August 23, 2000

those passing decades

Here's a little bit of information not calculated to interest anybody whatsoever. Excite@Home just signed on its 2,000,000 broadband customer, which makes it the leading broadband supplier in the United States.

Want to know what the stock is at today? 14-1/8. It's actually dropped. Unfathomable are the ways of the stock market. How grateful I am that I don't have a clue. I think if I did, I might actually give a damn.

The way I spend my first two hours at the office pretty much dictate what sort of day it will be for me at work in general. (Oh, how cute. Fred's hind leg is dangling off the edge of my terminal. He looks like he's just hangin' out.) Yesterday I spent the first two hours reading Internet Requests For Comment, which -- as anybody who is serious about learning about the Internet knows -- are the standards written up for the Internet by assorted experts, codified into common across-the-board requirements. These are intelligent minds behind these documents, mind, and a lot of these are full of fascinating and useful information. The bad thing about is that they were writing for posterity, and so were weighed down with the need to make the reading as dull as humanly possible.

By the end of the first hour, my head was wobbling on my neck like one of those plastic hula dancers you stick on your dashboard if you lack taste. By the end of the second hour, I was down to reading the same sentence twelve or more times, just to register beyond the first two words.

The rest of the day was spent in a drowsy haze; people had to repeat things to me multiple times in order to get my attention. I was sound asleep on my feet, and every time I passed a patch of sun, I'd stop and just stand there, staring blankly into space like a dog hitting a brick wall.

"You're like a lizard, Yuhri."

The building receptionist accuses me of being cold-blooded. But then, he doesn't have to sit back here in the freezing air conditioning. He gets to be out there in the sunshine, next to glass windows.

This morning I decided that instead of doing the reading that I really should be doing, I would indulge myself and spend some time learning perl instead. I got through two chapters, drank some hot tea to get caffeine going through my system, ate a 250 calorie fat-free yogurt that was clumpy and weird, and discovered that RealPlayer 8 is on my system and allows me to listen to Classic KING-FM 98.1 in Seattle.

I also discovered that I had speakers wrapped up in twine on the desk behind me. I plugged them into a little socket I found on my laptop, and am now utterly reconciled to the fact that I have an NT machine. See? I can even get it out without choking. As a ten minute break, I uploaded new pictures to go in front of my journal entries to-date, so that they won't suffer by comparison to the first one and people can stop looking at the @HOME ball that was there, instead. All in all, I'm content.

My coworker keeps harping on the fact that I'm getting old. Easy for him to say; he's pushing the half-century mark. (Okay, so it's my birthday tomorrow. Fine. My driver's license says I'm turning 27. Bite me. Fine. Moving on...)

You know, I haven't seen my sister in three days. I wonder if that means she's gone back to Seattle? Except all her clothes and bags and shoes are still in my room. Hm.

Oh. New link: pinstruck.com, which allows you to send anonymous voodoo curses online. Cute.

I've been noticing that lately there are fewer conversations to report in my journal. I figured out why. The fact is, outside of work, I don't actually talk to anybody. Literally. I don't pick up the phone because it scares me, Quirk is fuzzy and brown but not big on reciprocal conversation, and my roommate's out of town. My sister's disappeared into the arms of her friends here. I think the only time I spoke yesterday after I left the office was to my building manager, who promised in his broken English to fix the leaking kitchen sink. Oh, and I said "Vallejo Street, please," to the cable car brakeman.

What day is it, anyway? Is this a Tuesday?

On my way back home yesterday, I stopped off at the Church Street Safeway, which is why the Safeway logo is up on the top of this page. Everybody was carrying one of those little red shopping baskets, so I got a little red shopping basket. Everyone was heading right, so I headed right. It wasn't until I found myself parked in front of the liquor section, staring blankly at a bottle of tequila, that it occurred to me that I didn't really need anything at Safeway.

Like I said, it was that sort of day: both that I would go to Safeway without thinking about it, and that I would end up spending a good ten minutes just staring at bottles of alcohol and thinking how cozy it must be to be rum.

Since I didn't need anything at Safeway, I only spent $26 and came home with a loaded backpack.

Here's the thing, though. The next morning I was back at Safeway, (which is where the shuttle picks me up, lest anybody think I have some morbid fetish regarding the place), and a random security man who's always there in the mornings when I get there was quite determined in waving at me to elicit a response.

I am not a morning person. I resent morning people, with that quiet, tired distaste of the eternally weary towards the eternally peppy. He thrust his hand at me on my way out -- I check the clock inside the store every morning, just to make sure I haven't missed the shuttle -- and introduced himself. Then he followed me outside and sat on the curb next to me, trying to make conversation. It's possible, (and again, I'm not a morning person so my recollection is hazy at best), that he was macking.

He asked for my phone number. I explained to him my phobia of phones. I came to work. It was just another little bit of weirdness to round out my week.

My coworker, the one who's babysitting Spid, came around the corner at around eleven.

"Mind if I water Spud?"

He does that on purpose.

I need to buy some foam bricks. I think that would be really cathartic, hurling foam bricks at things. People. Mostly people. Apropos nothing in particular, did I ever mention that two out of the three other women in my group are pregnant? Everywhere I look in this company, there's another pregnant woman wandering by. Is it just me, or is it that time of year? I've never been near so many baby-carrying females in my life. Not that I have a problem with it, per se. I'm just saying...

...Oh, and my suction cup ball that I got in Colorado while visiting the Flamingo is now stuck to one of the great metal pipes that run overhead in our office.