is a blog by Brendan
Dear gentle reader: this blog has been operating continuously since I was a teenager. The writing below is at least a decade old. In that time every molecule of my body has been replaced, along with many foolish ideas and flighty beliefs. I want to keep some of those things public out of an honesty and humility I owe the world. I trust you to carry that context with you.
Bleagh. The facility from which Deep Fried, my current and past webhost, rented its space is filing for bankruptcy. The admin at Deep Fried is going to shut down his hosting operations (and it’s lucky I started trying to track him down, or I probably wouldn’t have known about this until my site suddenly disappeared). I’ve got everything copied over to PHPWebHosting now, but the domain transfer is looking to be a pain in th’ butt. I’m being forced to save local copies of all my journal entries, since I have no idea when xorph.com will suddenly start pointing somewhere new. When it does I’ll be unable to get to the old files, which means no copying. This is dumb. At least I managed to get out of going through the default, register.com.
Anyway, yeah, expect continued hesitations in content. I don’t much like the situation, but hopefully this will allow me to stave off another site move for a few years (at which point I will have a million dollars, and will buy my own damn dedicated server).
I hated “Too Little Too Late” for a long time. After he picked up the album at Sam Goody in what, September?, Jon left it in his stereo most days; since it doubled as an alarm clock, we’d both wake up to that raucous opening riff every morning, puffy and tired and grouchy. I really resented that guitar, and even though I loved the album, I had to skip the first track to listen to it.
That was the Autumn of Sleepovers, when everyone in our little accidental clique ended up in bed together in some kind of combination. It was all very innocent, except when it wasn’t. And it was all very intimate, and a little desperate, in ways we couldn’t see at the time.
We never had any intention of becoming as self-involved as we did, but that’s the way structures function in small, overeducated, post-adolescent Western society. It tightened until it snapped, and after that we were both more free and more disparate.
I never had any intention of going through an experience like that, either, but I did. I learned a lot when I didn’t think I had much left to learn. I came out the other side still angsty, of course, but I’d grown; I’d also learned how to express myself in cartoons and small sentences. A year later I started this journal, in the small warm shelter of a dorm room shared with Jon and Amanda and sometimes Ken, and the urge to write had some of its origin in the fall of 2000.
I listened to Maroon for the first time in months today, which maybe wasn’t the wisest idea. I’m still at the office, and it’s all very vivid now: nostalgia, unfulfillment and ache.
Amanda, Tara, Lauren, Alison, Rachel, Darren, Ken, and most of all Jon: Forgive me this outburst. I miss you. Come back.
My boss just officially pitched me the do-you-want-to-keep-working-during-school question, and I’m torn. Working in a cube isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot more comfortable whatever retail or counter job I’d otherwise have this fall. Plus it looks a lot better to have months of programming experience already on your resume, even if it’s just as a part-timer.
On the other hand, I don’t like this job. The people are great and the environment is comfortable, but the work is boring, boring, boring and I’m only even halfway talented at it. At least if I (hypothetically) work at a bookstore I’ll be busy and competent, even if I’ll also be on my feet all day.
I just want to DO stuff. I want to be minting clean lean extreme code, not patching bugs in this enormous ugly proprietary system. It makes me tired and I look for distractions, and with broadband right here at my workstation, that’s not good for my productivity. That in turn makes me feel guilty about my work ethic, which makes me more stressed, which makes me tired, lather and rinse and so forth.
I know that I’ll probably start out bug-fixing wherever I go, so I should probably get used to it. The other thing, though, is that I have no idea what my workload is going to be like in grad school; my boss would clearly prefer that I keep my job uninterrupted, just dropping down to part-time, but by the time I get to midterms that could very well kill me. I don’t like taking twelve hours out of my day now, and I don’t want to find out what it’d be like to do that with homework. Also, I’m REALLY tired of getting up at 0630. I want an evening shift.
(It occurs to me that I’m posting this from work, and there exists the possibility of a random IT guy picking it up on a sniffer and sending it back to my boss with a cocked eyebrow. Just in case: Hello, IT guy! Your sister was great!)
Forty-five google minutes later, I’ve got a list of ten book or comic stores I could bus to. I think I’m going to make a bunch of phone calls tonight. At least thinking about this got me to dust off my bum and actually start thinking about what I’ll be doing in the fall. Sometimes questions find answers.
There’s one other thing to consider, too: if I keep up my secret practice project, it shouldn’t be too long until I’m confident about writing publishable short fiction. I know the money’s not great, but it beats all my other options until they spit candy. I also know that chances are slim, and that everybody and her grad school duck tries to write short fiction, but I do have one little in: not everybody or her grad school duck knows Nancy Zafris.
At least I’m in process now, which I think is the important thing. I could live on just my student loans, but I’d rather not, and it’s nice to be able to buy a comic book once in a while. I just need to figure out how and how much I can work. Hey, old people, anybody want to tell me what to do?
I got about seven hours of sleep last night, and today I feel AMAZING. For the first time in weeks I didn’t fall asleep on the bus in to work, and I have no urge to hide under my desk and nap now. I even want to actually do work more than usual. I honestly can’t remember what it was like to regularly get more than four hours, even on weekends; was it always this good? Man, I must have been spoiled.
I joke about it a lot, but the fact is I’m pretty thoroughly and seriously sleep-deprived, and I’m starting to actually believe it affects my functionality. The problem is that, with travel time added in, I spend almost twelve hours a day preparing for or actually at work. I have one hour in there, during my lunch break, to do anything that doesn’t involve staring at a screen–and of course, when I get home, I do even more of that. I want to do other things, running and drawing and working out and cooking, and I only get from 1800 hrs to whenever I go to bed (ideally, 2200 hrs; realistically, 0200 hrs) for them.
Genuine insomniac Maria will probably blame herself for keeping me up, but it really has little to do with her. It’s been this way all summer, and in fact during most of senior year. Actually, the whole thing probably started junior year; sophomore year was the last time I remember regularly getting eight hours.
Man, this post kind of got away from me. All I meant to do was note that I felt really good after a good night’s sleep. I really am looking forward to school starting, because for the first time in my academic career, I’ll have no classes that start before 1100 hrs.
It occurs to me that it’s only a matter of time until there’s a movie adaptation of The Bean Trees starring Ashley Judd as Taylor, and yea, my heart is like unto a cold sad rock in my chest. I liked that book. (I like Ashley Judd, too, just not when she’s acting.)
What sucks is falling asleep on the bus to work, which I intended to happen, and waking up with a big drool-blot on the front of my shirt, which I did not.
Okay, one more nitpick. From Jon:
“… a Danville Cracker Barrel restaurant has been unwittingly selling postcards of Louisville’s skyline, emblazoned with ‘Lexington.'”
Danville: Home to Centre College. Host of a 2004 Presidential Debate. Thanks, Danville. Danville.
We spent all of yesterday moving the entire world from Richmond and my old apartment into the new apartment with Maria. My forearms are killing me, and our living room is choked with stuff, but my room actually looks fairly good and my bookshelf is full.
I literally did move everything I own this time; I no longer have any possessions in Richmond, and only a few boxes in storage. There was a big ordeal with getting a moving truck (notice: when U-Haul says “your reservation is confirmed,” what they actually mean is “eat a fuck, shitbrains”), but Ian’s roommate’s family had one that was bigger than what they needed and they were kind enough to help.
So it all worked out eventually, but the process took so long that it was 2030 hrs by the time Mom could head back home. Needless to say, it was also a little late for me to go home and pick up the half-day of work I’d wanted. That’s why I’m in the office alone on a Saturday, putting together my presentation for the CEO ‘n’ company on Monday morning. The fact that I’m in the office is in turn the only reason I can post this, since we have no interweb at home for the moment.
Why isn’t there some source of free crappy broadcast interweb, like there is with TV? Ad-supported. Big networks. Come on, it would be so convenient for people who just moved in.
Also, why not make cell phone rings work like my cell phone’s alarm? It starts off by vibrating, then gradually makes its beeping louder and louder until you wake up. It obviously isn’t hard to do, and that would give you a little notice so you could go for the phone before it just jumped in at the same annoying volume immediately. I hate cell phones. I love my cell phone.
Probably no more activity until Monday at the soonest (although of course I make all my posts from work now anyway).
This is how I graduate: the only Centre commencement in living memory on which it has rained, in alphabetical order yet in the middle of the pack, ending up shivering in the library halfway to the auditorium, which was in neither the sunny nor rainy day plans. Our baccalaureate speaker was a fervent liberal and our keynote speaker a stolid conservative; hackles were raised at each and both. I tried to dry the rain off my glasses and found that polyester robes don’t soak up much.
My apartment has been messily slaughtered, furniture shoved and stolen and hidden mold revealed. One more time I’m the last one to move out. The walls are bare, and most of what I own is in piles on the floor. I’ll never live with Jon or Amanda or David again.
I said goodbye and soon to many, many people, and went to my uncle’s house to see Ken, Jon and Emily one more time and to be astounded by the generosity of my family. I fell asleep sitting up before we came back here. I’m going to pack all night and leave in the morning, which I was explicitly told not to do.
Those of you who know me from my first Governor’s Scholars Program will be gratified to know, I hope, that I brought an umbrella onstage with me at the ceremony. As we were leaving, I ended up facing the wrong way and didn’t notice I was supposed to be moving for several long seconds after the rest of my row had gone. I jumped and cursed onstage (at my own commencement) and scrambled out. I was so flustered I forgot the umbrella.
On my way out to meet my family I stood for a few minutes on the stage in Weisiger. That was the first place I found myself on the first day of GSP, here at Centre; I stood in the dark, having come in out of the rain, and wrote about quiet stages on a chalkboard. Later that night, Milton Reigelman would point it out in his opening convo speech, and I would feel a strange mix of shame and pride at having something I’d written read.
This is how I graduate: I am bone-deep nothing-left weary, and I have miles to go before I sleep. I know my time here is done and I am satisfied with it, and I’m ready and willing and glad to go. I’m hurt and hollow, childish and scared. I want desperately to put off the deep wrench I’m feeling, because it means I’m really leaving home.