go dream

:)

Life is good, mostly! And busy!

And I'm in California, after a oh-god-but-I'm-an-introvert week of work at the mother ship, and there's nothing like being here to bring out the lonely rants, even when it was a productive, fun week. To end the trip I'd bought a ticket to see a couple of my favorite bands in San Francisco tonight, I got so far as walking halfway to the Caltrain station to head into the city to do it, and I wimped out, and I blame California.

It's not really your fault though, California. It's just that being here makes me realize how much better being at home is. California, you make me feel helpless, and that is pretty much my least favorite thing.

It's about the cars, and it's about the support network; it's about realizing that if I was in the city and needed to get back to the suburbs and couldn't hail a cab in time to catch the last bus I would be totally completely screwed, and realizing that even getting home from work safely depends on others. It's about not knowing the neighborhoods, about not being knowledgable enough to say confidently "I can walk here at eight in the evening by myself but not at eleven" and therefore erring on the side of staying away. It's about thinking "if I got mugged, and got away safely, I have no idea what I would do next." It's about the poor pedestrian who got hit this week in a crosswalk four (giant) blocks from my hotel. It's about the way I can't reason my way through a bit of paranoia using facts; it's about not having the familiar pattern of everything being fine in this place so many times before.

It's about how goddamn far apart things are, and how I'm used to life closer together; it's about my whole view of the world being ever so slightly disorientingly askew here.

It's about constantly thinking about what time it is at home, always anticipating three hours' jet lag till I'm in the right place again.

It's being homesick, and it's being sick of here -- I'm ready to take off my shoes at the airport, ready to click my heels.

(Note to self: never schedule business travel right on the tail of personal travel again.)

Digging through the boxes that I wound up with the last time that my mother cleaned the basement back home, I've found a bunch of old school papers. It's funny, when I picked a college I committed to being a maths-and-sciences kind of girl from here on out, and I've been that for quite some time now... but going through this old middle school/high school stuff, I'm remembering that that's not always how I've identified -- and I don't feel the urge to keep my high-scoring trig tests (although damn I was good at math), but the essays, the stories, the poetry? Yes. (OK, also the printout of the code from my final project in my intro to java class -- "public class monster..." etc -- but only because it's hilariously bad.)

Anyways, I've found a bunch of scrawled-in-the-margins love poetry and other things which I felt the need to save -- some of it may already be somewhere in this journal since I've had it for rather a long time, but nevertheless: here's alison-ages-twelve-to-sixteen. (Warning: I definitely took myself way too seriously most of those years.)

( 808.02Collapse )

( Points of Intersection (On a Pair of Parallel Lines)Collapse )

( untitledCollapse )

( learning to be spontaneous.Collapse )

( Bullshit.Collapse )

( sestina aigre.Collapse )

( PortraitCollapse )

( Ten Bad ReasonsCollapse )

I also found my very first W-2 -- $1673.25 from my veryfirstjob doing random computer lab maintenance stuff for the high school. I remember being totally impressed by how much money that was too.

Entirely-too-exciting discovery of the day: when getting doored (http://google.com/search?q=doored for those who haven't had the pleasure), the really fun part actually isn't the split second where you see what's about to happen, or the flying through the air or even the hitting the ground... it's actually the moment afterwards where you realize: oh, okay, now I am prone in exactly the oncoming traffic that I was trying to stay out of. Awesome.

My solution (shrieking more or less non-stop till I got myself out of harm's way) seemed to work, although it kinda disconcerted the dude who doored me.

I walked away -- rolled away, even, on my bike, though I'm bruised and shaken and it's misaligned -- but we are both more or less intact, which I gather makes me very lucky. Whew. More taking the lane for me in future.

Running early in the morning = six hours of headache afterwards. Bah. Dear body, why do you punish me when I am only trying to take care of you?

(Previously and elsewhere: "a couple blocks on the map in California is very different than a couple blocks on the map in Boston".)

Dear Self:

Happy is something you achieve, not something you are given. Nobody is going to bring it to you on a plate. It probably wouldn't be satisfying if they did anyways. You build it yourself, and that's not a bad thing.

You deserve it (really! yes you do!) and there is nothing wrong with pursuing it.

Love,
Self

I am, sadly, not a terribly minimalistic person at the best of times -- but never less so than when packing. Yes, I absolutely do need both boots and sneakers. And I don't know that I won't have occasion to dress up so I should bring something nice. It might be cold and it might be hot and it might rain. I might want to read this book on the plane (or this one or this one or this one or this one). At this point I'm just patting myself on the back for deciding that no, I don't need to bring two computers...

New Feature -- well, I'm not as attached to it as Old Feature yet, but it's likely shipping next month, and I've (well, "we've") got a working demo, and people around me are psyched about it, and apparently people at The Mothership are psyched too. And that doesn't suck.

And I have a party to attend tonight and a notquiteaparty to throw tomorrow plus family to visit and a stack of good books to read and the weather is gorgeous, so I probably won't get tempted to work over the weekend either. Which is also a good thing.

It's been a seriously up and down week, but it's definitely nice being on the up side for a bit.

What do you think, do I need this?

In other news, the other day I got a "... but actually I think you had the right instinct there" from a coworker after a discussion of my approach to a kinda ambiguous design choice that I had made a sorta-wrong call on, and it totally made my day. Which made me think about seriously how much I respect my coworkers and am lucky to work with them, which was a good thing -- a nice counterbalance to some of the frustration I've been wrestling with lately. Hurrah, good place to work.

And in other other news, I think my week of Not Quite Sick Just Really Tired All The Time is just about over! Extra hurrah! I ought to celebrate by getting back on the climbing walls...

The roommates are all three home for the holidays, so I basically have the apartment to myself for two solid weeks.

Pros: it's very quiet, and I can get away with being a total slob.

Cons: it's very quiet, and I can get away with being a total slob.