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For the week of june 29, 1997
Schedules. Always try to stick with them. And when you don't, your whole world gets turned upside down. Decided, after much back and forth, to go visit a friend up in boston this weekend. Haven't really done anything like that. Ever.
Decided pretty much the night before, did the ham radio stuff I was going to do in the morning. Hopped on a train that afternoon, and got up there that night. Took me quite a while to actually get up and do it. Went through a whole range of "is it worth it?" type arguments. And then realized that what the hell, life's no fun if you don't make it fun.
Besides, my parents and sister are taking off to go tromp around Europe for a couple of weeks, leave me here to work and take care of the doggies. So i'll be trapped here for a while.
Heh. Come visit. I'll be lonely. Just me and my computers. Bwahahah. Should give me time to deal with all the projects that I've been putting off.
Okay, fine. Who am I kidding?
Ah right. Boston. Remember, whereever you're going, alway take time to look out the windows. Maybe you'll see the same guy I did, standing along the side of the tracks, nobody else around, just watching the train go by. Gotta wonder what he was doing.
If you ever get the opportunity to take some time off and be a kid for a little bit, try it. It's great fun. i don't think we really succeeded, but at least we tried. Playing with those big lego type things was pretty cool. Though I noticed that all the adults around who were building things always went for the nice, stable, structural forms. You know, wall-type things.
The kids were doing more color matching or pattern stuff. More creative, less focus on structure, more on aethetics. Or something like that. The grownups built walls, the kids built pyramids. I don't know what this says about anything, but it was interesting.
Only other thing that really stuck out in my mind was the Japan display. A whole section dedicated to Japanese culture. Don't really know what it was about it that I didn't like. Maybe just the fact that they presented all japanese as, well, exactly what common stereotypes would expect them to be. And granted, the culture is very different. But still, when I was in Japan, they weren't all freaks.
You wouldn't know it from seeing this exhibit though. I don't know. Kinda had to have been there I suppose.
Time for sleep now. Not really too much that I've found I want to talk about. The weekend was really nice. And I got to spend time with a friend who I hadn't seen in about half a year. And, when you get down to it, that made the entire trip worth it.
Amtrak. Making the country just that much smaller.
wednesday, july 2, 1997 almost 00:00
*sigh*
There's nobody around to talk to, and they're playing the new Hanson song on the radio. I don't think things could get any worse at this point.
Okay, fine. Things aren't really that bad. And, in fact, I thought that I was doing pretty well yesterday. I thought that, of course, until my friend informed me that I sounded depressed. Wow. That's not at all what I was going for htere. I guess it just came out.
Oh well. The 'rents and my sister took off today to go on their vacation. They're going to be a while. And I think that this is the first time that they've ever left me going anywhere. The last few times it's been me going up to school. And the action's been me leaving them. This time, I helped pack up the car, I watched them drive off, but it was me that was left behind to deal with things the way they are.
This time I'm the one left behind. Dunno. This is the first family vacation that I can remember that we weren't all together in, as a family. No complaining that we didn't want to go sightseeing again. No dealing with Mom and her camera.
This was basically my own choice. I'm here because I'm working and because I chose to stay behind. I don't think it's really too big of an issue. Just interesting to think about. The way the things that I'm used to are constantly changing.
Or something. I suppose I'll just deal with things one step at a time. (easier to think about that way)
Step one: sleep.
07:23
I think that I'd better stop writing when I'm so tired. Just a thought. Seems that I'm just writing to write. Let's try something of substance later on. Yeah. That's the ticket.
This is going to be a short week. No work friday, skipped monday. Damn. Might actually get the wiring done in my house. If I set my mind to it. And if there's nothing on TV.
Oooh, went to see Men In Back tonight with mike and his sister. Turned out to be better than I thought, and it's a movie that we both ended up liking, which doesn't normally happy. Case in point, Mars Attacks! I thought it was the funniest thing in the world. I mean, come on. Cows on fire. That's funny.
Mike (and Russell, for that matter) decided that it was stupid.
I suppose that's what makes us such good friends. That is, the ability to think the others are complete morons. Yessire bob.
Before that, work. Interesting today. Finished up some login scripts (after much muddling through). How exactly does Microsoft get away with distributing a resource kit and then not supporting some of the software in the package. I think everything's working now, and all I have to do is make it look pretty. It is only a login script and nobody's going to be paying that much attention to it, but I think that it should at least look nice and clean.
Heh. More tweaking.
I like this work. Not sure whether I like it more than I like real programming, but I suppose I'll just have to look a bit more. Today at work we had a lot of fun. After getting the login scripts to work, we poked around in the ceilings running network drops to some of the offices on campus. Doing this network stuff is a nice blend of software/hardware work in terms of how much goes into putting up a network.
Maybe this is my calling. Or a calling. Or something. We'll see. I'm going to make sure that I have fun at work tomorrow as well.
My father would read through these entries and tell me that I did my best writing between the hours of 3 and 5 in the morning.
That was during the school year.
These days I'm just more tired.
I never really realized how lonely it is by yourself. Now, this is nothing at all like school. Up at school, there are no parents around, no family, and yet there are people around. There are things to do. You can keep yourself busy so you're not thinking about how lonely you are.
But here. Now. Myself. It's lonely. And there's really nobody to talk to. Even thinking about people I could call long distance, I don't think that there's anyone that I really want to talk to.
Or anyone who'd really want to talk to me.
Don't really use the phone up at school. Either we see each other, or we'll talk to each other through the computer. Phones are used only for conveinence, to arrange meetings and the like.
Conversation over the phone? Unheard of.
So it should seem obvious that now, when I need to talk, this is not the way I want to go about doing it. I can't just "call someone up to chat." It just doesn't happen in my world. And even if I feel like it's time to talk, that I could in fact use the phone just to chat, I don't. I'm just not used to it. It just won't happen.
But that leaves me, morning of the fourth of July, lying in my bed, trying to think of someone, anyone whom I can talk to. It's not so much the being alone thing. I'm pretty sure I can deal with that. It's the fact that there's really nobody to talk to.
Ever see The Shining?
"Heeeere's Johnny."
I'm not exactly sure how it got this late. I was planning on going to sleep a couple of hours ago, but all of a sudden I started writing some email, playing around with the computer, and *bang*, lost a couple of hours.
Reinstalled linux on my machine. Still haven't gotten it completely working, but that's okay. It'll happen eventually. Whatever. No more computer talk for now. I'm tired of it. All week with those things, I need a break. Not that I'm going to get it. But I can always pretend.
Just realized that this is the second Fourth of July that I've spent without my family that I can remember. First was when I went to sleepaway camp for the first (and last) time. It was some awful sports type camp where we had mass every Sunday and all that good stuff. Not my kind of place. Sure, I had a bit of fun, but after that summer I figured that enough was enough.
But yeah, I think that was the last time that I wasn't with my family. Remember one summer we were in Budapest. There was a palm reader there who said that I was going to end up having two wives and a whole bunch of kids in my life, and that someone was going to kill me.
Just what I wanted to look forward to.
I don't believe it. But who'll have the last laugh if it ends up true. Regardless, I've still got a while to enjoy myself before any of that happens.
These days I've been worried about that whole "love" thing again. Worried not so much about not falling in love as not recognizing it when it happens. Or seeing it, but blowing it off because I think that what I happen to be feeling couldn't possibly be love.
Being alone gets your brain start thinking. Sometimes a good thing. Often times not. I really should stop dwelling, but I can't seem to.
There just doesn't seem to be anything better to worry about these days.
Now that's something to worry about.
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