've got no emotional reserves, until I get my feet under me again. Which may take anywhere from a day to a week. It'd be easier to stop doing this if I weren't still so demonstrably productive in the low times—if I stopped being able to go to work and school and turn out the same quality work as before (if not better), it'd be no more than a matter of pragmatics to quit this ridiculous shit. But no.
I just erased several sentences on a related issue because I don't know how to talk about it. Stuff about trust and relying on others or not, and always feeling like I'm getting the rug yanked out under me when I'm down, and feeling like people only like me when I'm happy and so what the fuck am I supposed to do when I'm not happy, fake it? That doesn't work, I tried that all last year. BLAH.
Incidentally, John is brilliant:
Always healthy to look at yourself through others' eyes. And then it's healthy to stop. :)
Now if only I could actually do that second part.
I can't decide if I feel better for things being settled. I definitely feel sick to my stomach; I definitely want to scrape my eyes and mind with steel wool and rinse them with acetone to obliterate the faintest memory of venom; I definitely want to scream with frustration and hurl something breakable at the wall. But I may, in the end, feel somewhat better. At least for my part. Then there's the whole other part that I worry about. That'll probably still bug me for a really really long time.
It's all very odd. Another house, another mother's cooking, another father's jokes, another set of pictures on the wall in the hallway. Another long drive and another set of knicknacks and quilts surrounding me when I camp out in the living room. Nothing wrong with this set of things and experiences, of course (although god oh god do I miss the cooking), but it's definitely a jarring adjustment.
Tonight, I think the thing that is most upsetting is that he never seemed to even try to keep me. You could chalk it up to how convincing I am, and I might even agree that it was my own damn fault, but still. He never tried to keep me, ever... he tried to get me back, once, and I thought that mattered enough. But I don't think it did.
Having had a day to process and reintegrate stress, I feel better. Of course, having to run around like crazy all day and not get home until almost 9 pm makes me feel less better. In fact, it's generally been one of those sorts of days:
Delicious coffee in the morning (+). No jacket while walking to the bus (-). Complete hilarity on the morning End show, with particular highlight of the Slim Gaylord Trio's 1945 hit "Cement Mixer," and sunny on the drive to the bank (+). Bank not opening until 10 am (-). Excuse to go get delicious asa makku sausage egg mcmuffin (+). Bank telling me that even though it was their error, they can't do anything about me not getting my replacement credit card, and I just have to wait the week-plus it'll take before I get another one (-). Getting home exactly in time to miss the bus to campus when I was already late due to stupid bank not opening until 10 am (-). Arriving on campus perfectly in time to go to lunch with Craig (+). Standing in line at the post office for twenty minutes (-). Being late to meeting with usability class partner (-). Having an hour downtime at work where I really had nothing more rigorous to do than recertify for Dell parts, which I did while reading Web comics (+). Getting to be Old Sage Lead With The Wisdom to two new leads in a row (+). Having to label the Collab instructor station ports with teeny weensie identifying stickers because the people who use our spaces are dumbheads (-). Usability class being boring and a waste of two hours of my time as usual and having a partner who doesn't understand experimental rigor to save her life (-). Hanging out in the Commons and getting to help clients and chat with Tyler and Bolling-sensei for a couple hours (+). Hanging out those couple hours because my plotter job was being a total bitch (-).
That's where I stood when I fell in the door just a bit before 9, and collapsed on my bed. If you were counting, you'll see that the (-) outnumber the (+). But I convinced Craig to get fast food with me, and he / Patrick / I curled up on the couch and watched Tombstone. The resorative powers of Val Kilmer are not to be underestimated!
Plus I'm taking a three day weekend and a trip to Eastern Washington for a vacation. You can't go wrong with that.
(upset) I realized tonight that much of why I'd been so productive and feeling better the last four or five days was because I thought I'd been able to shelve one particular stress. I found myself able to juggle my life for the first time in months. What words do I use to discuss how I feel now that I've so unexpectedly found out that I don't get to shelve it after all? How do I talk about the dread that is back to looming over me every time that I check my email? How do I express the knot that's back to being in my stomach, clenching tighter every day fearing that I'll find out if the time bomb has gone off again?
I'm beyond keen disappointment into feeling physically ill.
I can't decide whether I should be thrilled about how much I accomplished today or despondent about how little. I applied to something like ten jobs, rocked the discussion house in class, hashed out some research duty division with Brandon, revised a conference paper draft, was cogent about Photoshop to the new desktop publishing instructor, and did some resume work. On the other hand, there's several other jobs I could have applied for but didn't for need of a cover letter or somesuch, I didn't get any work done on my assignment due on Thursday, feel slightly derailed on immediate research study progress, and lost ground on a few (admittedly not time-critical) projects at work.
And I'm insomniac again, but at least I was able to amuse myself with throwing my resume into HTML/CSS. It's not done (no banner image?!?), the color choice is still in flux, and I'm distinctly not happy with how some of it (*cough*education*cough*) looks, but at least it kept me busy for the last two hours while I pushed myself to the next cycle of sleepability.
I cleaned out my wallet today. I left a few things in the extra pocket: a book of stamps, my night pass for MGH... and a faded and unused Japanese movie ticket. Funny that I should get it out and sit looking at it for a while, before going back and reading about that so frustrating day in Japan a year and a half ago, and find that I wrote about Mark that night (huh... I can't remember now if I got myself drunk that night or not... it gets a little obscure and I'm not exactly sure why). It's been a positively Mark-imbued week. Makes me smile.
I feel better than I have all week. I got nearly twelve hours of sleep, I have been paid, my tax refund came, I had two cups of coffee this morning and then spent an hour quietly weeding in the sun. My project at work was finished in a lovely way yesterday, I got to hang out with my brother and other people I adore last night, and finish reading my book in bed. Things are relatively good, for the first time in days. Tomorrow will start the suck again, most likely, but I think I will do it in a coffeeshop with windows and music, and perhaps it won't be so bad.
Yay. Paroxysms of self-induced guilt. Just how I was hoping I'd spend my evening. I'm going to bed. Blah.
Exhausted, bone tired. Went to the BATL/Assemblage 23 show tonight at the Vogue with Matt and Craig and Kelly. Danced out all my nervous upset energy, used the wired phase right after the show to get to my car and drive Matt back to West Seattle, and now am slowly feeling the weariness creep up through my bones and into my brain.
To Liam: I'll always remember how much you loved to be outside in the sun. Thank you for every time you crawled into my lap, purring, and butted your head against my chin until I couldn't be sad anymore. I miss you.
Jim's mother wrote me back tonight, to say thank you for the letter I'd written her a week or so ago. And to tell me that sometime last night, Liam was hit by a car. And that Jim buried my wonderful smart kitty this morning.
A day both lovely and full of stress. Too much to do, far too much, and more responsibility that was not mine than I should perhaps have shouldered. I think I'll not go to the CHI conference in Portland this week, after all, and feel better for the decision. I would have gone, save remembering that I desperately want to be in town on Wednesday night... and driving up and down from Portland twice to be there on Tuesday and Wednesday morning as well as Thursday just doesn't work.
Craig and Patrick made rosemary beer this morning (I babysat it a bit) and hours later, I can still smell the scent, faintly, when my hair moves.
I didn't realize the signficance of today until just now, as I typed out the date above. No wonder I've been slightly... off kilter. I think I will change the subject.
I did drop the Japanese class; I've not yet emailed my prof about it, but I will. I'm much happier, having that settled. I am curious to note, however, that my current irritation with all things Japan is more general than I thought—I'm even having trouble reading Pattern Recognition due to the main character going to Japan. It clenches up my stomach with something that's not exactly sadness and not exactly anger... I'm really not sure how to describe it.