A Me Grows in Brooklyn

Ah Brooklyn! I moved out here August 1st and just now have gotten around to blogging about it. Proscratination or just busy? yes.

So coming out to the Big Easy...the Windy City...the Last Homely House East of the Sea...has been an adventure. When I first moved here, I wasn't expecting much since people said that New York was composed of five burros:

Since then, I've learned that each burro is evidentally actually a large city. I enjoy it here, though Leonard Cohen's song keeps running through my mind:

New York is cold, but i like where i'm living --
music on Clinton Street all through the evening

I just finished my new olde-fashioned blogging software, so hopefully I'll be blogging more. Or at least making my blogging software ideal for me. In the mean time, check out my cat Lilly's blog about the move from her perspective.

I'm sitting in the train at Huntington station awaiting the long ride home. I've just said good-bye to Shawn, over tears, and can't think of anything to do with my feelings besides write them down. Shawn might be pregnant -- probably not, but maybe -- and the possibility has gotten us talking about our future. A future that has been saddened by her allergies to my cat. If she is pregnant, she can't live with me because of Lilly. I suppose some people would consider me callous at not wanting to give up Lilly, but she's my best friend! She's loved me and been there for me when no one else was. And I love her very dearly. Even if I knew someone I implicitly trusted to take care of Lilly it would be so fard to give her up. And there is no one on this coast that would. Maybe anywhere. So then comes the sad possibilities of an abortion or raising a child apart. Both of which are too horrible to think about. And what if Shawn isn't pregnant? It seems we're confined to be apart -- to live apart, to not take any chance of conceiving. Its as if we have to love each other through glass walls. So we talked about being `just friends', words that sound so nice but seem so sad. Shawn can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, but as many times as I told myself that it would never work out, I care deeply for her. And I don't want to leave her. Not like this, especially. But do we continue to tease each other? To talk about a life together that cannot be? I don't know. I guess we'll have to wait for the test results and figure out where we're going from there. It was hard to see her cry. I tried to comfort her with empty words, saying that we'd be friends so there was no reason to cry. But it was meaningless. Sitting on the train, looking at where her Konky car had been brought back memories of when she first picked me up from the train. We were calling each other in the station, trying to figure out where we each were. I got in her car thinking that the date would be quick. I didn't guess that I'd grow feelings for her or her for me. And I remember the picture of her eyes peering out from behind her Ice Bat that seemed so full of life and imagination. And they were the same eyes that I saw crying in her car. Attachment is rough. I don't really know what to do. But I guess there is nothing to do except let fate take its course.

Things are going okay. Well not really. Shawn broke up with me. We almost lost our friendship over the fallout.

I had my first real problem with work today. I was supposed to install Trac on our production machine, theman. So Ian gave me the configuration detals and, after a week's work (more than I would prefer admit) I was ready to roll it out. So I mailed Scott and asked him to install the software that we needed on theman. This was supposed to roll out today. Last night, Scott sends out an email that suggests a setup that is different from ours in every way. So I send an exasperated email to Scott and the dev list basically saying (if I may paraphrase), `Look, I lost a week of time. We need to figure out our communication here.'

As is probably self-evident, I'm no diplomat. But evidentally I was undiplomatic enough for Whit and Ian to both email me back and tell me how uncouth I was. Now I'm worried about getting fired and all sorts of other things. And if I do get fired, I have no money, so I'm doomed.

Well, that's today's fun lesson. Hasta la bistro.

I broke up with Shawn last night. I feel horrible about it. I was just trying to protect myself and Miss Lilly, as my next several months will be pretty hard without any money and without being able to take Lilly to the vet. But maybe I did run away. Perhaps it is for the best. She said that she didn't want to feel as disposible as she feels around me. And sadly, that is fair. I used to be a good boyfriend. Or at least I thought I was. How did I become so horrible? I hate myself?

She encouraged my bad habits and less my good ones, and I her as well. I wanted to tell her, ``Once we're free of debt and you're free of your mom, we can get back together.'' But she would have called that bullshit and that's what it is.

I always feel on the defensive around her, and that can't be good. I understand that she comes from a background where she is used to being oppressed, but I feel like she takes it out on me. To me, equality is one of the big factors in a relationship. And I don't know how this can be.

I don't know what I want. Sexual relationships seem to be the only really close form of human contact that has meant anything to me. And not even many of them. But since sex is a vehicle of procreation, and I don't want to procreate, how should I feel about that? And if I am to not be in a relationship, shall I just grow old alone? Wither in the shadows while those around me have their lovers and friends?

I wish I knew what to do. I feel so helpless, fragile, and the air around me feels thick and black. I really hate myself right now. I feel I don't deserve anything nice and that my parents were right when they said, "You're Satan" and "All girls are cunts." Why would anyone want to put up with me? Am I capable of anything but hurting myself and others?

I miss you, Shawn. I love you.

Having done no small writing on the Kain story, I've been reflecting on how my ideas on the writing process have changed of late. I remember watching Naked Lunch and hearing Keruoac's character say something like, ``Editting is censoring your most primal thoughts.'' And as a naive 20-year-old, I was eating it up, thinking, "That is so true. Down with editting!"

Yeah, right.

I wrote a page or so yesterday that I am proud of. And I know, for a fact, that it needs editting. I guess, getting older and deeper into the process, I become more interested making the best possible product -- that is, the text -- than any such aloof considerations as 'This is how the writing process should work.' I've been reflecting similarly regarding programming and am amazed how similar the treatments of process are.

Ultimately, it comes down to that you have a vision. You have a place you want to get. If you don't have a clear vision, that is okay, but that is important to realize to, as the vision == what you want out of the process and you can only ever possibly get what you want. So you want to get from square one to where you want to go. The ideal process is the one that most efficiently gets you there, without cutting any important corners. Everything else is ideology.

Why people become pessimists:

Someone comes around and says, "Hey, I have this great idea! Its going to work well, its new, its novel, and it'll be done in a month." People say, 'okay, great'. They start on it.

Three months later, its not done. Its not nearly as cool as it first seemed, just more of the same. Its not working well. And there's no end in sight.

After people have heard the idea pitch enough times, they stop listening. They assume one month is always going to be three months. 'New and novel' is always going to be 'not-new and works-funny', and optimistics are deceivers, whether intentionally and just naively.

While this isn't entirely fair, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that optimists don't understand the pessimists. They have their beautiful hopes and dreams and don't understand why these whethered pessimists won't give them a chance.

Its not that they don't want to. In my experience, and for me personally, I'd like nothing more to find that one exception that proves that my pessimism is sometimes too much. The problem is that they are so often right its hard to try again with an optimistic attitude.

So what can be done about this? I guess if I were an optimist, I would say that the optimists should try to understand where the pessimism is coming from. There's much to be learned from pessismists -- not those that decry the world for every little woe, but the ones who have just seen failure over an over. They know how failure works. Beleive me -- I've seen failure enough to give you all the warning signs. I can't tell you how to make a better ship, but I can give you all the things you don't want in a ship, and I can tell you when you should really worry about how much water you're having to bail out.

But I'm not an optimist. I think that sadly someone's going to have to show me the way. I'll try to keep an open mind. I'll try not to shut up when people say "oh, you're just being pessimistic" when I'm trying to convey something important. And I'll try to give everything I put effort into as much as I reasonably can. But I'm waiting for that captain that'll listen and lead wisely. Until I find a ship where I don't have to spend every waking minute just bailing out water, until we can actually voyage out to sea without having to fear that the ship is falling apart constantly, I'm going to stick to what I do best. I can work fine on my own. I'd like to think that I could work fine with others if the environment was right. But my pessimism warns me that that may not be.

Green tea can be harmful in large quantities

What a surprise! Yet another instance of science saying 'this thing is healthy in x amount'. So people say, 'wow, ill take 100x amount', then science says, '50x amount isnt helathy', and people say, 'wait a minute...i thought you said it was healthy. youve tricked us again, science!'

science is so fickle. i think i'm going to go drink some red wine. that's healthy, right? since i want to be at my prime before work, i'll drink a gallon.

This time I have an excuse for not writing -- I moved. To post-industrial Bushwick. Moving is hell, but I love the neighborhood. Most of the time, anyways. It reminds me what I imagine the Mission was like 'back in the day'. Shawn hates it however. ::sigh:: Shawn and I remind me of the song of the Ents and the Entwives. What one loves, the other likes not. I like wilderness. Shawn likes gardens.

Moving is hell. It'll take forever. Work goes...eh. I like to think I am a pretty good programmer, but it takes forever to do what seems it should be so simple. I'm going a bit nuts over it, truth be told. I guess I need to take a step back and take it easy. But I guess I still have the fatal flaw of liking to program.

My kitty family has grown one larger! Coco...aka Hobbes...has come into my life. Shawn and I were going to PetSmart to look for cats. I didn't think she'd actually encourage me to get one. But I was playin' with the little guy and he cried when I left. What a little scamp! He's wild, and plays all the time. He'll even hand upside down from a chair and attack it!

So brings us to Midsummer's Eve!

There is nothing more beautiful than a blank page. To mar it with words -- such is dissidence, noise propagating noise in endless echo. Will we ever tire of brute facts and syntax and fiction's attire. Nothing but to fill the space after the comma, all of life's meaningless, nothing but drama played out in fields of twiddling minds; we planted a harvest and just got mankind. Why do we care that the ground is so bare? Should we take the time to paint the world with poetry in somewhat broken rhyme?

I think not.

And so I will stop.