Of course I remember you! Are ya really going to be in P-town? Shall we meet up?

I just got a very excited note from a Paul fan. She just received a reply to her fan letter. Not a generic one, but a very specific, personal one, and an autographed photo to boot. Before I did my page, there wasn't a current address for Paul anywhere. Fan letters went to the ether. So now I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes because this fan was so happy, so excited, and it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't done the page and received a good address from Paul.



Goddamn, this is what it's about.

Waiting for one big thing to copy somewhere...what an opportune moment to BLOG.



I've actually had a few Dear Frykitty letters lately. They've been serious ones. I'm too damned lazy to update the page, so I've been answering them privately and casually, without my usual cynical bite. Someday I'll post them. After all, if they wrote me, they must want the world to know, right? Sigh. I'd get so much more accomplished if only I could do two things: 1) Get organized; 2) Sleep. The first one I'm actually pretty good at when I put my mind to it. The second is beyond me.

I'd forgotten about getting back to work and having to answer the "how was your vacation?" question dozens of times. I'm going to start lying now--before I feel like a TOTAL whiner. I'm just happy to be back to work. I dont' mean that in a negative way--I'm genuinely pleased to be back here plugging away.

Yes, yes, I'm okay. I just needed to sleep on it. About the vacation--the good stuff:

• The Long Beach Aquarium. Definitely go there if you can--it's wonderful.
  
• The Ghosts and Legends Tour on the Queen Mary.
  
• Venice Beach
  

The bad stuff:

• Staying on the Queen Mary. Nasty--don't ever do it.
  
• LA County Museum of Contemporary Art when they wipe out their permanent collection for a special exhibit.
  
• LaBrea Tar Pits (yawn).
  

We did a lot more than that, but most of it fell on the neutral end of the scale. What really ruined my vacation was not the awful room and service on the Queen Mary, or the little disappointments. It was going with people that vacation in a considerably different way than I do--charging ahead and never slowing down. My feet were destroyed in the first day, and colored everything thereafter. Also, the people I went with were fine to spend a couple hours with. That's all. After days of them, I was ready to start shooting.



Bottom line: I'm looking for new travel companions. You must be gainfully employed, easy-going, and a kid at heart.



Oh, and the hurt feelings thing...turns out it was probably a misunderstanding. Not on my part, mind you. I thought Paul had hired another designer to do a site for him. The other designer certainly thinks he has. I checked with Paul, and he has no idea what's going on. Could be interesting.

I'm back from vacation. On balance, I'd say it was an overall shitty time with a few bright spots. Then I got home to marginally bad news. At least something that hurt my feelings pretty badly.



So fuck it all. Goodnight.

Dream: I'm leading the Rose Parade through the streets of Portland, but I can't figure out the route and I keep getting lost.



Note to subconscious: Don't you think you're being a bit heavy-handed with the metaphors? Oh, and quit with the grain silos.

Kelly: I noticed Jerwin writing on his chest recently.



Cat: Yeah, a couple of bloggers are doing that. I was thinking of jumping on the bandwagon. I could write War and Peace.



Kelly: Oh, so that's what their names are. I'd always wondered.

So I wandered off to wrap my head around it.



I went into the bathroom and closed the door to prepare for a cat-free bath, when I stopped cold. Dammit! That's what I always do. Escape to "think about it." Run off to some impotent fantasy about what I want to be instead of going out and becoming it. Ruminating about what I want to do instead of doing it. Screw that. No bath for me.



I changed shoes and grabbed some things I needed from the bedroom, then I stomped out into the night. About a half-mile north I found what I needed. A business complex had installed a nice little perk for their employees--about fifty yards of boardwalk right on the river, lined with a waist-high railing, dotted with attractive benches.



I paced that boardwalk three times, terrified. I went through a half-dozen dire scenarios, from losing my glasses in the river to getting caught by a security guard. It all came down to one thing: I knew if I didn't do what I'd come here to do, I would hate myself forever. Resolved, I sat down on one of those attractive benches and strapped on my skates.



I've had the skates for two summers. I tried to use them once or twice, but couldn't overcome my fear of falling. It's such a long way to fall. I used to ice skate years ago. I was fearless. I was into speed--careening between other skaters, falling, laughing, sliding twenty feet on my chin. I don't know what happened between then and now. Maybe I went too many years without a good bruise. Maybe I just got complacent. Thirty-something hit, and fear had stealthily taken over. I hated myself for that fear.



So I bought rollerblades, thinking I'd get right on them and everything would be good. I chose a low-traffic park with a smooth path and little to hold on to. Not a great idea in retrospect. I didn't fall, but I didn't get far either. Into the closet with the skates.



Tonight was different. I'd had enough of being afraid. I thought maybe I'd even throw myself to the ground, just to prove I could fall. I didn't do that. I did skate. I even learned to turn a little, though the brakes still have me baffled. That waist-high railing was key. It's like the wall of the skating-rink that you cling to the first 20 minutes on ice. I skated until my shins were on fire (if you've ever done blades, you know what I mean). I skated more tonight than I have since I bought the blades.



As for the railing...eventually, I let go. Tomorrow night, maybe I'll fall.

Got my review today. Very satisfactory. A new, non-demeaning title, a promotion, a huge effing raise. I should be floating, right?



So here I am, sitting at home, and all I can think of is I'm not the person I want to be. I have more success than anyone in my family. I have a really decent life. I live in a wonderful new apartment in a snooty complex, I have great friends, I do work that I (mostly) enjoy, I have fun hobbies. But I'm not the person I want to be. All I can say to that is:



WHAT THE FUCK DO I WANT AND HOW MUCH OF IT WILL IT TAKE TO MAKE ME HAPPY??



I mean, jeezus! My life is full of great shit. Great. How can I have the gall to be dissatisfied?? 'Scuse me...I gotta wander off somewhere and try to wrap my head around this.

Well, I tried to go see some live dance tonight. Willamette Week's description sounded extremely interesting. Note the price--$12-$24. One would assume that the cheap seats are $12 and the good seats are $24. But no. It's $12 if you're a student. I've been very broke lately, and it took some scraping just to get the $12. But I'm not a student. So with the service charge, the ticket price would have been nearly $30. Oh, I don't fucking think so. In more flush times, perhaps--but not right now. I was pretty angry. Service charges I understand, but this was whacked.



Ah well, had fun anyway. Was out with Chris and her friend Bryon (who is neato skeeto), and we walked around for a while looking for trouble. It ended where all such adventures must end: in a drag bar. Had to leave too early for most of the show, but hey, it was still a nice evening.

It's just another word-replacement thingie, but the funniest thing about this is that it translates "frykitty" as "marijuana cigarettes dipped in embalming fluid, sometimes also laced with PCP".

Feeling like a bit of a fuckup lately. I keep getting little but important things wrong. An instruction sheet on the work webpage. My own email address on PMO. It just seems like there's so much to keep track of, and I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around it. Worse than that though is the fact that I'm messing up because I'm getting volumes of things accomplished. I should be more pleased with my accomplishments! Kudos are rolling in, and things are changing for me. I am happy about it. But those little things nag at me. Damned perfectionism.



Time to spend an hour or two in organization mode.

So much for being a student again. I was verifying the location of tonight's Perl class, when I noticed it wasn't right across the river as it was when I enrolled, but rather more than an hour away. I don't even know if I can get there on a bus. Sorry, but that's screwed up. I'm very angry and disappointed. Bastards. So now I have to find another class. For next term. Feh.

All day long, sitting in my boss' office (he's on vacation) setting up a new computer. My computer. The old one finally died. Unfortunately, I run a lot of things that like to fight. So I've been working on this one computer for six solid hours. I'm bored out of my mind, because a lot of it is waiting for installs. Of course I can't just leave them alone and go accomplish something, because the minute I do, they're whining for some damned file. When I'm not bored, I'm frustrated, because the other lot of it is figuring out why the installs don't work. Oh, and I'm trying a new operating system. HAHAHAHAHA! I'm off my bleeding nut.



Kitty's had a bad computer week.



Last night, I managed to kill my new server for almost three hours. Not bad for starting over from scratch. I suppose I've learned a lot. I don't know about this whole pain-as-a-learning-tool thing.

He slowly comes back. Now we get a picture. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Andre is really cute.



Of course, I should probably shaddup because I get to meet him in a few weeks. Now he's gonna be all uncomfortable.

I'm still deep in the process of learning Flash 5. Actually, I have so many programs and languages and OS's to learn this year that I think 2001 will be The Year My Brain Exploded. But anyway, I just have to say that I'm working through the book Foundation Flash 5 (thanks Paul for the suggestion), and I keep running into these features that are so good. I've had to work with a lot of bad software in my life. Specifically, I've had to support several breeds of word processor, spreadsheet, and other business applications. They're all piles of steaming crap. Macromedia thought this out. It's functional, it's useful, it's intuitive. It's what software is supposed to be. Usually with new software I'm swearing in five different languages--two of them made up on the spot. With this, I'm blowing kisses to my computer. This is buttah.



Dear Macromedia: you deserve a special corner of heaven. Whatever horrible things are done with your software, let it be said that the product itself is wonderful.

Living in an unsafe neighborhood for so long, I had forgotten how delicious the night could be.



A few blocks away, by Alber's Mill, there is a tiny park dedicated to the Liberty Ships built in Oregon's shipyards. It is a graveyard for the concrete-encased bows of over a hundred of these maritime monsters. The park is peppered with informational plaques, a bit of bow, an anchor, and the smokestacks from the Oregon. Behind the smokestacks, facing the river, is a long bench where I sat for a while and watched the shimmering lights reflected on the river, so like quiet fireworks.



The night injects a special kind of life into my veins. A sense of peace with an undercurrent of danger. I'm glad to have my nights back.

They caught me at a bad time, but I immediately did what I could anyway. No, servers aren't cheap. But more than that, I've often thought to myself (though I don't know if I said it aloud) that I would pay for Blogger's services if I had to. The Blogger Server Fund was a chance to put my money where my mouth is. Sure, I couldn't drop in much at the moment because I had to get a few things for my own server on this paycheck. I'll drop back by in a few days though. It's a good cause for folks that have earned it.



I teeny bit of irony (I think): I actually did all this yesterday. Blogger wasn't working at the time, so I couldn't blab about it.

Warning to fry-fans: expect downtime soon. I'm not sure how long this place will be gone--or even if there will be a problem. I promise to get up and going again ASAP.

Wow! Jerwin redesigns! What a treat for the new year. It's gorgeous, dahling.

I think last night may have been the first time in my life I didn't stay up for New Year's. It wasn't cynicism or disinterest, I wasn't even that tired. I've just had to work so much in Sydney time recently that my brain had already rolled over. I was the Yahoo! Australia daily pick for 1 January 2001. I'm contstantly searching and posting news items in a timezone a day ahead. To keep up, I have to know when they roll over.



So does this mean I've freed myself from the bonds of time, and will live forever? I hope so!