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I apologize that this entry is not very full of content (one of those will be on the way shortly, I hope, if I'm able to pull myself together), but I feel compelled to note that there seems to be something very weird going on with the number 27. It's the day part of my birthday, and I saw it every once in a while in Pittsburgh and all the time on the way home (of course, I saw many other meaningful numbers as well, but 27 seemed to jump out at me a lot; sometimes with a 2 (my birth month) as well, but more often not). My jaw dropped on the drive when I realized that I had recently had to pay $27 for something, and just now it hit me: Ratha just turned 27. How can this not have occurred to me all this time I've been obsessing about the number 27?
Too weird.
Oh yeah, I made it back to Albany alive. But that's a detail, and we're ideas people, right?
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Stupid obsessive thoughts won't leave me alone. Won't be able to get to sleep without alcohol. Very bad idea to drink; would still be drunk in the morning. Plus, I left all my alcohol in the car, and I don't want to go back out there. (Oddly, despite perhaps the most intense drinking experience of my life last night, I didn't have a hangover at all today. I gave my body tons of water to work with; maybe that helped.)
Things I didn't do in Pittsburgh that I wanted to, not out of conscious decision not to do them but simply due to lack of time or energy:
I guess I have to cross my fingers and hope that they can all happen later. Especially that last one. Not sure it would be considered appropriate any more, but I'd really like to have pictures—frozen memories.
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I just did a Google search for a quote from Final Fantasy VI that I like, and I found my own journal.
Yes, there are much more important entries to write, and they are in progress. I've been physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted these past few days, but at least I've got decent notes, so the fading of memory shouldn't be awful. In the mean time, know that I am well in the present and that I am unsure which is greater: my pride in the past and how far I've come or my anticipation of the future and how far I'll go.
Oh, and as a brief teaser, if you want to see my tattoo, try the Wiki page about it.
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Sheesh, I'm sorry this stuff has taken so long to post. I've been extremely lazy. To contextualize, this post concerns events that happened from 2004-01-27 to 2004-02-02. I'll put in date markers every once in a while so you don't lose track. More concerning the past couple of weeks will be forthcoming when I've written it and cleaned it up.
Oh, and be warned that the end state of this entry is very, very different from the current state of my and Ratha's relationship, so please wait for the sequel on that topic.
Tuesday late morning I went over to visit Laura. I explained to her the then-existent attitude of Ratha towards a relationship with me (which was to undergo several radical shifts later in the week, but I wanted to give Laura the information I had at the time). We discussed my commissioning her to make a cover for Breakout and my tattoo design (she basically ended up confirming my thought that my symbol, fairly small and exactly centered on my back, would be a good idea, and that the calligraphic version in particular was good; she also suggested a slight modification to it).
We talked about life plans, specifically in regard to my finding a balance and source of stability, and the possibility that moving to Pittsburgh would be good for me. Laura said that if I move to Pittsburgh, it would have to be for the potential of the place to generate or attract people I would like to deal with, not the specific people who are there now, and that really it's CMU that does it. It was hard for me to accept this, and still is, but I think she was probably right.
Laura had been planning to leave for work at 14:30, but it was cancelled due to snow, so I stayed for about another hour. I called Ratha to tell her and she seemed kind of upset due to Bikini Shoppe and general stress, so I made sure to limit the amount of additional time I spent on Laura, striving for a balance. At last, Laura walked with me most of the way to my car, and I drove back to Ratha's.
How did I make Laura understand me? I really don't know. It seems terribly important to know, because Laura seems to be sort of a unique case for me. I'm almost never clingy or demanding towards her at all—it rarely even occurs to me. I worry that if I obsess about this as much as it tempts me to, it might not be true any more, but still, something to understand—maybe I can control this ability to magically get people to like me. If I could, I would be so powerful … but maybe I can't. Either way, I guess it's something that I do, somehow.
When I got back, Ratha was upset. Her internet connection was terribly flaky, and she didn't feel like the Bikini Shoppe stuff would work out. I helped her pull herself together and we went over to Mav's to use the 'net connection there.
When we arrived, my mind was blown. Mav's was where Jammy Jam had taken place, and I had known that, but I hadn't put two and two together and it was an intense shock to step inside and see the exact place where Ratha and I first met. We went up to the attic, took caffeine, and got to work. We managed to keep things moving pretty smoothly, improving the Bikini Shoppe site for what we thought at the time would be a client demo the next day. At some point we needed to take a break, so we ordered food from Thai Me Up and ate downstairs. I looked at and briefly sat in the exact spot where she and Ed and I had been cuddling at Jammy Jam and I had been too demanding, then sullen. It was pretty intense.
Eventually we finished up and went to sleep next to one another in the attic. At some point in the early morning in a semiconscious haze we ended up making out, and continued to do so pleasantly for I think several hours. (Note: I did not consciously decide to do this, it just sort of happened. By the time that I realized what was going on, it was pretty obvious that Ratha was okay with it.) I think it was that day, but it could have been the previous night, that I said that a sub-self of me was developing that didn't view committed relationships the same way as I previously had. Basically, it seemed that I had been putting the cart before the horse in wanting to commit up front, whereas it seemed more reasonable that the committedness of a relationship would only be evident in retrospect.
A technician came over to Ratha's place and installed a filter on her line, so the internet connection would work again (this is Wednesday morning now). We drove back and had a call with Ami, for whom we're making the Bikini Shoppe website, but we didn't actually demo the site; though it would have been okay to do so, it seemed better to get some additional requirements and clarifications from her first.
Wednesday evening Ratha and I had scheduled to drink and relax. Ratha doesn't normally drink at all (though she used to, quite a bit, in college), and has extremely low tolerance, so I made her some fairly weak mixed drinks (milk with Kahlua, which she said tasted “like a milkshake”, and gin and tonic), and had a “martini” (no glass or olive, sadly) and I think something else I don't remember later on, myself. Our conversation was about what you might expect from two very intelligent, mildly intoxicated people—probably a little scatterbrained, but quite enjoyable at the time.
Thursday I was exhausted and got almost nothing done, though I think I at least managed to support Ratha somewhat in her work on PC Torque. Mark finally called me and left me a voicemail in the afternoon, so I called him back and we arranged to meet for dinner. I would have liked to see Mitch for more than a brief hello as well, but he was indisposed due to OS.
Also, I think it was at some point on Thursday that I received Laura's emails saying she had read my book—one laudatory and one constructively critical. The first one included the following quote, which touched me amazingly deeply:
And anyway, even if everything isn't going to be picture perfect, well, we know everything is going to be alright.
After all, we survived.
—Laura Marsh
This is now my email signature. It finally displaced the SML quine I wrote a couple of years ago.
Around 17:00, I think, I called Eye Candy, the tattoo place at which William had gotten his tattoo the past weekend, to see if an appointment could be set up. This was not a problem. Ratha went there with me. On the way we stopped at an ATM so I could get cash since the tattoo parlor's credit card machine had been broken the last time we went there, but then I remembered that my ATM card wasn't working. Ratha took some money out instead and she gave me $100 which she had owed me for taking a day off of DMV to work on Bikini Shoppe a couple of weeks earlier. As it turned out, the credit card machine was fixed anyway, so I now had some more cash in my wallet.
I had Jason, the tattoo artist, place the template on my back three times so as to get it exactly right before starting anything permanent. It hurt a little while it was being applied, but it really wasn't that bad. It cost me $50, and it will be with me for the rest of my life. That's kind of grounding, in a strange way.
After the tattoo, it was time to go meet Mark for dinner while Ratha went to kung fu. Driving around Pittsburgh I had to be conscious of the conditions and adjust my behavior (as a matter of fact, this pretty much applied to the entire week; I guess the weather was pretty bad, in objective terms, though it never bothered me all that much), but I found Mark's house okay. The place is pretty crazy. It's really a 3-person house, but there are 8 people living there. Mark is living in the attic, which they have renovated to be semi-furnished and insulated and which has 3 people living there—never mind the rest of the house. There's stuff lying all over the place—largely computer parts, but also books, clothes, video game consoles, various pieces of projects in progress or half-abandoned. It's clearly a guy house, someplace that a girl wouldn't be comfortable living unless she were really open-minded, but still somehow teetering on the brink of balance, not degenerating into outright squalor.
Mark and I talked for a bit about where we should go and decided on a pretty expensive restaurant (Pino's, I think it's called) on Murray to which we had been once while I was at CMU. I had sort of turned off my monetary filters for the visit to Pittsburgh, and as Mark said, it's not something we get to do every day, anyway.
I had literally almost forgotten how much fun it was to talk to Mark. Even though I haven't really read Slashdot since just before NaNoWriMo, most of our conversation concerned technology, although there was also a fair bit of politics (on both of which issues Mark and I are surprisingly in line in practical terms, given our hugely differing theoretical bases for our opinions). Mark also told me about how he had finally upgraded his system (not doing this had been a running joke about him for years), then was posting to Slashdot about how it really hurt him that people blamed the physical computer for any problem it had, when it was almost always a software problem—and at the exact moment he was writing this, his processor fried. Cosmic irony, I guess; almost unbelievable. He's done a full upgrade now and managed to get his computer back on its feet.
At the restaurant, when I asked for a description of a dish I had been considering, the list of ingredients included bacon. I did a slight mental jump, then decided to go along with it anyway. I ended up picking some of them out, but I didn't vomit or anything. I don't see meat playing a large part in my diet at any point in time (and I still think trying to eat a steak would almost inevitably induce me to hurl), but I guess that once the hard line is broken, making exceptions on a case-by-case basis becomes a lot easier.
Back at Mark's, it was time to give my tattoo its initial care session, so I showed it to Mark and had him help me with it. We talked for a bit longer, including one of his housemates (I forget exactly whom) in the discussion, and eventually I took off, heading back to Ratha's for the night.
Friday morning, I had an appointment at CMU's Career Center (which has moved from its previous location in Warner Hall to the bottom of the UC). Ratha convinced me to make the appointment when we were discussing graduate school earlier in the week. She had wanted to go as well, but when the time came, she felt that she had too much work to do, so I went alone.
I met with Kevin Collins, who I had seen once or twice during my senior year at CMU as well. I didn't know whether he could tell that there was something different about me this time. Though I had originally made the appointment to discuss graduate school, we ended up largely discussing my finding a job in Pittsburgh. I tried to steer the discussion towards really specific possibilities, like finding a staff job at CMU (Kevin helpfully suggested that SEI has their own separate hiring process) or any particular companies, but Kevin largely just ended up pointing me to the same resources he'd given me last time, although with a bit more guidance as to the specific details of how to actually use them. I think that the difference this time, though, is not the details of the process so much as my attitude. Specifically, Ratha's presence in Pittsburgh and the chance to move in with her should, if I understand my own psyche well, function as a pretty strong driving force to finally make that push to move to Pittsburgh, to which I've sort of vaguely aspired pretty much ever since graduation but towards which I hadn't taken any specific, directed action.
We also did finally discuss the graduate school process. Kevin told me that while I was pretty much too late to start in the fall of 2004, I was in very good shape for fall of 2005, and that the next thing I should do is find people to write me letters of reference. I hadn't even been considering starting as early as fall of this year, so this seemed like both good news and good advice. However, since it was already Friday and almost all of the rest of my time in Pittsburgh would be over the weekend, I resigned myself to worrying about letters of reference from home or when I came back out to Pittsburgh (hopefully for the long haul).
In the afternoon, Ratha had to work on PC Torque. I looked over her shoulder and helped her find bugs. I think I also managed to keep her more motivated than she might have beeen without me there.
Friday evening was Subliminal Geek Fishing, KGB's trip to a sushi restaurant (which I never attended while I was actually a student at CMU, due to my then-dogmatic opposition to putting dead animals in my mouth; it never occurred to me that if one really wanted to, one would probably be able to find vegetarian dishes at a Japanese restaurant).
Ratha and I took her car over to CMU, where we picked up as many other people as could fit in the car and drove to Sushi Too. Ratha was only able to find a metered parking spot, and throughout the evening she had to leave every hour or so to put more quarters in the meter.
I sat next to Ratha, directly across from Ed and only a couple of seats from Rachael and from Shawn. I ordered warm sake early on, because it had been an extremely pleasant experience when I had it the first time I had gone to get sushi, with Charlie. It was slightly less spectacular this time, and I took a little longer than I ought to drink it, letting it get less warm than it should have been. Still, the alcohol certainly conditioned my experience of the evening, I think in a positive way; and it made me popular, as a whole bunch of people wanted to try it. (I asked Ed to try it, rather than the other way around, and he said it tasted foul; I guess you can't please everyone.)
I ordered a tempura appetizer, an eel roll, and I believe a yellowtail roll. Throughout the evening I was sending off signals as if I was in a relationship with Ratha, touching her in ways that, while they couldn't exactly be considered PDA in the strictly objectionable sense, were clearly the kind of things that I would do if I were dating her. I knew that these things might make her uncomfortable, and when I consciously noticed myself doing them I generally made myself stop, but I still found myself doing them again many times. I discussed this in so many words with Ratha afterwards, while we were walking from where she had parked to her apartment, and she said that while it had made her somewhat uncomfortable, she had felt honored as well, because my doing that kind of thing must mean that I would be proud to be thought to be in a relationship with her. This made me smile.
There was one topic of conversation with potential long-term consequences: it looks like it might be possible for me to get a job in Shawn's office at CMU. At this point it's more of a cross-my-fingers situation than a sure thing, but it would be good in so many ways that I really do have to remember to keep my fingers crossed.
Anyway, it took several hours (although I did not find them unenjoyable in the slightest), but eventually things at Sushi Too wound down and Ratha and I took those who had ridden in her car back to CMU. (There should be a word for “person who hitched a ride to an event with you”. Like “roommate” for “person who shares a room with you”, or “classmate” for “person who's in one of your classes”. “Carmate” doesn't seem quite right.) Then we went back to her apartment.
After we got back, Ratha had to work for a couple of more hours to actually get PC Torque live. I sat and watched, as patiently as I could, pointing out her mistakes when I saw them, and absorbing what exactly she was doing so that I could potentially be more helpful and understanding in the future. A bit after midnight, I think, she actually put the new site live. For a while after that she was on the phone with Adam, debugging the problems that inevitably arise in the course of deployment. I think that aside from specific knowledge, I gained some interesting insight into how people cope with stress and unexpected issues—I could see the visitors to PC Torque hitting the webserver error logs when they ran into problems as Ratha worked to fix them.
Saturday morning, I think I slept in somewhat. Ratha had some additional issues with PC Torque with which to deal, but everything ended up working out okay. Ratha also helped me work on my resumé—I added an entry regarding the ongoing work I'm doing with Bikini Shoppe, cleaned up a few things, and worked on the omnipresent “what do I put for an objective” bugaboo.
Some time Saturday (I think, I could have the chronology too messed up to even get the day right), Ratha and I were discussing the value of ritual, and she decided to do the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. She asked me first if I knew it and I said that I was familiar with it, but that I had never actually memorized it. I sat and watched in rapt attention, trying to visualize the pentagrams as she was while she drew them in the air. I was self-conscious of the fact that I was intentionally trying to class this experience as “a beautiful thing”, but at the same time that no such intention was necessary, both because everything is intrinsically beautiful if you look at it right and because the abstract form of Ratha's movement (and of her existence) embody values that I have held for a very long time.
Saturday evening was cooking. Technically we were supposed to be cooking together, partly for the purpose of my learning better how to cook, but in actuality it was more like Ratha was cooking while I helped out around the kitchen (not that I hugely resented this). We made tofu with soy and peanut sauces and broccoli florets (these two ended up becoming sandwiches); we also had salad with raspberry vinaigrette and microwave baked potatoes with broccoli and melted cheese. I drank some Chardonnay that Ratha had bought for cooking, and remarked that I liked white wine, which comment Ratha said she liked because it was unconventional. The entire dinner was actually very pretty, well prepared, and good-tasting, although I don't think I was able to completely finish it because of my anorexia.
Our discussion that evening was surprisingly relaxed, given that it concerned potentially tense subject matter. However, both my and Ratha's views were shifted slightly as a result of it. Some tension did develop towards the end, though it was not earth-shattering.
Sunday morning I was exhausted and didn't do much. Around 13:00 Ratha left for kung fu, and although I would have liked to accomplish something useful with that time, I actually ended up taking a nap. When I awoke, around 14:30, I felt antsy and needed to get out of the apartment, so I began the walk over to kung fu, even though I knew I would be early.
Arriving there, I saw Ben and Arthur in addition to the expected complement of Ratha, Ed and Marc. It was a joy to watch Marc work, because he is so clearly present in everything he does. While I sat by the side, Ratha did her set again, and I could not help noticing how similar it seemed to the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram she had done in her apartment a day or two ago while I watched. As Ratha, Ed and I departed, Marc suggested that I consider whether I should do kung fu. His suggestion that it was worthy of consideration is a good one.
We walked over to Ali Baba, where we were supposed to meet Laura for lunch, but it was closed. Laura was a bit late, and Ratha and Ed were discussing kung fu, when I broached to Ed in reasonably specific but still tactful terms the fact that I wanted to go to Pittsburgh to be with Ratha and that I needed his support. He said that anything he had to offer, he would give me, and I hugged him.
Eventually Laura did show up, and we went to Lulu's. Ed and Laura were talking to one another, largely leaving Ratha and me in the background, but I didn't feel excluded—when something would occur to me to say, I would say it, and the conversation drifted between us. Ratha, however, seemed totally reclusive. I tried to involve her in the conversation, but there was only so much I could do.
Ed had to take off to do physics homework, and Laura and I continued to talk about life. Erik was apparently in one of his negative moods that day, and Laura was seriously considering moving out. She said that she had about six more months on her lease and that at that point, she would evaluate whether it was a good idea. She told me that when things were good, she tended to forget how bad they could be; I responded that yes, that was true, but it seemed that when things were bad, she forgot how good they could be too, and I questioned which was the “real” perception and which was the aberration. Laura agreed that it was difficult to judge.
I think it was around this point that I explicitly told Ratha to join in the conversation, but it was to no avail. She told me later, when we were alone, that she had felt flustered, and that if she were one-on-one with Laura she would never speak. I found this hard to understand, because it seemed like a more fundamental self-doubt than I was willing to entertain. But then again, maybe it just means that I'm self-obsessed and selfish and have no problem with grabbing whatever attention I can. Though it doesn't seem that way with Laura at all.
We received fortunes each of which seemed uniquely appropriate at the time. Mine read
Good work, good life, good love, good-bye oppression.
(I think; I may have gotten the order of the clauses wrong). Laura got “You have a very magnetic personality”, which she says she seems to get frequently. I can't remember what Ratha's was or what the one that would have been Ed's, but that we decided was instead for the organic whole of the three of us, said. I paid the check all myself, because I felt like it, and we said our goodbyes and Ratha and I headed back to her apartment.
That night, I was feeling kind of anxious, and it was hard for me to get to sleep. Ratha suggested alcohol. I had a total of seven shots in a span of minutes. This helped me sleep, but when I woke up around noon, I was still quite drunk, and I found out that I had been sick during the night (which Ratha had cleaned up without my knowing, and which I did not remember at all).
The previous night, I had discussed the issue of my feelings for Ratha with her while I was drinking. Specifically, I had said that although I had said earlier in the week that I loved her, what I had actually been thinking was that it was just a sub-self of me that loved her, and I had to be careful about who was talking; but over the last few days my paradigm had been shattered and now I just didn't know what to think at all. Ratha followed up to this, on Monday, by telling me that she did not love me and that she did not think a relationship between us would be good.
I accepted this at one level, but at another my motivation was shattered, and I lost confidence that I would be able to maintain moment-to-moment control of myself on my car drive back to Albany. I could no longer lean on Ratha to help me get home, so I drank lots of water and sat around waiting for things to change. I sat at Robert until, around 14:00, Charlie got back to his house and logged onto ICQ; I sent him a message that I would call him on the phone, and did so. When I explained the situation as best I was able at the time, he was totally thrown for a loop; he told me that he generally had a contingency plan for any conversation, but that this time he was just completely unprepared. He advised me that the alcohol wearing off might have a more substantial effect on my mental state than I might realize, and told me to call him back in a couple of hours. I said that was fine.
When I did call him back, I told him that I had realized I could hold myself together well enough to make it home. He was very relieved. When we discussed what his thought process had been upon receiving the first phone call, he told me how it was a little thing that had gotten to him; he could have dealt with my dying (in a car crash on the way home), but he really didn't have the wherewithal at this point in his life to insist on a certain song being played at someone's funeral. (For the record, that song is the Final Fantasy Theme, as I'm sure it would not be too hard to guess for anyone who knows me remotely well; I had told Charlie about this desire of mine several years ago. This journal entry should clear Charlie permanently of any egregious responsibility in the matter, as it is now (I hope) 100% clear that that is my desire.) His saying this reminded me that I really could trust him, while at the same time injecting a bit of absurdity into what had before seemed a pretty dire situation. We both laughed a lot.
At almost 16:00, Ratha hugged me and got out of my car. All my stuff was loaded and I was ready to leave. I looked back at her as I drove out of the parking lot. I knew I had to leave, but that image of her smiling was imprinted indelibly on my memory, the same image I had of her when I arrived. She was wearing her hat and she looked absolutely adorable, and even as I knew she probably wanted nothing to do with me, still I wanted terribly to be with her.
The way home was long and extremely draining. My attitude towards Ratha shifted every hour or so, but there was an overriding sense of rootlessness, of having had a plan that now was shattered and having no idea where to go next. Other than a brief phone call to my father almost exactly half-way through, explaining where I was and that I probably wouldn't be home until 1 in the morning or so, I spoke to no one. My playlist was my entire music collection on shuffle, as it had been on the drive out; I might have skipped a song or two, on the way back, but almost everything seemed to have a message for me (even if that message was often only a dull sense of numbness).
A bit after my phone call, there were signs saying that I-80 (the road on which I was driving) was closed ahead, I assumed because of a bad accident. I took the detour and ended up wandering around side streets clogged with traffic, wasting almost an hour, before I finally found the correct way to get back on my path with the assistance of some sort of an emergency worker (probably a policeman or fireman or both). This experience seemed heavily symbolic to me of how lost I was, not just physically but spiritually, emotionally, and as regards a path for my life to take.
When I did finally get home, I called Charlie (he had told me it was okay to wake him up) and emailed Ratha, even though I was unsure she would want to hear from me. I tried to go to sleep, but alcohol was out of the question, and I ended up posting a couple of journal entries and getting maybe two hours of sleep that night. I stumbled through the next day, less tired than I could have been after a night of that little sleep, but feeling drained.
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—Mon père, monsieur, voyait dans cette action un miracle. Mon père croyait à un bienfaiteur sorti pour nous de la tombe. Oh ! la touchante superstition, monsieur, que celle-là, et comme, tout en n'y croyant pas moi-même, j'étais loin de vouloir détruire cette croyance dans son noble coeur ! Aussi combien de fois y rêva-t-il en prononçant tout bas un nom d'ami bien cher, un nom d'ami perdu ; et lorsqu'il fut près de mourir, lorsque l'approche de l'éternité eut donné à son esprit quelque chose de l'illumination de la tombe, cette pensée, qui n'avait jusque-là été qu'un doute, devint une conviction, et les dernières paroles qu'il prononça en mourant furent celles-ci : « Maximilien, c'était Edmond Dantès ! »
Chapitre L, Le Comte de Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
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Again, this concerns events that happened a while ago, and I have inserted date markers to help you keep track of things.
When we had spoken on the phone on Monday, I had also told Charlie that I thought it was important that I see him in person as soon as practically possible, which seemed to be Tuesday evening. There were practical impediments to making even that work, but we worked around them, and I pulled into Charlie's driveway just after 17.
I proceeded to explain the situation and circumstances to Charlie with a great deal of energy for about an hour, at the end of which I think he said he understood maybe 40% of it. But then I fizzled, and though I made several more false starts to give him a little more information, I was never able to get him to understand my and Ratha's relationship. As I told him, I literally do not think it would be practically possible to convey every relevant fact. Nevertheless, it's kind of frustrating for him not to get the basic point of a number of items.
I also asked Charlie, then and several times since, whether he could explain how, in his view, he and I differ from the rest of humanity to the best of his knowledge, but he was unable to put it into words. I suppose this is only fair, but it's also kind of frustrating, because I'd really like to know what he's talking about.
As the evening wore on, I had some Scotch and we talked more generally about romance and its various facets for people such as us. Around midnight, I think, I fell asleep.
Wednesday morning I woke up at about 5 in the morning with an intense desire to email Ratha. I composed an email, but was unsure about sending it. It said basically that although I could still make myself move to Pittsburgh without her being there for me, I could only do it by deluding myself into thinking that something between us was still possible. This email expressed what it was supposed to perfectly, but I wasn't quite sure that that was what I wanted to express.
I talked about it with Charlie as we brushed snow off our cars. He told me that sending it was a bad idea, but when I told him that I was pretty much resigned to the fact that I would reach out to Ratha at some point, and it was really only a question of how, he said that this particular way wouldn't be worse than any other; at least I understood it and could anticipate its possible negative consequences. Then, on the car drive to work, I was seized with the concept that I had to purge all expectation—all hope and all fear. I arrived at work in this somewhat strange state, edited my email to remove all expectations (replacing them with mere possibilities) and sent it. In the moment I pushed the button to send the email, there was nothing in my mind but the immediate moment—no past, no future, just my finger pushing a button.
Ratha and I exchanged tense emails for the rest of the day. It seemed at first to me that Ratha was trying to gently discourage me, but eventually she sent one message that really stung. In my reply to her, I told her as much, and her answer surprised me: she said that the thought of my not coming to Pittsburgh was making her surprisingly upset, and that this was making it hard for her to know how to act. That night, I disallowed us from discussing personal issues entirely, partly because I saw a glimmer of hope, but also because we both had a lot of work to do and I knew I had to pull things together a little.
On Thursday evening, Ratha and I discussed how we felt about one another. We both agreed that we did not “love” one another (I have a feeling that my problems using that word, as well of the same problems of many others, may be unending), but that our feelings for one another did include everything that, under my new conception of dating, I thought that a dating relationship ought to include. It seemed like things were set.
Friday, Ratha made a LiveJournal post about these topics. The discussion on this post was explosive, totalling 84 comments at the moment (though I think this has leveled off now). There were some things said (though not by Ratha) that were pretty harshly critical of me, and I initially defended myself, but I discussed this with Ratha, and having decided that the discussion would not affect how she felt and that the opinions of others were not worth the effort (and chance of failure) to influence, I resolved not to post any more. I even refrained from reading the posts there for a while, though I found myself failing to resist at least that temptation eventually.
Around this time I was also reading Prometheus Rising, which Ratha had intentionally (although without my knowledge) left in one of my boxes when I was leaving Pittsburgh. This gave me some insight into how Ratha thinks, as well as some insight into how people in general work, and even myself. I don't agree with everything it says, but I have a feeling that some of its ideas will be with me for a long time. I was also working pretty hard on Bikini Shoppe, for which by this point it was already pretty evident to me that I would eventually end up assuming full responsibility. Still, I felt vaguely uneasy. Something seemed … unsettled.
On Wednesday evening, after what had already been a pretty long night of work on Bikini Shoppe, Ratha said that we needed to have a “talk”. I immediately went “uh-oh”. She proceeded to tell me that, while she definitely thought that I should move to Pittsburgh, because I am starved for social contact in the Albany area and pretty unlikely to take the steps needed to fix that, she didn't feel that it would be right for us to go out. She said that she wouldn't mind being roommates with me, but that this was something on which I needed to emotionally support myself, not have it done by someone else. My response to this was that I was not like her in this way, and that really, this put me between a rock and a hard place: staying stuck in what seems a nearly worthless situation in Albany vs. going to Pittsburgh and facing the spectre of unending attachment to her. I was very reluctant to put myself in the latter situation, and pretty angry at Ratha for thinking she knew what I needed so much better than I did.
Fairly quickly after this happened, I formed a rule: treat Ratha only as a business contact until my birthday. I was suspicious both whether I would actually be able to put this rule into effect and whether doing so would be entirely a good thing, but it seemed necessary, so I resigned myself to it. I knew that since Bikini Shoppe was nearing the closing point, and since I was probably going to end up taking over the site anyway, that the most likely result of this was that we would have little or no contact of any kind. I figured this was what Ratha wanted.
My feelings towards Ratha jumped all over the place for the first few days, but slowly they coalesced into a pattern: I realized just how inexpressive of my own identity it would be to try to intentionally overcome my emotional attachment to Ratha. I am a highly sentimental person. To deny this would not only have been to leave myself stuck in a bad situation in Albany, but also to act against the core of my being. So, it seemed to me that moving in with Ratha, even if we were not dating, would be great, because I just wanted to be with her, and didn't care about anything else. Even aside from my rule to give Ratha some breathing room, though, I didn't want to say anything about this, because I was sort of worried that Ratha would change her mind that even that level of support was appropriate.
Some time last year, I made a very vague mental promise to myself that in 2004, I would send someone flowers for Valentine's Day. When Ratha had told me that she didn't like cut flowers, I had been willing to cut myself some slack by altering the gift. The promise had been vague enough that I could probably have excused myself for just totally failing in it, but still, I had tried to figure out ways to bring it into execution. During the period before Wednesday in which I had thought Ratha and I would be going out, I had decided to send her a box of Godiva chocolates.
Whether I would still go through with this decision was a matter of some moral uncertainty for me. On the one hand, it seemed to clearly contravene my prohibition against treating her as anything but a business contact. On the other, it seemed that that sub-self of mine which was committed to Ratha and which had, perhaps, not only failed to diminish but actually increased its occupancy of my attention, even as I had extinguished its expression, would have been rendered a gross unfairness by not being permitted this single act. Thursday I decided to go through with it, and went through a long process of complication and doubt as I selected the precise gift, the card, and the text it would include.
The order at last being placed, I tried not to fret over the details too much and impatiently attended Valentine's Day, by which time Ratha and I would not have exchanged a single word in, I believe, three days.
Around noon on Saturday I discovered through channels unavailable to mere mortals that Ratha's reaction to my present had, perhaps, not been perfect. I suddenly felt trapped by the enclosure of my house, so I departed, leaving an away message on AIM indicating that I could be reached by cell phone if it was important. I got in my car and drove towards Coxsackie (my home town until I was 8), intending to head to the gazebo there, a location that had some connection to my past.
While I was driving, Ratha called, as I had been half-expecting. After a few initial pleasantries, she said that she had “refused” my present—or at least, so I thought for fully ten more minutes. My automatic numbing reflex kicking in was probably the only thing that saved me from feeling (and acting) utterly crushed. Nevertheless, it was apparent both from what I said and from my manner of speaking that I was unhappy.
When the topic of the chocolates came up again, it was obvious that I had been wrong. I told Ratha about my mistake and she was pretty shocked that I had made it. In retrospect, I think there were three reasons. First is the sound quality of cell phones, which is not great. Second is the tone which Ratha uses on the phone, which is very different from the one she uses in person (I noticed this during my week in Pittsburgh)—I believe she does this, whether at a conscious or subconscious level, in an attempt to minimize precisely this kind of miscomprehension when speaking over a noisy channel, but it meant that in her statement “I re(fused|ceived) your present—thank you”, the words “thank you” seemed to me to have a somewhat dismissive tone which, had it been intended, would have implied the word had been “refused” rather than “received”. Most important of all, however, was probably my frame of mind at the time—my idea that Ratha just wanted to forget about me. It came out very clearly in our conversation that I had been totally wrong about this, with I must confess not a small amount of pleasant surprise on my side.
I was still questioning whether there was any sense in attempting to partially adhere to my rule of treating Ratha as a business contact, but at some point I decided that what was worth doing was worth doing well, and told her about how my attitude towards moving to Pittsburgh and towards her had been developing. She seemed pleasantly surprised by this, as well, because she had made sort of a parallel assumption to mine—that I had decided definitively not to move and was now trying to cut my losses. We talked a bit more about entanglement, about intensity and getting lost, about identity. Eventually she met up with a friend and I drove back home. I felt refreshed, and was very conscious of how little I had gotten done over the past few days, when I hadn't been dealing with Ratha at all—I'd had trouble motivating myself at work, trouble motivating myself to work on Bikini Shoppe, trouble motivating myself to journal—trouble motivating myself to keep things together.
Sunday evening, Ratha and I talked for a couple of hours on the phone again. I had told her at the end of our conversation Saturday that since I thought it would support us both, we would try to maintain some level of personal contact until my birthday (not that I thought or think that we will no longer have contact after my birthday, but I was suspicious that it might be a watershed event, because birthdays have often been points of concentrated suffering for me in the past—times when it felt like no one cared about me), while keeping things from taking over our lives and interfering with our ability to function.
I alluded to some stuff that I didn't want to discuss right away, but would talk about later—this being a delineation of what my and Ratha's relationship might look like under this new paradigm, after I moved to Pittsburgh. But, as often happens, once the concept had been formed, things moved along faster than I expected—Ratha told me that when she had talked about her various life issues with her mother that morning, her mother (who has up until now seemed to have a very mystical view towards relationships) told Ratha something that totally shifted Ratha's perspective towards her mother and her father's relationship: her mother had not loved her father when she first met him, and in fact had found some things about him pretty unpleasant, but had grown to love him in time. I replied that not only did this change things drastically, but it changed them in a way that actually made more sense to me—that it fit almost perfectly with my concept of the “essential flaw”, the idea that rather than apparent flaws in the story of the world being mere accidents, they in fact always seem to lead to the fulfillment of Providence.
The next thing Ratha said was that due to her shift in perspective, she had decided that, in fact, she wouldn't be so opposed to our going out after all. I had to work to contain my joy, and told her as much, because she has wavered so much on this decision already that it's hard to fully trust it. But I could tell that something was different this time. She posted about this to LiveJournal, but when the possibility of my and her going out attracted the predictable skepticism that it always had in the past (this post has so far managed to garner 54 responses, none of them by yours truly), she brushed them off, saying that she knew there were risks, but that she had decided that the only thing to do in a situation like this was to acquire more empirical data, and that it was a chance we probably wouldn't get again if we didn't take advantage of it now.
Well, that leaves only this week, in which, sad to say (?), my world has not been flipped totally around multiple times. (Hey, there's only so much of that that one can take, right?) The short of it is that it looks like I'll be trying to arrange to move to Pittsburgh in about a month from now, probably without already having a full-time job there, but hopefully with at least some contract work and some prospects. The long of it, I'll try to write this weekend.
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I've been reading about the World Trade Center over the past few days.
However one of the most popular options, rebuilding the Twin Towers, was ignored by authorities at the insistence of WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein. He is not comfortable with new office buildings taller than 70 floors and dreads the short-to-medium term vacancy risk of rebuilding the giant Twin Towers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_site
So, I think this guy is a little bit of a wuss, but at least the reason the Twin Towers aren't being rebuilt is respect for private property. It's hard for me to feel too angry about that.
The proposed Freedom Tower would be the tallest building in the world, at 1776 feet. CNN Story.
There appears to be a lot of controversy over this plan, and I guess we won't really know what's happening until construction has started. But, the important point is that there will be at least one really tall building in the New York skyline.
I am no longer so worried about this. It looks like what needs to happen will happen.
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Le 24 février 1815, la vigie de Notre-Dame de la Garde signala le trois-mâts le Pharaon, venant de Smyrne, Trieste et Naples.
Chapitre I, Le Comte de Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Today is the 189th anniversary of the day on which The Count of Monte Cristo begins. Appropriate, then, that I have only three chapters left in the book and will finish it today.
This read through The Count of Monte Cristo seems like it has been the most emotional artistic experience in my life. Since my responses to art often seem unusually strong relative to those to real life, it may be the most emotional experience of my life overall. There have been two times I've cried so hard that I had trouble finishing the page I was reading.
I hope one day to be able to write a book equal in quality to The Count of Monte Cristo. I think I can, eventually. To aspire to uncontroversially outdo it would, I think, be sheer vanity.
Relations with Charlie have been a little tense lately. First, when we were discussing my moving to Pittsburgh, he let drop that there was some major reason that I might not want to, but when I asked him what it was, he refused to tell me, saying that he thought I would overreact if I knew. This was distressing to me, because it seemed to indicate a pretty basic lack of respect for my ability to make reasonable decisions, and also because of the sheer annoyance of knowing that a secret exists without knowing what it is. Unfortunately, this pattern—Charlie holding back some piece or other of information from me for what he says is my own benefit—seems to be a recurring one in our relationship.
I am, at the moment, ignoring this unknown factor, due not so much to doubts as to Charlie's sincerity (I have never known him to lie to me) as to the fact that I have racked my brain for any strong counterargument to my moving to Pittsburgh and, having come up empty, believe that the only reasonable way to act is on the information that is available to me—which tells me that I'm not in a good life situation right now and that Pittsburgh would be much better for me. Nevertheless, it is a continuing source of stress.
After this discussion, I perceived a certain degree of coolness in Charlie's dealings with me, especially as regards how welcome I would be in his house. But, as it turns out, both of us had meant to mention a visit this past weekend, but neither of us did so, so we are both equally culpable. And last night's discussions were much friendlier, so I think I may have mistestimated Charlie's reaction, or at least the degree thereof, due to the narrowband nature of IM conversation.
Ratha has been having sort of a tough time lately. She's felt like things are very unsettled, and at the same time she's been having trouble focusing. I think our levels of wasted time have actually been fairly similar, and I may actually have been wasting more time than she has, but whereas she has many tasks that need accomplishing right now, I've felt like my life is sort of in a holding pattern—although it has been getting on my nerves somewhat to waste as much time as I have been. (If it weren't for The Count of Monte Cristo, that amount of wasted time would likely be far greater.)
I've been trying to help her hold things together, and I think she's been doing okay. She found a job, and while it's still contracting, it's for a longer period (4 months) and should supply enough work for her to treat it as full-time. Although I think this will be difficult for her, I also think it could be really good, because it will allow her to prove to herself that she really can hold things together. Next week, she's visiting Florida, which should allow her to take a bit of a breather from “real life”.
We are both really looking forward to seeing one another again. We've been talking a lot on AIM, and I have perhaps stayed up later than I should have several nights, and we've had a number of phone calls longer than an hour. If it didn't seem like a waste of effort when I'll be moving to Pittsburgh so soon anyway, I would be looking into an actual cell-phone plan right now, rather than pay-as-you-go.
Lately I have been somewhat demotivated. It hasn't been awful—I've been able to accomplish small tasks, especially when they seemed urgent—but I definitely haven't had the most productive couple of weeks in my life. I think this is due to my environment—the house, the job, the lack of social contact. I hope so, because those things are all due to change when I move to Pittsburgh, and while this state is tolerable at the moment, it would be very unfortunate for it to stick around too long.
Last night Ratha and I were talking about my fiction writing. I mentioned to her that I hoped one day to be able to write a book equal in quality to The Count of Monte Cristo, and she warned me against “lusting after results”, as Aleister Crowley had put it. I was not really able to understand her objection, and told her so—as I saw it, while writing is indeed a process, it is also a process which, by definition, produces results, and producing those exact results is indeed a very important goal of mine. She asked why I had chosen this goal, and I told her that it was because I thought that novel-writing was the artform in which, with a given investment of energy, I could achieve the greatest results. (I believe that my lesser natural talent in music and visual arts would probably put at best a middling ceiling on my achievements in them, and I would not be content with mere mediocrity.)
Ratha then suggested that, if writing is such an overriding goal of mine, that it was obvious what I should do with all of my free time once I finished The Count of Monte Cristo. I said that I was worried this was not the ideal time to begin editing Breakout, even though I badly want to have completed that task, because my life is in a stage of upheaval at the moment and I feel that my attention could be needed elsewhere at any time, in which case I would lose a large part of the mental context I would have to build up to be able to do the editing task justice. She also suggested that I set aside a certain amount of time, an hour a day perhaps, for writing. I was unsure that starting that right now was a great idea, for similar reasons, but I definitely recognized that establishing a pattern like that for myself long-term would be beneficial to me, and told her that after I moved to Pittsburgh I would definitely have to do it.
It is interesting to me that Ratha views her journal as an artistic outlet to some extent, whereas I view mine essentially as a recording and presentation of facts. I very rarely hesitate for long periods when writing my journal so as to come up with the most æsthetically valuable way to say something, as I frequently do when writing fiction. I wonder if I lack a creative outlet at the moment, and, if so, what effects that might have on me.
Several people have expressed concerns with me over alcohol lately, so I wanted to explain my attitude towards it. I realize that this attitude is a little unconventional, but it seems to be working for me, so don't knock it until you've tried it, or at least until you have a good argument against it.
I have heard the theory that the only “valid” use of alcohol is in a social context, to relax, many times. Unfortunately, the mere repetition of this statement does not establish its truth. It is true that consuming alcohol in a non-social context can have negative results, and perhaps even that the dangers are greater when drinking alone. However, I am confident that I can control for them.
Thus, although I do consider drinking in social situations an acceptable time to drink (when the amount is modulated; passing out, losing the ability to form memories, vomiting from alcohol consumption, etc. all seem to be of pretty dubious value in any case), I also think it is legitimate to use a small amount of alcohol as a sleep aid. Since returning from Pittsburgh, this amount has been pretty low; some nights I'm dead tired and I fall asleep without any help, others it's a little harder and I might have two drinks. My average has probably been one drink per day.
I am aware that both alcoholism and binge drinking are serious problems. (The very few episodes of binge drinking in my life so far have been flukes, not parts of a pattern, and have never gone so far as to put my life in jeopardy.) However, a drink or two a day is not alcoholism, and there's not much evidence that it's a health problem. Thus, when people tell me that all non-social drinking is “invalid” behavior, I have to wonder: do they think I'm not in control of my behavior, that I haven't thought these things through fully at a rational level? (I have.) Or do they have so little respect for my ability to make my own choices that they can't see outside their dogmatic box and accept that maybe, just maybe, I'm not killing myself one step at a time by having a nightcap? Either way, it seems kind of disrespectful to me.
Okay, I'll step down off the soapbox. I've made my point. And to anyone who is genuinely worried, as I may have given them cause to be: yeah, I know that moderation is a good thing, and there's nothing worth worrying about. But thank you for your concern.
(I would like to learn more about sleep. It is true that I have not found any reliable way to get to sleep other than 1: complete exhaustion or 2: alcohol, although other factors do help.)
After several months of dormancy, Ralah has acquired a new learner. Ratha and I were talking about it, I believe two nights ago, and she seems to have decided to pick it up, at least to some extent (with my encouragement, I must admit). The presence of a new mind has already caused Charlie and me to fill in a few of the cracks that we both already understood but that were anything but obvious to a newcomer, and will hopefully continue to lead us in that direction. Also, Ratha can help figure out vocabulary and think of vocabulary that Charlie or I can figure out. And it would be really neat to be able to have a spoken conversation with her in Ralah, even a fairly minimal one, although that's probably a pipe dream.
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Well, I'm 22. Isn't that a stupid age? You don't get any new privileges or respect, and it's not a very pretty number (although, as Ratha pointed out, it is the number of Major Arcana in a Tarot deck, and as I replied, it's also the number of Hebrew letters).
I'm working today, because it seemed pointless to take the day off when there's really no one in the area to hang out with or anything, so I'd basically have been spending a day home alone. I did, however, drive myself, so as to 1: be alone and 2: be able to play music at my birth time, 7:48. I listened to the Final Fantasy IV version of the Final Fantasy Theme, then the piano version, then the Christmas version. I have noticed lately that sometimes instead of crying as an emotional reaction, my whole body shakes instead. I wonder what causes this, and if it happens to anyone else.
As the music was playing, I drove past exit 22 on the Thruway (I was going to exit 23). This was kind of symbolic, although probably not as much so as when I pulled into the grocery store parking lot on Wednesday and my odometer read 227021 (and the 21 was actually in the process of changing into a 22).
I don't have high hopes for presents this year. Too few people have any idea what I would want, and even Charlie has apparently run out of really great ideas (which I can't blame him too much for, since he's given pretty amazing presents pretty much as long as I've known him). Actually, I don't have very high hopes for the day overall. Have to try not to let it get to me.
I don't think I'll get upset, though. The future looks bright, so I just have to focus on that.
—Mon ami, dit Valentine, le comte ne vient-il pas de nous dire que l'humaine sagesse était tout entière dans ces deux mots :
« Attendre et espérer ! »
Chapitre CXVII, Le Comte de Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
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Best birthday ever?
Quite possibly better than all previous birthdays put together. Can't think of anything that really compares.
And I decided I wouldn't let myself believe it was possible.
Oh, and Ed, I understand your Wiki comment now. :-)
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Friday was my birthday. I had decided to work anyway, because it seemed useless to take the day off when probably nothing was going to happen. The night before, Ratha and I had been up late talking on AIM. About twenty minutes after I had set myself away, supposedly to go to sleep, but in fact mostly spent lying there thinking about it, I sent Ratha one more IM of three little words, because it was my birthday and I wanted to. She (unexpectedly to me) responded in kind, and I fell asleep happy.
I must admit to some trepidation writing this, because I am afraid Charlie will condemn me for it, but there you have it.
Work was busy. The plans to switch credit card providers at DMV were finally set to go through for one test office on Monday, so things were moving quickly. I've been trying to get my program in shape so that it will actually be useful, at which I think I've now finally succeeded, although there is still more to be done on it.
All day I did not hear from Ratha. There were no emails and no LiveJournal posts. This did not surprise me all that much, but I was slightly disappointed.
When I got off work, I headed over to my mom's house to pick a few things up. As I was leaving, I tried to call Ratha on her land line, but there was no answer. I sent her a text message and asked her to call me if she was free, since I wanted to have a chance to talk with her on my birthday, and I didn't know exactly what my schedule would be like. She did not respond to this message the whole time I was driving home.
I got home about an hour later and logged into AIM. Ratha was not online. I started to get worried.
It occurred to me at this point that it was logically possible for there to be another explanation for Ratha's absence, but it seemed too ridiculous, so I had to push that out of my mind. However, that left the possibility that she had been in an accident or something. This was simply too much for me to bear (on my birthday, of all days), and I knew I wouldn't be able to relax otherwise, so I called her cell phone. After five rings, she answered. I told her that I had been worried about her. She said she had met up with some friends and gone out shopping, which was why she hadn't been around. I was just glad to know she was okay. When we got off the phone, I looked upwards and smiled. I was very thankful to have heard her voice.
Shortly after that, I went downstairs to have birthday dinner with my dad, Nance, and my grandparents. While we were eating, there was a knock at the door. I knew Charlie had said he might stop by, so I went to answer it.
When I opened the door, I stood there numbly for a few seconds, then staggered back into the hallway and leaned against the wall. I almost had trouble believing my eyes.
I hugged Ratha, and we went inside and sat down at the table. I introduced her to my father, and by the ensuing discussion it came out that she had come 500 miles to visit me for one day. I didn't eat much more after that, having only the tiniest slivers of cake, but Ratha and Charlie both ate, and we talked with the folks. Even though this was pleasant enough, it was my birthday, and it seemed suboptimal, so eventually I grabbed Charlie and Ratha and we went up to my room and sat down. Ratha got to see that I really hadn't been kidding about how messy my room was.
Charlie and Ratha talked for about an hour, with me occasionally interjecting a comment. Mostly, though, I didn't feel like I had much to say, because I've spoken so much more with both of them than they had with each other that I had already heard all the stories they were telling one another. Eventually I noted that this was not really doing much for me, and I was at this point too tired to really drive much of a discussion. We talked for probably a good half-hour about sleeping arrangements and how to put them into effect (I guess this is what happens when you put three people who are all as cerebral as we are in the same room), and eventually I went downstairs and asked my dad if it would be okay if Ratha stayed with me for the night. He said that was fine. Charlie left soon after that.
Ratha and I did not get much sleep that night.
The next day, Ratha was dealing with a problem that migrating PC Torque to a new server had caused. She had actually meant to solve this problem the previous night, but hadn't managed to figure it out. She upgraded the forum software and we went to the diner to get food for a break. We split an omelette and chocolate chip pancakes, and talked. It was nice.
When we went back home, I had the impulse to ask Ratha whether the server's clock was set to UTC. It was, but the time was set as if it were EST. I had once again solved one of Ratha's computer problems with my m4d l33t skillz.
Everyone else was going to a concert in which my cousin Brian was performing, but I wanted a little more time with Ratha and to collect myself mentally, so I told them I would meet them at the restaurant where they were going for dinner after that. Ratha and I talked some more and took some pictures (a few of the ones of us together are really cute), and finally she left. She had to get back to Pittsburgh to catch a plane flight to Florida the next day, where she was visiting her family for a week. Almost immediately after she left, she came back, realizing she had forgotten her driving directions. I gave her one last brief hug and told her to take care.
Ed had posted a comment to my Wiki, in response to my first birthday post, to the effect that he had eaten a piece of cake in my honor. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about until Charlie and Ratha brought the rest of the cake into the house.
Also, Ratha told me at some point during her visit that while she was driving to my house, Laura had called her and asked her if she wanted to do something (I forget exactly what). Ratha indicated that she wasn't free, and Laura asked what she was doing. Ratha said she was driving to Catskill (the implications of this being clear) and Laura wished her good luck.
I find it noteworthy that these particular people were tied, however loosely, to the whole situation. Also, it's interesting that there was a little bit of foreshadowing: several weeks earlier, I had said to Ratha that I had considered coming to Pittsburgh for my birthday, but it just didn't seem reasonable. Then, later, when I had found my beard trimmer and trimmed my beard, remarking on how it felt weird to have it so short, but how it was a definite plus to not get my mustache in my mouth, Ratha had said that it was better for kissing, too. I thought it was kind of strange she would bother to mention this, since I didn't expect to have a chance to make use of that advantage at any point in the near future, and told her as much; but having said that, I just brushed it off …
Ratha's present for me (other than her visit—in my own words, “There's more?”) was two pairs of black jeans, which she knew from the old torn pair I had worn in Pittsburgh and from several discussions we had about the topic that I badly needed. Nance got me a binary-coded-decimal clock, which is neat-looking. I still don't know what Charlie's present was, since he accidentally left it in 'toga. I'll get it when I visit him there.
Most of my other birthday presents were money, which was slightly disappointing, but so it goes. This almost seems like an irrelevancy, actually, it's so much less important than what I did get.
About an hour or so after Ratha left, I left too, heading to Cavaleri's for dinner with Sue, Ken, Brian, Tasha, my dad, Nance, and my grandparents. The place was packed, and it took about an hour and a half to get our food, but it was nice to have a chance to visit with my aunt, uncle and cousins. On the way home, my check oil light came on. I meant to mention this to my dad, but forgot; he noticed when he was taking my car to the car wash. This turned out to be a fairly severe problem, for which my car's been in the shop so far this week, although it is now fixed.
I guess this is good enough to post. I'll write about the rest of this week later.
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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Mon Aug 4 19:38:25 2008