December 21, 2004
I have been trying to take compliments more than brush them off as I tend to do in a falsely modest sort of way. Just in case I need some practice, here are some things that coworkers have said about me leaving:
- If I were to start another company you are 1 of the 4 that work here that I would want to start it with.
- I am so happy for him; he was too talented to stay here.
- First-rate
- Always kept me laughing
- Edge-of-your-seat nail-biting-thrill-ride-of-fun
- Made me want to marry him all over again
- Great taste AND less filling!
09:35 PM part of
work
December 15, 2004
How much work have I done?
I just ran a report on all the code changes made by me (on my main project only) since I got here and it took 27 minutes to run. When I told it to show details it generated a 1757 page report, detailing about 99,000 lines of code.
How much progress have I made?
None.
08:41 PM part of
work
I go through these phases when it comes to coffee. I will take it black, no sugar for about a year, then switch to heavy cream and plenty of Equal for about six months. When I make the change it is full of stress and relief all at the same time - relief to rid myself of my current troubles and stress over the knowledge that I have signed myself up for new ones.
I am going through one of those phases now.
02:18 PM part of
ever-growing evidence of a deep obsession with coffee
December 07, 2004
Notes to my therapist
- I look at myself in the mirror for about fifteen minutes every morning. I usually have to sit down because my legs get tired.
- I don't ask a lot of questions.
- I cry every time I see a commercial with a father and son playing catch.
- When I was a child I was obsessed with racism and read biographies of famous civil rights leaders. By the time I got to college I had one black friend.
- I like the simple pleasure of exercise, but avoid competition unless I know I can win easily.
- I am a sucker for compliments and find it hard to not smile when I am being praised.
- At the same time I can be crushed by one insult or valid criticism.
02:55 PM part of
fragments
Mexico is different - Mexico is different.
He was getting all packed up and was trying to get ready for the flight. He was going alone somewhere real for the first time and wasn't able to either deal with the fact that he was afraid nor admit it to himself. On the surface he was simply worried about the details of travel - exchange rates, Spanish phrases, packing first aid supplies.
In reality, he was eighteen, clueless and about to travel to a country full of strangers who were stranger than anyone he had ever met. He didn't know anybody in Mexico, and even though he was ignorant on this as well, he wasn't really there to meet anybody other than himself.
02:43 PM part of
fragments
December 06, 2004
A man is not old until regrets start taking place of dreams.
- unknown
03:07 PM part of
inspiration
When did Saturday Night Live get so bad? I was watching last night and Weekend Update is fucking sad - Tina and Amy are very funny - mean funny; but this is nice and easy and not funny.
Would somebody tell them that SNL is supposed to be a) mean b) on the edge?
05:36 AM part of
unavoidable sadness
December 02, 2004
The food was cold, but the company was relatively warm, and it was much better than sitting at the edge of his bed afraid he would fall off it all.
He watched the people as they came in - most eating a quick bite at the only place that was open before doing the big meal at dinner. He had ordered a lot of food after looking over the menu - lingering - while sipping some coffee after some warmer small talk. She was a veteran of this situation even if he wasn't and knew what not to talk about but at the same time address indirectly.
While he was waiting on the food was the best time, because he had to be there - they needed him to pay.
08:39 PM part of
fragments
(Man sitting at a bus stop. Someone approaches.)
Hey! Hey!
Hello.
Do you remember when you were born?
No - um - no.
Good! I don't either. Will you remember when you die?
I think so.
Good!
08:34 PM part of
overheard
I am covered in sameness most days. I could live my life with my eyes closed if it weren't for all the traffic - I move, flutter, and object in the same ways everyday. Sometimes I try to mix things up, but even this is a repeat. If it weren't for my rubbing up against her sameness my life wouldn't have any meaning to it at all.
08:30 PM part of
fragments
December 01, 2004
Most of the people in the world think that they are doing fine because one of the interesting consequences of this world is that you can get happiness from your strengths and your weaknesses – being shy can lead to a life of contentment – life doesn’t force you measure up all the time. This is how most people become successful.
04:21 PM part of
fragments
The most important thing that she ever told me was that there is nothing but learning, that the one constant in the world is that there is only change. When I asked her later she said that she didn’t believe it anymore.
04:21 PM part of
fragments
A few things bothered him about college when he first arrived. First, the professors were freaky smart and knew a lot about things that didn’t have to do with anything about what they were teaching – shit like World War II and the history of America. His Spanish prof knew more about stuff than he did when it came to just about anything. Second, most of his classes were a joke – it was like he was paying to learn things in a much more professional environment but he had already learned them. Ass-wiping at Harvard. Third, there were women everywhere and they were not being yelled at my their fathers when they found out what they were not wearing. Fourth, there were at least a million people just like him wondering around looking at everything but the sidewalk, but the older ones still looked down more than up and they didn’t talk much.
04:20 PM part of
fragments
The impact started at her shoulder blade and knocked her easily to the ground. She was so shocked by it that at first she didn’t feel any pain, but just felt herself not wanting to get up, but to just crawl as fast as she could back to the house and find her mom’s legs to wrap around and hide behind like dissappearing into the shadows of a forest. The boys never knew where it had gone, but it stayed with her for a good long while, aged and strengthened by the fact that it was her memory only.
04:20 PM part of
fragments
The real mystery to me is how the magazines get into the bathroom in the first place. Somebody systematically rips the stickers off of the front covers (usually taking a subtitle or too along for the ride) and then throws them away somewhere (most likely outside of the office based on the results of my searches). They then put the magazines in the bathroom under the papers at least once a week. I suppose the really interesting thing is the response that they have gotten over the last few months. For a while it appeared as if someone was reading them a good deal (probably more than one person) and now it just looks like someone (else probably) is pushing them down and at one point I found one in the trash. When I came in yesterday I found that they had all been moved to the trash and someone had brought in their rival publications to give us another slant, probably not as extreme this time. I can’t wait to finish this bagel and coffee – I have to enjoy this before someone kills the whole thing (but how could they really?) and stocks the place full of fucking Marie Clare and Golf Digest.
04:20 PM part of
fragments
I always liked the quiet part of my office once I got it all setup. There was a time after all the boxes had been shipped that I felt simply silly to have spent the amount of money that I had on the desk(s) and the shelves and the machines, but the quiet hum when I get home sounds like an impatient greeting and I don’t feel when I feel like I am still at the office up until I get to bed.
04:19 PM part of
fragments
While waiting for takeoff I was thumbing through a magazine when I noticed an article that was listing the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ professions over the next five years. My eyes probably stopped as they have a few times before whenever they have long articles helping young people to find what they want to do with their lives. I used to buy those ‘best colleges’ reports and just look over the majors looking for something to catch my eye – I guess I was hoping that I would find something that was a nice fit and wouldn’t waste much more of my time:
‘University of Virginia’
‘Undecided’
Average Starting Salary: 65,000
Most of those magazines give you advice based on the fact that you are making your decision of what to do everyday of your life only on the amount of money that you can make over the next five years – like you get all the way to college and then just study the landscape to see where to go for the next forty years. It is, and was, such bullshit that I got so disgusted that I had to order a drink from the stewardess, but she couldn’t give it to me until after takeoff, and since I was in the back of ‘Economy’, the prospects weren’t so good.
04:19 PM part of
fragments
It started out as a strange intellectual fascination and he thought that it continued along this vein much longer than after the point at which it became purely physical.
04:18 PM part of
fragments
After everyone was gone he fell into a common routine starting with rising before dawn and going onto his front porch to watch the sun come up. Most days he would drink a full two cups of black coffee while he watched, but some mornings he would look down into a full cup and watch the reflection off of the top steam. After this he would walk around the neighborhood for a few hours, not stopping at the pharmacy or the newstand or bagel place – not waving at the regular joggers or people opening up shop either. The man who owned the diner waved four times in the hopes that he could grab another regular after seeing him, but did not try a fifth. He would write the rest of the morning in a long journal while sitting on a bench watching the traffic between periods. Every Friday he would go the market and stock up on coffee and wine and he would throw out the full journal on his way out and turn the corner towards his place without looking back.
04:18 PM part of
fragments
A reunion is really a strange place to be when you never really knew anybody to begin with because now you have changed so much that they really don’t know you now either, and the traces from back then end up getting in the way of both of your little social movements and you just can’t get around it. Luckily for her, they were both drinking when he walked over and noticed the memory, and that little piece of complete newness between them was enough to get everything started.
04:18 PM part of
fragments
She had never really understood that part of him, but she kept at it almost everyday in the hopes that she would reach some level of understanding. She would glance over at him and find him making faces to himself like he was watching himself in the mirror right before a big meeting. Most of the time it was while they were just sitting around watching TV – she would feel him moving slightly against her and tilt her head up to see that it was his jaw and neck moving like he was responding to what was said. After awhile she decided that asking him about it would make him either explain it all to her or closet it up. The thought of him having to talk to himself in the bathroom was too much for her, and she decided to just leave it and let him go on with it. It tasted more like mystery that way.
04:16 PM part of
fragments
We were wandering – lost - for what seemed like ages – at least half of our lunchbreak. After making numerous jokes about different peoples areas and a little innocent finger pointing right after we passed people in the long, monchrome halls we simply starting being quiet and all walking in the same direction until somebody recognized the fax machine that was one department over from ours and we all returned to our desks and didn’t talk again until it was time to smoke.
04:16 PM part of
fragments
After he told her to start looking for the patterns she starting notices things that she never had before. While he told her to look for ‘truth and happiness’, she was still just a little girl, and the wisdom was lost on her – all she retained was that he had told her to start looking for things that happened over and over and in the same sequence. In this way she started her obsession with digestion and numbers, and as she would walk down the street she would count the cracks and sub-cracks on the sidewalk, watching in frustration the way that they would split apart and ruin the order of the surface.
04:15 PM part of
fragments
As soon as the bell rang, he felt as if he was already out the door and home. The long walk home for him despite the heat were the most calm moments of his life, and he relished them by stopping to turn down new streets and later alleys and unfenced yards until he looped back around towards his house when he felt that his time was up, where the incredible solitude of not being understood would start up again.
04:15 PM part of
fragments
He would keep it up until he felt silly, and then he would stop for a few days and give it a rest before starting back up. The beginning and the end of each of these phases is when he most felt like a professional, like what he was doing was real in any sense.
04:15 PM part of
fragments
The old man finally drove himself mad, after years of the world attempting nobly to do so, by trying to write a book. ‘Mathematicians should never try to write books’ was the unspoken lesson at his funeral, where the events leading up to his death were painted as the last passionate struggles of a man on the forefront of mathematics and literature, when in reality he had convinced himself that one could write a book by starting out with a word and then simply adding to it every other possible word that would make sense after it. After spending a year trying to picture the first page in his mind, he started inventing a much stronger type of paper that could withstand the mammoth opening that he so vulgarly intended to place on it, and when his relatives were dividing up his inheritance, no one knew what to do with all the rolls and rolls of blank pages.
04:14 PM part of
fragments
All things in the world have been known before at one time or another, people are born and grow in knowledge that has been learned and forgotten again and again with each generation. People don’t read the lessons of the past, and libraries are a simple waste since they only record in a great book of fame those that wrote an old lesson down in a simple, pretty way – but these libraries will be dust again as well and that lesson will never ever be learned.
04:14 PM part of
fragments
The thing that she never ended up knowing about humans despite years of research and even the changing of some of her personal habits to theirs like a fan of a quirky artist, was that perfection for them seemed to lie right in the middle of things, but that they defined themselves at extremes. Most that she met would live on extremes and be proud of their vegetarianism or their love of cars, but most of their moral standards were based on the idea of ‘everything in moderation’. It was quite a paradox, and she had lost many a moon-night over it.
04:14 PM part of
fragments
Her whole life she would tell me stories, although it took me years to really listen. You do, after all, shut out the world during the time that you think that you have it figured out – you don’t hear the wisdom being shouted out at you through your covered ears. The last story that she told me was not told in print or with her soft voice, but through her eyes. Sunken back from the truth, they were staring at everything and finding nothing would return to her hands and then start over. She was mumbling without meaning to my mother and even though I thought she was mumbling ‘help’, Mom said that she was asking for water. Her last lesson was that death is a great tidal wave – she could see it and knew that when it broke she would be alone.
04:13 PM part of
fragments
After he told her his overall life philosophy she tried to follow it for as long as she could. His basic tenet was quite dramatic as six-year old’s statements tend to be (and it was also obvious to most that he had overheard it on the subway): Find truth in most things, and let the rest fall. Since she wasn’t at the level of discovering who was lying to her, she started instead paying attention to patterns in the hope that things that were true would happen over and over again and lies simply wouldn’t work for very long. She had found that lying to her parents didn’t work, but that they remembered when she was honest, so she lived the rest of her life like this and it worked out pretty good.
04:13 PM part of
fragments
The problem with trying to write a letter to God is that it is hard to find your audience. Normally when you write something you have a reader in mind whether or not you realize it. And the problem with writing to God is that you don’t really know your audience.
04:13 PM part of
fragments
He used to get up and run in the morning back when they lived by the water. He would run right between where the water was and where the sand go too thick. The ground there was perfect for running because it was flat and hard and little wet, so the sand didn’t kick up and get in his shoes and give him blisters. The rest of his life running could never really match that.
04:12 PM part of
fragments
The part that his parents never really got was that he knew more than they did. He had seen his homeroom teacher at a party that weekend that he spent with his older cousins, and she was drinking and smoking and bitching. He was never able to get back his motivation after that, and he hated that class. He thought of her at the end of his first week of work.
04:11 PM part of
fragments