Straight Edge Life

“Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.”

   — Jacques Anatole Thibault.

“You know, if you smoke after having sex, you’re doing it WAY too fast…”

- Anonymous

“One good thing about internet dating: you’re guaranteed to click with whomever you meet.”    

— Mongo.

“MAKE LOVE NOT WAR (see driver for details)”    

— Bumper sticker.

“The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.”

- Confucius, The Confucian Analects

“If a man withdraws his mind from the love of beauty, and applies it as sincerely to the love of the virtuous; if, in serving his parents, he can exert his utmost strength; if, in serving his prince, he can devote his life; if in his intercourse with his friends, his words are sincere - although men say that he has not learned, I will certainly say that he has.”

- Confucius, The Confucian Analects

“If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.”

- Confucius, The Confucian Analects

“Have no friends not equal to yourself.”

- Confucius, The Confucian Analects

“Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.”

- Confucious

“Men’s natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart.”

- Confucius

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

- Confucious

“He who will not economize will have to agonize.”

- Confucious

Sitting at the southbound light at 5th and Washington, a light where all the lights are frequently red at the same time, I look right, left and think about how easily I could be carjacked, and about how much I would lose if that happened… A minute goes by, two, scarier by the minute, and a well-maintained 1978 yellow chevy sedan glides through the red light heading east. Didn’t slow down, didn’t speed up, just glided right through that red and on down 5th. The light turns green and I turn right for another lap around the Washington / Jefferson Bridge Park. I don’t know if that’s it’s official name. I do know that more dead bodies have been found down there than anywhere else in Eugene.

I’m in the parking lot of the Eugene Mac Store sending the photos I just took to my home computer using their wi-fi network. I got an assignment from The Monitor this week that’s as hard as anything I’ve done for them. Alfredo is a great editor but he’s very much an illustration and graphics oriented thinker. Whether or not the photo he’s looking for could exist in reality, if it’s in his mind’s eye, he will ask for it. I love working with him, it’s a challenge every time. And luckily he’s given me a couple of days to make it happen. Tuesday is my deadline. I’ll post a couple of the outtakes once Alfredo’s had his pick. Tomorrow or the next day. Assuming he doesn’t send me out for more photos after I show him what I did tonight. He probably will. Usually does. Actually, maybe I should send him only the worst shots from tonight so he does send me out shooting again. That would make me quite happy and would probably make his weekend a little nervous. It’s always good to make editors a little nervous.

So yeah. I don’t really want to be working today. There’s a whole lot of other stuff I’d much rather be doing. Yeah hey. Like a punk show. I’d be super-psyched to go see a good punk show. Or climbing, or shooting, or just about anything. I’m not sick of work, it’s actually eased up after last week, I’m just restless. Feeling the urge for a roadtrip of some kind. Steve and I have a tentative plan to hit the road as soon as I get my next paycheck. That will be cool, but it’s a vague sort of thing depending on whether or not he is still free to do it and whether or not my paycheck is big enough to cover the trip. Everything is annoyingly up in the air since my expenses just jumped another $500 a month because of this damn car crisis with Nichole. Fuck. Anyway. Enough, back to work.

Dreams. Daydreams and regular dreams. I think it’s something about the big moon this week that makes them so vivid. Even my random daydreaming about getting out of town and doing some photography are vivid. Last night, asleep on the floor in front of the tv, I had trouble distinguishing between what was real and what wasn’t. Thankfully they were all pleasant dreams. Almost as if I was reliving my day again, only everything was going much better than things actually went yesterday. So I woke up just now feeling like the real yesterday never even happened. Wouldn’t that be nice, because yesterday was a disaster. My ex has been failing to make payments on the brand new Jetta we bought right before she took off. That car, which I didn’t even want, is the only thing that still has my name on it. I left myself exposed and it came back to bite me. So my options are either to take over payments or sell the car at a loss. I don’t want the car, and I don’t want the annoyance of being forced to split that loss with her and have to deal with her for another year as we pay it off. I was hoping naively for a clean break from this woman. Not much of a chance of that now.

Well, I wasn’t quite as out of the woods as I thought. It’s not 4:30 in the AM, and I’m just now uploading my files to the live server. Goodnight all. Much love to all those who have been visiting the site. And thanks for all the support lately as well.

But man, oh man, has it been an eventful week. Maybe not so much on the actual event side, but it’s been busy, and a lot has been going on. For one, I spent two hours on the phone with a long lost friend who’s living in LA. What can I say about this woman… She’s a spiritual guide for me, one of the most genuinely attractive and inspiring people I know, a kindred spirit, a photographer, a beautiful soul, and she invited me to come down and get an apartment with her in LA. And I am tempted to do it. But also I know I would fall in love with her if I were to go down there. In an instant. She’s pretty much everything I’m afraid to admit that I really want in the people I want in my life. All the spirituality, all the courage, all the heart. I have never got the feeling that she would also be interested in me in romantic ways, so I dodge the rejection and heartbreak before it gets a chance to happen. How’s that for healthy?

Why is it that I do that? Dodge. I know I’m wary of my gut right now. I know I’m wary of losing myself in a relationship. I know I have so much I want to do that I didn’t get to do because of my last relationship. I know I have legitimate reasons to be hesitant in romance. But it does feel wrong to keep this inside. I really like this girl. I’ve settled for less before because she was involved with someone when I realized my crush. I’ve settled for less because the quality of her character means that I would also have to be of high character. And I’m not sure I have all of that in me. I’m not sure I’m that good of a person. And it was easier to settle for less than to risk rejection. I have nightmares about how people see me. I don’t fear judgment. I fear simply what they notice.

Whether it’s her, or whether it’s the ideal of her, the thought of being with someone like her is a dream I don’t know I’ll ever let myself have.

Maybe I’m just afraid of success. Maybe I’m just heartbroken and feeling pretty burned by Nichole. Who knows. But I’m going to cry if I keep this up. I’m going to be so mad if I don’t let myself find someone again. And I’m going cry if I don’t allow myself to find the person who is deserving of my love.

Strangely, I think this may already be right under my nose in Eugene. A beauty of divine proportion. And I think I’m incapable of seeing it. At least for now. I have to shake this fear. I have to shake this pain. I have to take care of myself so I can trust my gut again. Because it’s talking to me again. And it’s stronger than it’s been for a long time. And I don’t plan to spend this life alone.

8:55:45 PM and I’m finally sorta-kinda out of the woods with this crazy boolean search interface. The trick… perhaps the only really difficult thing in programming, is making the user experience idiot-proof. Whenever you fill out a form online, whenever you order a product from an ecommerce site, whenever you join a chat room, whenever you go a google search and it feels natural… when the technology doesn’t show itself, it’s transparent; that’s the hardest part about programming. Getting it to work really isn’t half as challenging as making it fit into how “normal” people think. And it’s all got to be done without instructions. You can’t put a paragraph of instructions up on a search interface and tell people how to properly enter their search criteria, you have to guess what they will do and program around it. No matter how insane it might be. Because nobody reads the manual. Nobody. And they shouldn’t have to. Such is the life of a programmer.

Ever spent a day building self-generating sql statements based on boolean syntax and regular expression matching? Yeah, neither have I until today. And let me tell you, it’s a party. I’m just getting to know regular expression syntax and, although it’s stunningly powerful, it’s not the most straight-forward stuff when you combine it with map and array building in Lassoscripting environments. It’s not hard, just funky getting used to it. This stuff is so far removed from natural spoken language I feel totally submerged in a different world, and am desperately seeking a way to breath properly. For whatever reason I keep figuring it out and solving problems, and fairly efficiently… It’s just weird because it’s a completely different world. I don’t really have anyone I can talk to about regex matching. /(bb|[^b]{2})/, that is the question.

Ok. I’m sabotaging my work efforts. I didn’t actually watch but a few episodes of 24 yesterday, still I managed to get almost no work done. Too many distractions. Too many big distractions, too many little distractions. I’ve been taking a bit of time to enjoy myself I guess. Which is good. And I have been taking care of thousands of little errands that have been hanging over my head. It’s part of the curse / blessing of being a freelance programmer. I can work any time. And it doesn’t matter if it’s all in one 48 hour maraton or in 8 hour shifts. The client won’t know the difference because the code will be the same either way. So yeah… speaking of distractions. I had better get back to work. As you can see, some of my distractions are not all that useful. Spider photos anyone? This little dude hangs about 8 inches above my head above the toilet. Weee.

And the glue isn’t even dried. Quite literally, the glue is not even dry on my 7 DVD box set of 24 Season 2. Today is a good day. Talk to you all in about 24 hours.

Dude. Borderless printing. This is a GOOD thing. It’s finally been enabled in OS X and I couldn’t be happier about it. Given, I’m going to be buying a lot more ink as a result of this fact, but my setup is starting to feel more and more familiar and comfortable. IE: more and more like a traditional darkroom. It’s exciting. I give it an 8/10 because the documentation is hidden in a random pdf that it deposits on your desktop during install. Find that file, read it, and you will know how to do borderless printing.

It’s funny what running into a bunch of old friends will do to create a whole series of new alliances in social and business matters. Sound vague? It was meant to. I haven’t felt like this in a long while, but I’m tight with a group of friends again and it feels good. Really good. These people understand me. The old me. The real me. The only me.

Based on the number of inside jokes that are popping up all over the place already, I’m going to have secrets and alliances with these friends. Maybe not secrets. But there’s stuff they will know that other’s won’t. Why? Because I trust them. And they know me from a younger time, when I was a different person, and not so weather-beaten or sad. I have a chance with them… More than that, I have the benefit of a better history. Something I can build on using the knowlege I’ve gained from the last 10 years of my life, but without having to relive or be bound to the pain of it.

Friendships are different when you share a lot of pain, or when you simply witness a lot of pain in your friends. It’s different when they knew you before you were bummed out, pessimistic and sad. But when they only know you as sad because they met you after the shit hit the fan (over and over again in my case), you have a lot more work to do so that they see you as healthy. It’s a burden not shared with those who know you before it happened.

The truth with these old friends is that they’ve all been through a lot of shit, just like me, and that’s just sort of a given. But we all know each other before all that stuff had a chance to change us. We have changed, but we haven’t. Does that make sense? We are the same on the inside, but, for me at least, it’s tough to let that shine unless someone already knows that it’s there. Or that it was there. And this is what these old friends provide.

I feel like many of those I met from about a year after high school and before about a month are going to fade away into the background of my life. In that time I haven’t really built relationships. In fact I think I’ve been a pretty heavy burden on my friends because I’ve been hanging on by such a thin thread for so long. I’m partly ashamed at how long it took to get my shit together, I’m partly dissapointed at the shallowness of these relationships and with some of the people I tried to connect with. My now-over marriage not being the least of those shallow relationships. Really. So it’s all good. Or it’s getting better. People are in your life for different amounts of time and for different reasons. I’ve left friends behind before. I’m not afraid to let it happen again. It’s already happening actually.

I’ve kept in touch with a precious few good friends from my high school years, and made a few solid friends in college. Friends who never lost faith and friends who never gave up. But now, as a whole group of old friends come together to capitalize on shared knowlege and shared understandings, wonderful things are going to start happening. Stay tuned. I have more to say on this subject. Much more. Business and pleasure.

“Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”

– John F. Kennedy, speech at The American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963

“We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”

– John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963