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10:14am At the office. My last Saturday here, which I'm going to spend cleaning off my hard drive, a process which has taken up a lot of my time this week. When you're on the same computer forty hours a week for almost four years, you tend to accumulate stuff, epsecially when you're a collector like me. Actually, no. That's not the word. I'm an archivist, is what I am. Yeah. That's better. Because the universe never tires of displaying its wicked sense of humor, the only other person here right now is my archnemesis. Over this past week, I've discovered that she has far more of a Machiavellian streak than I'd ever expected, which partially accounts for why she wasn't among those who got the axe. Alas. Murder will out, y'all. The new neighbors move in today, so I wouldn't want to be home anyhow, though staying home relaxed and warm would have been a good thing, since I'm still illish. Woke up this morning with my throat hurting a bit more than it had been these past few days, more of the pokey kind of hurt. Because of this lingering malaise, I haven't worked out in two weeks now. I hate the thought of becoming sedentary again, especially since I'll no longer have the extreme convenience of working two blocks away from my gym. Everything clicked when the company moved into this office last summer, and I'm glad I had the werewithal to take advantage of it. I'm in much better shape now than I was then, the lingering malaise notwithstanding. When I'm finally not-ill again, I know I won't be able to get back into the same routine as before. That's over, because that period of my life is over. I tried to savor while it was happening, since I knew it wouldn't last forever. Indeed, before everything started falling apart a few weeks back, I was feeling genuinely content, and I did my best to exist in that moment. I understand the concept of impermanence, I really do. I was even fortunate enough to get to see Meredith Monk's Impermanence at the Yerba Buena Center with Vash a few years back, since it was part of the San Francisco Performances series, and since they're one of our clients I got free tickets to their shows. I saw a lot of neat stuff that way, including both Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet a couple times each, which is awesome. No more of that. I'm not even sure if they're still our client, any more than I know why we started dropping our clients at all, or if I would still be employed now if we hadn't dropped them. All I know it doesn't matter, because things are how they are. My time here is done. Nothing lasts, and if you're lucky, it'll end while you're still enjoying it. I was with Maddy way too long. (I tried to break up with her a couple times in 2000. It didn't work.) Even if I never love someone as much as I loved Vash, and for as much as it hurt to lose her, I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to love her at all. Now I know how it feels. And I know how fortunate I was to have been employed here. This is when epochs shift, and someday, my tenure at NakedSword and all it brought will feel as alien as my time at CNET with Brian and Pike. And like those days, I'll only know for sure that it happened because I wrote about it. 11:20am My archnemesis left the office. See? Everything goes away. sometime after midnight Back home now. All's quiet upstairs, and there's a car in the garage. I actually don't know if they're home or not, but I'm going to assume they are. Earplugs when I go to bed, just to be safe. | ||
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Friday, 27 February 2009 (madrigals of the rose angel) 10:37pm Though it doesn't pay the rent, I can take some solace in the fact that in the same week that I lost my job, the San Francisco Bay Times printed my picture in the calendar section. It's nowhere near as big or hyperbolic as the picture in when I featured at Smack Dab in 2004 (which is one of my favorite pictures of myself ever, both for how it looks and how it nails where I was emotionally at that moment), but it's nice to know that I'm still a rock star in my own small way, that I'm still in the game after all this time. And I intend to be for a good while longer. | ||
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Thursday, 26 February 2009 (fritter and waste) 8:25am Feeling better this morning, I think. My throat is fine, I'm just a little sniffly, and my eyes greatly scaled back their overnight goo production. Not sure if I'll be going to this gym this afternoon or seeing Raphaela tomorrow, though. (On our last session, Friday the Thirteenth—yeah, yeah—I went ahead and pre-paid for our next appointment, which as yet hasn't happened.) I want to be sure I'm past this before I putting stress on my body again. I have an appointment at Site for Sore Eyes this morning, to get new glasses. My sunglasses are current as of last year, but my regular glasses are several years old and at a few prescriptions behind. My insurance lasts through the end of March, so I gotta get while the getting's good. Hell. I think that means I need to cancel my next visual field test, which is in April, and thus will cost waaaaaay too much without insurance. Oh well. I probably won't get glaucoma. And, hey, if I do, that's what I get for not being vital to AEBN, am I right? 4:25pm This is how my eyes see:
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Wednesday, 25 February 2009 (providence is not earthen) 11:42am My friend and coworker Tor has also gotten the axe. Indeed, all half-dozen or so of us who've been laid off are people I like, which if nothing else makes it easier to bond with them. If they were from the cliques who don't talk to me, well, that would be awkward, wouldn't it? Anyhow, we were asked to leave the office early yesterday (our last day is Friday, March 6) so that the rest of the office could be informed of our impending demise without our living-dead presence rendering the meeting uncomfortable. Sure, okay. We went down the street to the Mars Bar, drank—I originally ordered a White Russian but changed it to a Bloody Mary because, you know, dairy—and vented loudly about the whole absurd situation. The bartender took pity on us and gave us the second round on the house. My second was a orange juice because, you know, alcohol. I did some erranding, then came home just in time to meet the new upstairs neighbors, the boy and the girl. They seemed nice enough, if a little unsure what to make of me. I talked to them in the entryway as I held Perdita, who was a little uncertain about being taken out of the house like that, but it felt important to me to bond with them as a cat person. Though they don't move in until this Saturday, they were upstairs for a little while with my landlord. Footsteps, muffled voices. I just don't get it. How come I never noticed this sort of thing before? I'll have to doublecheck with The First and Maddy, but I'm fairly certain we weren't always aware of every time someone upstairs took a step or cleared their throat. What's changed? Is it possible that material in the ceiling has somehow down and now allows more sound to pass? | ||
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Tuesday, 24 February 2009 (everybody's happy nowadays) 11:31am I woke up this morning around half past five, which is not that unusual, since for the past sixish months that's when I've been getting up to go the gym. But I haven't been working out this past week and a half out of fear of exacerbating this illness. It's mostly just lingering now, an awareness of my throat when I swallow or breathe deeply, and much smaller amounts of ocular goo when I wake up, but the bug is still in me. What work me this morning was footsteps from up above, the cleaning crew deciding to get an extra early start. Can't fault their work ethic I suppose, but frak. I'd gone to sleep without earplugs and with the Buddha Machine and white noise generator turned off, so I turned them on, then went into the living room in search of fresh earplugs. I'd bought some a few days earlier, and I was pretty sure they were in my backpack, which was on the couch. Perdita followed me out of the bedroom and started chewing on a piece of plastic, which is very catlike but very unlike her. Now, of all times? Feeling around inside my backpack for the package of earplugs, I felt something...sticky. No, not sticky so much as soapy. The hell? I pulled my hand out, and the stuff was bluish. Oh, that's right. When I bought the earplugs I also bought a bottle of dishsoap since I was almost out, and I declined a plastic bag because I'm all conscientious and stuff and prefer to put things in my backpack when I can, except then I'd put the bottle in and promptly forgot about it, and now it had leaked. So there I was, noise from upstairs keeping me awake even after the giraffe had gone away, the inside of my backpack soapy, I was still sick, and I'd been laid off the day before. Normally when things go not so well I console myself with the though that at least I'm healthy, or at least I'm still employed. Nope on both counts. Hell, I don't even have a girlfriend on whose shoulder I can cry. (Though the upside of that is not having to break the bad news to anyone. Often the worst part of losing a job this past decade was having to deal with Maddy's explosive reactions.) All I had was the knowledge that I'm strong enough to get through this. Which I am. | ||
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Monday, 23 February 2009 (going up) 9:12am Good turnout at Bad Movie Night for Johnny Mnemonic. It wasn't packed, but it was better than we were expecting between the rain and the Academy Awards. It was one of those rare nights that I didn't host or even sit in the front row in my usual seat, instead either being behind the counter or in the lobby or in the aisle. It's nice to see the show from different perspectives, especially that of the audience having a good time. 2:45pm *THWUNK!* thud-thud-thud 7:30pm These days, when your boss asks you into his office, it's hard not to feel the world drop out from under you. I wonder what the physiological basis is of that vertiginous feeling, if it's an inner ear deal or what. But I had it big time when I got the IM from Officer Dave, and again a few minutes later in his office when he told me that I'd been laid off. It was in fact decided by the AEBN corporate uberlord who visited week before last, though it had nothing to do with me not being in the office at nine that Friday. Indeed, I'm all the more glad that I wasn't here. Rather, it was because of the Global Financial Apocalypse, and after looking at the numbers he decided that I was among the people who could be laid off without the whole company falling down like a Jenga tower. Officer Dave assured me that it had nothing to do with my performance as an employee, and that he (Officer Dave) knows full well what a good worker I am, but it isn't up to him. A few other people are being booted as well, though not my archnemesis, which is either A) karmic retribution for my weird Jungian distate for her, or B) how the cookie crumbled, and since the cookie is going to crumble how it crumbles without without regard to my neuroses, it signifies nothing. I'm going with B for now. I'm being kept on (and paid) for two more weeks, and while Officer Dave has made it clear that they'd like me to still come to the office in the meantime, it won't be held against me if I'm not there all day every day. Like, for example, if I have a job interview or somesuch. Which is nice, but I don't think I'll be taking too many chances on that, either. The carrot that keeps me from going into hardcore "what are they gonna do, fire me?" mode is Officer Dave telling me that if things pick up financially for the company in a few months, there's a possibility that I'll be hired back. I've clung on to more tattered strands of hope in the past (i still love you, pitu), so I won't be burning this bridge. I cried in his office. I couldn't not. I don't have it in me to surpress those emotions, and I wouldn't want to if I could. First time since November, I think. I had an appointment scheduled this afternoon with acupuncturist in the Mission. After getting the news from Officer Dave, I called the her and canceled the appointment, explaining that I lost my job and therefore my budget has shrank a great deal, not to mention that I wasn't sure if I would be able to keep my shit together. (Still don't know what the frak I'm going to do about Raphaela, who isn't all that expensive as trainers go but isn't free, either. Down to once at week, if even that often. It's moot until I'm healthy enough to see her again, I suppose, and it makes me resent having missed three sessions with her so far.) She told me to come on in anyway, and she wouldn't charge me, since I was most likely in shock and needed help. She wasn't wrong. So I went in, and we sat and talked for a while about both my illness and the job loss. She suggested an apple compress for my eyes, put some stuff which reminded me of malfunctioing pop rocks under my tongue, then had me take off my boots and stripeys and blouse and get on the slab. I still wasn't entirely sure if I was going to be able to keep my shit together, and I'd certainly I'd gotten a little teary and sniffly while we were talking (loss hurts, and I cry when I'm hurt), but the fact is I have to do whatever it takes to get healthy again, so I'm not going to turn down a gratis acupuncture treatment. The needles stung a bit more going in than they had on Saturday morning, though there's no telling how much of that was due to my emotional state. I did fine for a while—the way it works is they put the needles in and leave the room, leaving you to contemplate the life choices which have resulted in you lying there with needles stuck in you like a fleshy pincushion—but, inevitably, as I knew I would, my brain started going to all the wrong places and I cried. It started with my remarkably deep ocular cavities (seriously, my eyes are set so far back in my skull, it's like they're afriad of something) filling up with the tears, which then streamed down my face and into my ears. I didn't dare move my arms, what with the needles in my arms and not wanting to mess up the chi or whatever there was to mess up. When your tears are pooling in your ears (for the record, the tears/ears rhyme is unfortunate and unintentional) and you can't do anything about it, it's a mild but exquisite form of torture. There's a lot more where that came from, I suspect. I've spent the rest of the evening at The Dark Room (when I arrived, Jim took one look at me and asked: what's wrong? what happened?), and in a little while I'm going to Pete and Sarah to watch last Friday's Galactica. The ritual should be kept alive. I called my mom a little while ago, which was the first thing I wanted to do when I got the axe this afternoon. Because I'm eight years old, see. | ||
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Sunday, 22 February 2009 (heaven's blood) 4:40pm Perhaps because it's a pretty good way to both procrastinate and be productive at the same time, I've been updating my Flickr page. At the moment I'm just using it as a place to keep track of my diary pictures, and I just finished adding the last few months' worth. It's kinda fascinating to the look at the thumbnails, a six-by-twenty grid of my evolution from February 1999 to February 2009. Fascinating to me, anyway. If nothing else, it's nice to see there is an evolution. The timeline is a bit fux0red, since now and again I had to use pictures which were a few years old and I haven't gone to the trouble to put them in the proper order, but it's pretty much all there. | ||
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Saturday, 21 February 2009 (out of the flesh) 7:52am Not better. Woke up with my throat hurting and my eyelids and lashes lightly sauteed in the goo once more. It's not that I necessarily expected a miracle cure, but I expected to at least feel better by now, and instead I feel like I got shortchanged last night. The person on the phone when I called asked about the specific symptoms down to the color of the eye goo and said they'd make a tincture, but when I got there, they (a very white person, it was a very white new-agey kinda place) pulled a bottle down off the shelf and were all oh, yeah, this'll probably help, handing me what's essentially an over-the-counter medicine, not one specifically tailored to my issues. It was twenty bucks, which would be worse, but still, SHENANIGANS! So, later this morning, I'm going to an actual Chinese herb shop in the Inner Richmond, one which according to Yelp does exactly what I'm looking for, and is owned and operated by actual Chinese people. Does that make me imperialist or racist or something? Oh, probably. Fortunately, I don't care. Acupunture-wise, I'm playing phone tag with someone in the Mission who comes recommended by Cindy, and who can see me on Monday. This means I'll have to cancel with Raphaela again, godsdamnit, but this is an emergency, and even with my high hopes for the stinky herbs from the place in the Richmond (which is right around the corner from Spices! II, no less), I have to operate under the assumption that I won't be ready for her brand of torture by then. I miss it and I miss exercising daily, but I'm not too worried about my body in that respect right now. I feel like I have enough physical karma stored up to get me through this period of comparative inactivity, it's not like I'm shoveling down mayonnaise by the ladelful, and heaven knows I'm losing of plenty of weight in ocular goo. So, it all evens out. 9:57am It occurs to me that this illness is happening on the fourth anniversary of my bout with pneumonia. Coincidence, I'm pretty sure. 9:08pm Never made it as far as the Richmond, since I decided to take my chances on an acupuncture place here in the Outer Lands, a joint so low-key they aren't even on Yelp. (These days, that's like not existing.) Considering that most of the most of the acupuncturists I called yesterday didn't have any openings until next week, that fact that within fifteen minutes of walking in the door I was on the slab with needles sticking out of my body was pretty remarkable. He also gave me some herbage in powder form to be drank as tea, in a bag with my name on it and everything, not just pre-made capsules in a jar off the shelf, either. (I'm not sure why, but that really offended me yesterday.) The First described the resultcing concoction as tasting like dirt, which is an insult to the noble soil, but she's not wrong, either. I don't mind, though. Whatever works. And I do feel better—I'm still a bit congested, but my throat hasn't hurt since I left the acupuncturist this morning, though it's a bit tender when I cough—but I guess the real test will be how I feel when I wake up tomorrow. The noise continues upstairs, surely from cleaning and such. I'm choosing to believe that when the people are actually moved in for real (and their first day isn't supposed to be until the end of the month) that it won't be this bad, that they'll be quite and light-footed like the majority of past neighbors. Fourteen years I've lived this apartment through over half a dozen sets of neighbors, ten of those years without children upstairs, and I never started hearing footsteps and muffled voices from above until these last couple of years? In any event, so much for my theory of a half a month of silence, and (at the moment) I'm not even healthy enough have sex if the planets did align in the next week. Ah, fate. It's nothing if not fickle. | ||
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