Currently listening to: Drive-by Truckers – The Purgatory Line

Met up with A for drinks last night after not running into each other for two years. Oh hey. I’ve followed her LJ in the interim. She’s always up to something awesome and I’m a fan of how she lives and moves.

Some OSS drama ensues. A asked “As in drama that’s being modified by everyone around, or drama-filled open source?” I told her the latter, but the more I think about it, the more interesting the question is.

I’ve been thinking about the drama resulting from my own emotions. I feel like while I’ve accepted that I’m emotionfull, it hasn’t settled right. Like I need to move it a little to the left. Also, A sent me dropout and my recent pick up of Hackers and Painters has started a little conversation of “Uncle Paul’s” essays.

Currently listening to: Whiskeytown – Crazy About You

One thing I remember from watching A Beautiful Mind was the impression that smart people are always walking the edge of crazy. I feel crazy often.

Okay. It’s the first of a new month. Three weeks ago on a Monday I said “Okay heart, fuck you, this week is going to belong to me.” Let’s see if I can make another run at that, since I failed pretty miserably at not falling in love with anyone in October. Interestingly, I have some past and present fronts presenting that I should totally keep my feelings to myself because they really don’t do those people any good, and other people present in my life still maintaining that I should be totally open with them and that they value the opportunity to keep that space for me. Which is totally admirable, considering, but I’m having a really hard time sifting through my emotions deciding if, in the long run, I’ll have a relationship with the desire and emotional fortitude to reciprocate my openness, or if I should learn to live with that not being a possibility.

Or maybe I’ll just cook some wealth, and forget all the girls that made me happy for a while.

My third MFG race was disappointing, as I mentioned earlier. The results are in, and while I didn’t finish, I was the first to not finish, which put me 24 of 43. Compared to 35 of 50 and 33 of 39, that feels like an improvement. I dropped a chain again too. I did finally find a a Rohloff, but it doesn’t fit my clearances. Chain guards appear all to require a further step down in chainring, which wouldn’t be terrible, but I’m almost wondering now if it’d be simpler to just run a double with no derauiller and stick to the lower chainring, using the larger one as the guard. Granted, it wouldn’t look cool at all, but hey, I’m riding a 1985 Schwinn anyway. Go team oldschool beardo. Always nice seeing friends from other scenes in new ones too.

Currently listening to: The air cleaner at Mom’s house

At some point I had disabled new user registration and had forgotten about it. Someone asked me about this recently and I’ve re-enabled it. Those of you new to my journal are encouraged to create accounts and comment when something strikes you and you desire to add to the discussion. You may notice I try to avoid talking about anyone in specific here, if you can’t manage that game you’re welcome to email me directly with your thoughts.

I woke up early enough yesterday to make the MFG CX race, desipte having been up until two or three reading, writing and talking about life, the universe, and everything. I’m glad I got up and went, although I was dissappointed by having to stop a lap short of finishing due to being lapped at the very end, despite not feeling like I was all that far back. I know the leader was quite a bit ahead of the 2nd place racer. I wouldn’t call it sandbagging per se, but the ‘beginner’ category is definitely too broad.

I still felt sad about Friday, and not feeling social enough for the Messquerade, or the halloween party at the Awful Shark, I left town and came down here to Eatonville. I brough the CX bike and did some downhill at Pack Forest, which I’ve meant to do all summer but didn’t get to. I got close one weekend with a friend but he bailed the night before. Which is a funny memory of running into her on a DBB ride. Shit always seems to come in piles for me.

I’ve continued thinking about my emotional trajectory, spurred by events as of late. The implication that there wasn’t any point in talking because I was emotional is… offensive? insulting?… lame, and a self-serving charade for not wanting to feel. Later when I saw her she made a comment about how I seemed better, in relation to being emotional. I was better in regard to being less sad, but I had moved on from considering her a meaningful person in my life, worthy of sharing my feelings with. Which is interesting, because I feel like she somehow expected to be able to get one without the other. I’ve written about this twice (1, 2) since and it feels right.

There’s an email in my inbox since yesterday that I haven’t opened. I’m too letdown to deal with it right now.

Not just adjusted, well-adjusted. More Hackers & Painters quotes, I promise I’m skipping a lot of them,

Back in the era of terms like “well-adjusted,” the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn’t dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don’t think things you don’t dare say out loud.

Oh, and s/thought/feel/, if you know what I mean.

Once upon a time, at the beginning of a phone interview with a company whose name rhymes with Oogle, which of course never happened and I can’t talk about, because Oogle does not exist, never has, operates completely on magic fairy dust, and I had to promise to acknowledge and respect that [1], I was asked to have a pen and paper handy at the start of the interview. I can’t tell you why of course, but it may take the prize of the most insulting experience I’ve had in an interview. Now granted, I’ve had worse requests, but this was insulting because this request was carefully planned rather than being your typical ignorance and falling on swords. Discussions in The Secret Club of Oogle Interviewees (SCOOI) has garnered agreement.

Completely unrelated, a quote from Hackers and Painters:

For example, I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complex program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. The way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of debugging.

For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn’t hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to pgroam in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

Just saying.

[1] Sidebar: maybe you get what you deserve

but sometimes, it is interesting that words are the action. I’ve noticed in a few completely different situations recently that standing up and having something to say is incredibly meaningful.

Currently reading: Hackers & Painters: Big ideas from the computer age

I left out my response to the earlier email, which is the clincher: “Thanks. Good luck.” That’s it. Well, that’s all they got. Mom got, “I miss everything. Bleh.”as well and my journals got much more.

One thing I will never be is adjusted. Happy, sure. I’m often happy. It’s funny being told that they wouldn’t want to be someone sad, by the same person who once tried to convince me that it was okay to feel. Do I, perhaps, live in a far off alien world of feeling where it isn’t only conceptually okay to feel, but also to express how I feel? Is this the product of some sort of guilt about making a nice guy feel sad? Like it’s been easy before, because they were dicks, or because you didn’t give a fuck, but this guilt is all new to you and running away and sticking your head in the sand is the only coping mechanism you have left? Yes, it’s hard, I know. Life is hard. But if not now, when? If not living for this, than what? But yes, I know I am nice, and I know I deserve more than I get. Let’s just accept already that you’re not the first person to say that while walking away backwards.

Yes, my feelings are strong. No, it isn’t a phase. Yes, I’m going to keep talking about them.

Currently listening to: Foo Fighters – Times Like These, Live

I’ve been thinking for some time I need a WP plugin that shows what I’m listening to, I just realized I sometimes try to hard. Of course, over the course of an entry like this, much time passes pondering and writing, consequently so do many songs.

Oh hi. Back, that was shorter than I would have hoped.

A while back I ran into a bike friend at a local bar and she introduced me to her companion by listing off the ways she knew me: friend of meg, seattle bmf organizer, tall-bike builder, etc. Earlier I dropped the f-bomb on facebook with, “Feeling like a solitary wanderer that doesn’t fit right anywhere.” and a friend responded with “…and we love it.” I feel like said friend needs context and as I start in my head: securty cons, burning man, configuration management; I laugh at the inability for that to really convey anything. Sometimes I assume people know me, know how I am, and I start responses with, “Oh, well, you know me…” but mostly I’m just feeling like a square peg right now.

Fixed up a leak on the garage and the smoking shed today, as well as running a number of errands, in between work and meeting Mom and my step-father, a new Seattle arrival, at Squid for lunch.

100% of your previous relationships have failed, and the most common thread in all of them is you.

The strength of my feelings, my comfort talking about them, my gentility, continue to entice and then overwhelm. Did you know amiable is synonymous with nice? Yeah, it’s a good thing.

i don’t doubt the strength of how you feel. not at all. but the idea that we were going to agree to break up is unrealistic given how far apart we were in the emotional trajectory of things. also, in breaking up, i have removed myself from responsibility for how you feel and cope with things. this is why i love your friends and family. however, this is also to say that i’m not really into long emails about us or your feelings as they continue to consume your work day. this is not my role anymore. also, i don’t want to dialogue about how things went down until you’re more stable/happy/adjusted.

I’m not saddened by that message. Was that ever anyone’s role though? Perhaps, before they knew what they were getting themselves into.

I don’t stray far from here for long, this journal’s companionship, the atmo, these patterns. Perhaps if I ever rename it from rants, I’ll call it atmo. It’s survived through accusations and implications of how so many other people feel about it, silently standing by my side when others are too pre-occupied by what it means to them to ask what it means to me.

*sigh*

At least there is still plenty to build to distract me from that reality.

Current mood: distant.