tipping over the mental cows you hide behind

My boss still hasn’t finished rewriting my job description so I can have my promotion, but hopefully by next month she will. Come on, I want money. She is letting me come up with the position title, however, so that’s a bonus. It has to be something that sort-of commands respect because of the people I’ll be dealing with, but also somewhat technical. I’m trying not to let my imagination fly free with this one. In other, more exciting news, my dry erase board is covered in diagrams for my new database and an update on my existing one. It’s so exciting to come in every day and try to remember what the symbols I used mean. What does Msub1 mean??? I don’t remember. It has something to do with a main data set, but I don’t remember which one. But there are plenty of arrows stemming from it, so it must be important. I loaded Google Talk and Sean treated me to an eavesdropping session of his office. It was Felliniesque. Or noise pop. Not sure which one more so than the other. (note: I think you need a Gmail account in order to use Google Talk.) I’m going to reread Dennis Cooper’s new novel, “God, Jr,” this weekend. It was so good the first time I didn’t finish the last part so I could absorb the bulk of it again without knowing how it ends. His is probably the only art that makes me cry without actually being the kind of story to make you cry, it’s just sort of breathtaking. Maybe I’m overly sensitive to that kind of flaying of the human psyche. That sort of soul-raping feeling. It’s probably the best feeling I can have without chemicals, so when I find it I need to recognize it. I self-soul-raped myself once, with a story I wrote, and I was never able to reread it after I’d finalized it. It almost hurt too much to be a good kind of pain. Yes, yes, but no, I’m not trying to make myself sound good, it was just a moment in time. I’ve just loaded the following amount of Queen’s music into iTunes via my external hard drive: 1 day, 1 hour, 55 minutes, 37 seconds. 1.92 GB. That’s a lot. It should certainly see me through the day. Right now, “Leaving Home Ain’t Easy,” is playing. From the “Jazz,” album. Brian May vocal, with an amazing mini-tribute to the Beatles in the middle eight. It’s not raping my soul, but it is giving me goose bumps. I’m such a girl, I have to go get some coffee (not as if that will change anything, but it will set my blood on fire).

P1010078

P1010078
Originally uploaded by boxedrobot.

A picture I took in the Japanese Tea Garden.

Some trip recap, more to follow.

Trip report, part one, real time. So, after a weekend of near never-ending excitement that included a highly charged, though very intimate party at Ms. RL’s, followed by a leisurely day of sitting by Ms. RZ’s pool reading Ms. Judy Blume’s “Blubber” (it was on my summer reading list) I am finally in the air, heading on the first leg of my trip to San Diego and San Francisco. This involves me spending an hour in Minnesota. That’s about all I can say so far about that. (P.S. I also enjoyed the enlarging of Ms. RZ's breasts. They got quite big, and attracted the attention of boys like nothing I've got to dazzle with.) Providence’s TF Green airport has become a cattle-cade of people on queue for the security check in. I had my boarding pass printed for me by my saviour, Ms. D. So I felt that I could arrive about an hour before boarding. This was enough time on a Tuesday, but I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer. The number of zombies who get to travel by air is simply limitless. They are all so lost, and all they have to do is wait in line. I do enjoy the Homeland Security video on a loop, also the placards with the pledge to keep as secure as they can. Thanks for doing a good job, I’ve made it just out of Rhode Island in one piece, and hope to keep it that way (at least till Alcatraz). There’s a $3 box lunch on offer, which I will obviously pass on. I’m wondering now if there will at all be anything open once I get to the Manchester in San Diego. I’m not too sure what I’ll be hungry for on a drug/drink free night at 2.30 in the morning, but we’ll see what’s on offer and what I feel capable of eating. No doubt it will be a heart wrenching experience. Traveling coach is not a great option when you have a larger laptop. It doesn’t quite fit on the tray in front of me so I’m actually having to type using my lap as a semi-flat surface. I just forgot how to spell surface. Off to a good start. Ok, now the plane is shaking and I feel like the pant load in front of me is going to lean back, so end of part one. We’re going to be late. Not very late, but late enough for the two middle-aged Minnesotins next to me to start getting angry. The husband is reading Harry Potter, the wife some romance paperback in one of those paperback cozy things only someone like her would have. She’s saying that it’s ‘bullshit’ we’re delayed because of, wait for it, thunderstorms. The plane has been bouncing like the one in the commercials for that Snoop Dog movie. Really. The flight crew, this lady with helmet hair, yelled over the intercom for the people in the tail end of the plane to stay seated. She really yelled, and not just once. But it’s all bullshit, you know? I mean, the weather is so predictable and you can always count on the airlines to use it as an excuse. At least that’s the reasoning of the slickless-wonder beside me. Trip report, part 2, real time/autopsy mode. After a breathtakingly poor amount of time to make my connection, in the strange port of St. Paul, Minnesota, I sat on the runway for an hour. An hour in which no member of the flight crew said anything to us. An hour in which the guy next to me fell asleep with his head in the crash position, resting on the seat in front of him. At least no one was reading Harry Potter this time around. There’s a guy a few rows up who might just be 500 years old. Really. He looks like an ancient monument. Grizzled, but tall like the mighty oak. A thick head of silvery hair, combed back classicly. He’s pretty twisted up with a huge black cane. He’s a million years old, maybe he was the young lover of a younger William Burroughs. Maybe. He was in the toilet for about 30 minutes. I assumed he died, but he came back out and sat down. 15 minutes later there was a call over the intercom for a doctor or any other medical professional. They took this old dude to the back of the plane. Did he actually die in the can? Maybe will power alone got him back to his seat, his corpse just cared that much about his dignity. I don’t know. It’s midnight, 33,000 feet up in the air, almost pitch black, half the plane is asleep. Except for the girl a row in front of me flirting with the three guys a row in front of her. She’s pretty limber, sitting with her feet up parallel with the seat in front of her, folded in half. She’s pretty in the way that girls who flirty that easily are. The guys are typical jockish looking Abbercrombie ones. The kind who are used to girls like her doing what she does, and do it right back just as easily. They suddenly look a bit stricken as the call comes for the doctor. It’s a long way down but we’re not going anywhere soon, and what do they do with a body at this height? He doesn’t die, he comes back to his seat to live out the rest of the flight. I wonder if they were going to lie him flat and stow him under the seat. He’s too big for that. The rest of the flight is boring. We land in San Diego at 11:45. It’s closer to three in the morning for me. I have to walk through the airport wondering if my ride will be there. The shuttle I paid in advance for to pick me up at 11:15. I hit the street at 11:58. No shuttle. I know it’s supposed to run 24/7 so I hope it’s on the :15, because that leave me with about a 20 minute wait. Pays off, too, because it comes at 12:16. I get to the hotel by 12:40 and start to check in. My boss has a call in for me so I talk to her for a few minutes to be greeted by the clerk with great news. My room isn’t ready and I have to go to another hotel. At a time when my body thinks it’s nearly four in the morning, when the clock says it’s nearly one, I am shepherded into a cab with a voucher so I don’t have to pay. This is just one fact that will confuse my cab driver. The other, more important thing that confuses him is my destination, four blocks away. He gets us lost and drives up onto the sidewalk trying to take a normal right turn. I figure out wither the other hotel is by the large sign. He still doesn’t get it, he hasn’t even turned the meter off from his last fare. A two minute ride is now nearly $20. I fill in $5 on the voucher and don’t tip him. He was a complete waste of time and could have gotten me killed, I suppose. Also, I feel the hotel owes him a tip, and owes me an apology. My temporary hotel is pretty nice, a boutique hotel with an amazing courtyard. I spend 10 hours there, four of which involve getting some sleep. I wake up at 7 in the morning, forget that I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday, which is now closing in on a 24 hour period and walk back to my real hotel. The room still isn’t ready so I’ll have to carry around my laptop all day, plus the new carrier bag I get from the conference with a 250 page manual-type book of power point presentations. Until 3:00. When my room is finally ready. So this is the travel process I endure. And the first thing I eat is a gray version of a hamburger. A ghost of the real thing. But at least it keeps me going until 5 when I get a good meal. And I keep myself up until 11 to get a sense of reality back in me. And now it’s day two of the conference and I feel human again. I’m not learning a single thing, our group is so far ahead of the curve it’s not even funny. At least now I know I could work in any research shop across the country, my knowledge base is so large. I’m going to need an ego check at some point, but this is probably why my boss even brought me here, to get a sample of what my ‘competition’ is. Now I feel more confident about my database building skills. No one else here on my level is doing something like that. Other things I did a year ago are being talked about as ‘goals’ or ‘ideals.’ I didn’t even know, I rock the research world. Fuck it, I really want some pretzels and I’m definitely having some Jack at lunch.

As unhip as I am witless.

I suppose I’m officially vexed. The software I ordered still hasn’t come, leaving me, at this time, about 8 hours total to get my new database working, and that’s if-and-only-if the software arrives in the next two hours. If it’s not here today or tomorrow there’s no hope of this even being beta before the 19th. Did I mention I have no idea how this is going to work, how I’m going to pull it off, how it’s going to be useful? And I had hoped to be somewhat beyond this early confusion at this point in the week. Oh, well. I did what I could. I’m not going to worry about it, I just would have like to have at least failed on time, not been stuck in limbo. The week has been a bit weird anyway, probably because even though I know I’m going to be away for the next two weeks I haven’t really thought about it, so the reality of the time is a little sketchy. I don’t have to work Monday or Tuesday, and I leave Tuesday night. I guess I’ll start to think about it on Sunday, when I can pack a few things. I’m more worried about the most space-economical way of bringing some DVD’s with me to watch on my laptop. I should have learned how to rip them beforehand and taken them on the HD with me. But I didn’t. UglyAgnes and I saw “The Island,” last night. Two hours of Ewan McGregor learning that he is a clone. Two hours of Scarlett Johansson being breathy. It was a fun ride for the time. It didn’t really do much to bring attention to the cloning debate, since the only possible point to take from this movie is that cloning is unfair to the clones. The film expects you to infer a lot more information than I assume the average ‘summer blockbuster’ viewer is going to be capable of, but there are more car/hover bike/train chases than you would expect from a movie that borrows so liberally from “Logan’s Run.” I do enjoy a big sci-fi picture, however, and this is the only one on offer besides “Star Wars,” another McGregor clone movie. At least we’re progressing through August, and at least half of this month I’ll be away, which means that cooler weather is coming soon. This is will be of great comfort to me as I begin the massive project of cleaning and organizing everything I own over the winter. I’m going to compress space as much as possible. Everything that can is going to be stored digitally. The next place I live, I hope to make a wireless wonderland.

To the world united, un-unite.

I thought I would be very productive today, but that didn’t happen. Not my fault, the software I ordered is now coming in late. In any event, I started to work on the database the software is going to be added to, and actually made a lot of progress on that end of things. I suppose this means I was productive after all. UglyAgnes and I had an awesome lunch today. Awesome. Awesome. Yes, it was good. I read a comment from some guy about something, with an observation included that read “I’m not really a feminist.” Which I found funny, as I wondered what that meant, is it something like “I’m not really an atheist?” “I don’t really believe in the goals of feminism, but I do believe certain tenants…” vs. “I don’t really believe in the tenants of atheism, like there’s no god, but on certain points I can agree…” with what? Am I being foolish in reducing both of these belief systems down to either/or properties? No. They are both fairly ridiculous, as are all beliefs. The application of thought to anything reduces it to nothing, therefore nothing is worth considering. Yes, your ideals and beliefs are pointless, no matter what they are. And the harder you fight for and try to believe in something, the more impossible it will become to realize. When people say they are something, or are for something, I automatically think, no you’re not. You’re not that at all. You’re lying to yourself, attempting to lie to me, but I see it for what it is, that which it is not. Things that I find most unbelievable include the use of the term ‘equality’ because this is the most obvious lie of the liberal age. It is also one of the most rampantly used terms in conjunction with just about anything, but it is completely meaningless. Any approach to this term involving logic should prove that one out. This is not what programming databases all day yields, but it is what happens at 3:45.