a super happy birthday
Last year Superstar got away with a cute cartoon. This year I dig out blackmail from my archives. Hopefully he doesn't have equally flattering photos of me lying around, but even if he does, it should take him a while to figure out how to advertise it on his web site.
Now that's a face only a Jess could love. Happy birthday Superstar, and try not to get too wise. Retaliation is permitted in the comment section below.
Now that's a face only a Jess could love. Happy birthday Superstar, and try not to get too wise. Retaliation is permitted in the comment section below.
fear
I slid head first tonight at hockey, towards the boards, entangled in some girl's skate and stick, trying frantically to turn around before impact. I did manage to get my knee out in front of me, and subsequently hit the boards with that instead of my head. It really wasn't much better, but I skated away from it, my mind replaying the incident over and over again with morbid invention.
I never actually envision myself walking away from accidents though. In fact, as time goes on, I find my obsession with horrible accidents growing to such a degree that I can't stop thinking about them. I still participate in the same dangerous hobbies (and more), but now frightening thoughts fill my head much more often. Getting hit on the freeway, having a horse flip over on top of me, breaking my legs skiing, crashing my bike down a hill, being attacked by killer bees...the list goes on.
Strangely, despite these maniacal fears, I'm still thinking about getting my private pilot's certificate. I've gone on an intro flight with A, who insisted to me recently that there was some kind of giant parachute on the expensive Cirruses that would save you if you were about to crash. Disbelieving, I made him Google it while at his house. We then both stared at several videos of small planes going into death spirals and otherwise falling out of the sky, and giant parachutes coming out of the tail and opening and saving all the passengers.
This $10,000 life saving device, I concluded, is what must make those Cirruses nearly $200/hour to rent. I found myself secretly wishing I wasn't so poor that I had to fly ancient Cessnas that made weird noises through the window seals and that I could barely see out of because the seats were all saggy. But A and I did agree it made no sense to pay to fly the newer planes, when we could learn just as well in the older, cheaper ones. Until the engine dies and we die, I thought to myself. Where's my big parachute? Stop. I knew I had to stop thinking about that, but how? Are we forever prisoners of our fears? Shackled by past experience?
Obviously I'd never been in a plane crash, so I can't exactly say I have a fear of crashing planes because it happened to me before. It's more like, I've had a few wrecks during my various "a little less safe than getting out of bed in the morning" activities, most of which I've walked away from, and now for some unexplicable reason the fear generated from those wrecks has swelled to encompass everything, including things that never happened and even things that don't involve accidents.
My fear of not living up to at least a few people's expectations has now, in my head, reached critical mass. The trouble is, none of these people really expect the ridiculous things from me that I imagine myself falling short of, yet I can't shake the feeling that I am somehow not making the mark. In fact, some of these people don't even know what to expect from me, as they just met me, yet my irrational fear of failure has led to a sort of performance anxiety with no basis other than my "perceptions of people's perceptions."
That I can write with such clarity about this insanity is also disturbing, but I don't think I will even begin to discuss that topic. I've backdated my entry about the company party, because I just had to post this in case I get eaten by wild dogs in the next five minutes.
I never actually envision myself walking away from accidents though. In fact, as time goes on, I find my obsession with horrible accidents growing to such a degree that I can't stop thinking about them. I still participate in the same dangerous hobbies (and more), but now frightening thoughts fill my head much more often. Getting hit on the freeway, having a horse flip over on top of me, breaking my legs skiing, crashing my bike down a hill, being attacked by killer bees...the list goes on.
Strangely, despite these maniacal fears, I'm still thinking about getting my private pilot's certificate. I've gone on an intro flight with A, who insisted to me recently that there was some kind of giant parachute on the expensive Cirruses that would save you if you were about to crash. Disbelieving, I made him Google it while at his house. We then both stared at several videos of small planes going into death spirals and otherwise falling out of the sky, and giant parachutes coming out of the tail and opening and saving all the passengers.
This $10,000 life saving device, I concluded, is what must make those Cirruses nearly $200/hour to rent. I found myself secretly wishing I wasn't so poor that I had to fly ancient Cessnas that made weird noises through the window seals and that I could barely see out of because the seats were all saggy. But A and I did agree it made no sense to pay to fly the newer planes, when we could learn just as well in the older, cheaper ones. Until the engine dies and we die, I thought to myself. Where's my big parachute? Stop. I knew I had to stop thinking about that, but how? Are we forever prisoners of our fears? Shackled by past experience?
Obviously I'd never been in a plane crash, so I can't exactly say I have a fear of crashing planes because it happened to me before. It's more like, I've had a few wrecks during my various "a little less safe than getting out of bed in the morning" activities, most of which I've walked away from, and now for some unexplicable reason the fear generated from those wrecks has swelled to encompass everything, including things that never happened and even things that don't involve accidents.
My fear of not living up to at least a few people's expectations has now, in my head, reached critical mass. The trouble is, none of these people really expect the ridiculous things from me that I imagine myself falling short of, yet I can't shake the feeling that I am somehow not making the mark. In fact, some of these people don't even know what to expect from me, as they just met me, yet my irrational fear of failure has led to a sort of performance anxiety with no basis other than my "perceptions of people's perceptions."
That I can write with such clarity about this insanity is also disturbing, but I don't think I will even begin to discuss that topic. I've backdated my entry about the company party, because I just had to post this in case I get eaten by wild dogs in the next five minutes.
time served, penance paid, redemption
I haven't posted properly in three months about anything, most notably my holiday adventures and my new job. For this I apologize, but only tepidly, since last I checked none of you had a paying subscription to this blog anyway. A few weeks ago I mentioned my tardiness to Superstar, who only answered me with a huffy, "Yeah," over the phone. Since most of these stories include him, my question is, where's his blog? Now that anyone can blog, he has as little excuse as I do for not writing about our trips.
I'm not sure if I should start most recently and write backwards, or begin with the old and end with the new. Since I can't seem to ignore my current afflictions, like this cry-for-Advil body pain after two days of skiboarding, drunkness, and debauchery at my new company's annual ski party, I guess I'll start with that. My first day of work was Monday, and the last day of my first week ended on Wednesday, since Thursday and Friday were spent at Tahoe bonding with people I'd only met three days earlier and existing in a general state of shock about how I managed to survive the past year of my life at Oracle in a sterile cube with no windows and a non-flowering plant for company.
I tried my new skiboards on Thursday, and for anyone who thinks they can't ski or snowboard or are just totally impatient, these are for you. Without sounding like a marketing campaign, I was reborn as a snow rider in just a few hours, after many years of mediocrity on the slopes and many more years of struggling with pants wetting at the top of runs and other accident-induced emotional sports dysfunctionalities. I still never do what's good for me. But if I someday die in a blaze of flaming wreckage and twisted metal, clutching a slice of chocolate cheesecake in one hand and an appletini in the other, well then dammit, at least it was worth it.
Thursday evening I ventured from my cozy hotel to the tents they had set up for the night's celebrations, only to discover a five room pimped out dance club, complete with themes (techno, 80s, country, caribbean, piano bar), girls dancing in cages, neon, disco balls, light effects, buffets, outdoor bar counters carved from ice, and bonfires. An 80s cover band completed the evening, drawing such a huge crowd in the main tent that we jumped and screamed in the middle of a virtual mosh pit that went from virtual to real when people started diving from the stage and crowd surfing over crazed employees. Like a scene from a movie, one minute I'm sitting at a gray desk in the middle of a carpeted walkway, typing "Please send me the component number for your product so I can enter it into the bug database," and the next minute I'm crushed in the middle of a sweltering crowd of engineers, product managers, sales people and all else, jumping in time to the Cure and pop culture and rainbow lights and mouthing the words to "Just Like Heaven." "Did you know you were dancing with Orkut?" one of the designers shouted in my ear over the din of the crowd. I looked over to see the small, wild man I had been gyrating with slip back into the crowd. I wasn't sure if that little fact was weirder than the fact that my totally intolerant metabolism had just handled a vodka shot and I had not yet keeled over in the middle of the floor.
Today I rode the bus home to Mountain View, fading in and out of consciousness while trying to read a book about Big Bang Theory and the history of the universe. I'm in horrendous pain, the kind of pain you can only experience after releasing a year's worth of pent up frustration, bad traffic, and Visio templates. It feels fantastic.
I'm not sure if I should start most recently and write backwards, or begin with the old and end with the new. Since I can't seem to ignore my current afflictions, like this cry-for-Advil body pain after two days of skiboarding, drunkness, and debauchery at my new company's annual ski party, I guess I'll start with that. My first day of work was Monday, and the last day of my first week ended on Wednesday, since Thursday and Friday were spent at Tahoe bonding with people I'd only met three days earlier and existing in a general state of shock about how I managed to survive the past year of my life at Oracle in a sterile cube with no windows and a non-flowering plant for company.
I tried my new skiboards on Thursday, and for anyone who thinks they can't ski or snowboard or are just totally impatient, these are for you. Without sounding like a marketing campaign, I was reborn as a snow rider in just a few hours, after many years of mediocrity on the slopes and many more years of struggling with pants wetting at the top of runs and other accident-induced emotional sports dysfunctionalities. I still never do what's good for me. But if I someday die in a blaze of flaming wreckage and twisted metal, clutching a slice of chocolate cheesecake in one hand and an appletini in the other, well then dammit, at least it was worth it.
Thursday evening I ventured from my cozy hotel to the tents they had set up for the night's celebrations, only to discover a five room pimped out dance club, complete with themes (techno, 80s, country, caribbean, piano bar), girls dancing in cages, neon, disco balls, light effects, buffets, outdoor bar counters carved from ice, and bonfires. An 80s cover band completed the evening, drawing such a huge crowd in the main tent that we jumped and screamed in the middle of a virtual mosh pit that went from virtual to real when people started diving from the stage and crowd surfing over crazed employees. Like a scene from a movie, one minute I'm sitting at a gray desk in the middle of a carpeted walkway, typing "Please send me the component number for your product so I can enter it into the bug database," and the next minute I'm crushed in the middle of a sweltering crowd of engineers, product managers, sales people and all else, jumping in time to the Cure and pop culture and rainbow lights and mouthing the words to "Just Like Heaven." "Did you know you were dancing with Orkut?" one of the designers shouted in my ear over the din of the crowd. I looked over to see the small, wild man I had been gyrating with slip back into the crowd. I wasn't sure if that little fact was weirder than the fact that my totally intolerant metabolism had just handled a vodka shot and I had not yet keeled over in the middle of the floor.
Today I rode the bus home to Mountain View, fading in and out of consciousness while trying to read a book about Big Bang Theory and the history of the universe. I'm in horrendous pain, the kind of pain you can only experience after releasing a year's worth of pent up frustration, bad traffic, and Visio templates. It feels fantastic.
indecisions
kt: you should keep a journal.
jess: you mean, instead of using you as one?
jess: :)
kt: no..
kt: just to have a more object way to view evolution.
jess: but how can i write objective things in it
jess: if i'm not objective
kt: you can't deal with any of that unless you can look at youself from outside your own head.
kt: you can't do that in the present.
kt: but you can do it in your reflection of the past.
kt: if you just wrote they way you feel
kt: and the conversations you had then down.
kt: you would have more to consider then the little you have told me.. and the even less that I remember.
kt: then perhaps you would have made other choices long ago.
jess: you mean, instead of using you as one?
jess: :)
kt: no..
kt: just to have a more object way to view evolution.
jess: but how can i write objective things in it
jess: if i'm not objective
kt: you can't deal with any of that unless you can look at youself from outside your own head.
kt: you can't do that in the present.
kt: but you can do it in your reflection of the past.
kt: if you just wrote they way you feel
kt: and the conversations you had then down.
kt: you would have more to consider then the little you have told me.. and the even less that I remember.
kt: then perhaps you would have made other choices long ago.
on a roll
The photos from our New Years in Las Vegas are already up. And who said having some time off would make me less productive?
catching up
Thanksgiving photos are up on the images page, two months late, but I'm still doing better than B's Christmas cards.
goodbye oracle
I'm done today, outside marble halls and chrome elevators, mahogany conference rooms and sleek dark labs. Sometimes when you stand outside a tower of glass with nothing in your hands but a space heater in a box and a plant with exactly 18 leaves, you wonder, "Will I ever wear my dry cleaning again?" Only time will tell.
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
good or bad
I'm quiet you know
You make a first impression
I've found I'm scared to know I'm always on your mind
Even the best fall down sometimes
Even the wrong words seem to rhyme
Out of the doubt that fills my mind
I somehow find
You and I collide
- Howie Day, Collide
You make a first impression
I've found I'm scared to know I'm always on your mind
Even the best fall down sometimes
Even the wrong words seem to rhyme
Out of the doubt that fills my mind
I somehow find
You and I collide
- Howie Day, Collide
