This past week, Ratha and I have been talking for hours a day. We've been making pretty heavy use of email during the day, of AIM in the evening, and of the phone close to bedtime. A certain amount of our communication has regarded practical issues (mostly connected with my moving and all the things that will entail), a certain amount has involved abstract ideas or concepts which seemed relevant to our relationship, and a certain amount has really been mostly for the purpose of establishing and maintaining our degree of emotional closeness.
It seems pointless to catalog everything we've talked about, because the email and AIM conversations are logged, and I've already forgotten a lot of the content of our phone calls (the lack of logging on phone calls is a very annoying factor, though the degree of closeness they provide makes them worth it, and a lot of the points we make on the phone end up getting reiterated in email or AIM, anyway). I wonder if we'll continue to communicate much by email or AIM or anything once we're living together. It would be a shame for our conversations not to be recorded. (Maybe we should look into voice recording software?)
Ratha was in Florida for the week, so even though she was doing a certain amount of work, it wasn't that too bad for her to spend as much time and effort on communication as she did. But as for me, it definitely took something out of my ability to drive forward my job-and-a-half—although, when I don't deal much with Ratha, I seem to get totally unmotivated, so this is probably just grass-is-greener syndrome. It has felt really nice, though, to stay closely in contact, and it has solidified my feeling that things will be basically okay once I move.
There was one day (Wednesday?) when I took a bunch of caffeine and got a lot done—worked a lot on my program at DMV, implemented a feature for Bikini Shoppe, wrote a couple of thank-you letters and did my taxes. This was good. I need to have a few more of those days to get more of the unavoidable junk out of the way so that I can focus more on things that are important to me at a personal level without feeling like I'm being evasive.
Over the weekend, I went to visit my sister at Bates College, where she is a freshman. I wanted to have a chance to do this before moving, and my mom offered to pay for my room (and my dad gave me gas and toll money); and also, I did feel like taking a break from all of this junk, although I would have rather taken it with Ratha.
I left late Saturday morning and got to Lewiston late Saturday afternoon. The drive of about five hours, while not extremely unpleasant, definitely felt dull and unstimulating. I need to figure out how to have Robert read to me or something, because my higher-level mental processes get horribly bored and go into extremely repetitious cycles when all I'm doing for hours is driving and listening to music.
When I got there, I met my sister and she drove us and a couple of her roommates to Portland. There, we went to a Japanese restaurant. I got warm sake (I can resist, I just never choose to :-) and split a sushi platter with one of Betsy's friends, but although I more or less did my part, Tasha was a lightweight and there were probably 20 pieces left at the end. Nevertheless, it was fairly enjoyable, and the small amount of alcohol took the edge off of being in a sort of strange social situation, with my sister and two other female college freshmen who I barely knew at all. (I have little idea what impression they got of me, though my guess would be sort of eccentric but reasonably friendly—I'm just saying that I enjoyed myself.) Then we wandered around for about half an hour looking for a movie theater that they had seen while we were driving. We finally found it, but nobody really seemed that enthusiastic about seeing anything (me included), so Betsy drove us back to Bates. We checked out the movies that were playing in Lewiston and Auburn, but I really didn't care at all whether we saw one or not, and neither did Betsy, so I decided we should just save our money. My sister felt a little bad about my driving all the way to Portland and not doing anything, but I was a little tired anyway, so I just went to the hotel and checked in.
At the hotel, I checked in (got room #125) and brought in my stuff. It was impossible to get a cell phone signal, at least for the network my phone uses, in that area, and the room phones were kind of stupid, so I ended up calling Ratha collect. (The room was clean and comfortable enough, but oddly, it didn't have an alarm clock either. I suppose that at about $40 for the night, I can't really complain too much.)
Ratha and I talked for probably an hour and a half. The middle part of our conversation was a sort of tense discussion of Breakout, which Ratha was about halfway through at the time. I actually ended up sending her an email the next day from my sister's computer, apologizing for getting defensive about it. It ended up okay, but I'm a little embarrassed for reacting the way I did.
After we got off the phone, I was pretty tired. I read for a bit, then felt my eyelids drooping, but I forced myself to get up and brush my teeth before actually falling asleep.
I woke up at the bright and early hour of 5:45 to a phone call from my sister. Contrary to what you might think, I was not annoyed by this; in fact, I had asked her to call, because she and her friend/roommate Tasha have a radio show on the Bates college station from 6 to 8 in the morning on Sundays. Due to the aforementioned lack of a clock (which, had it existed, might have also possessed a radio), I went out to my car and listened. It was enjoyable to hear the amateur broadcasters doing their job, imperfectly but competently enough, and also to get a sense of their musical taste, which feels like it has integrity but at the same time is very different from mine. Also, there was one song I liked enough I'd want to have a copy of it, which prominently featured the lyric “one love” which I was hoping was the title of the song, but it doesn't appear to be. Does anyone know a song with that lyric, probably fairly recent, kind of poppish (definitely uses electric guitars)? Maybe I'll email my sister about it.
After the show ended, I was kind of tired, but not enough so to go back to sleep. I read for a while, showered, and headed over to Bates. I took a look at my sister's computer, which has been shutting off at random intervals. This sounds like a heat problem, but I didn't see any dead fans or anything, so all I was able to do was clean out the dust inside her case and set Word to auto-save every minute instead of every ten minutes. We tried running a ton of programs to thrash the system, but we still weren't able to trigger it.
I made use of Betsy's internet connection for a bit, then we went on a walk around campus and talked for an hour or two. It was nice to get a sense of what my sister is trying to accomplish in her college career, and a little bit of her potential plans after college. It's odd, though, that I like my sister as much as I do even though it seems like a lot of our core values differ (though we do share a few). I wonder if it's just a matter of biology. That seems like the most likely case, though it's odd for such an influence to condition my emotional reactions the way that it does.
After that I lay down on my sister's floor for about fifteen minutes, because I was tired, but this short of a nap didn't do much to help me. Then we went to get food, and after that, I took off. Overall, the visit involved a higher proportion of driving to actually doing stuff than I find ideal, but I'm glad I did it now, while I reasonably had the chance. (Lewiston is much farther from Pittsburgh than it is from Catskill.)
On the way home I stopped at a New Hampshire liquor store, both out of curiosity and some vague desire to support their state government (New Hampshire has state-run liquor stores) now that the FSP has chosen them. I bought a couple of cheap bottles of white wine, a bottle of port, a 750 mL of Grey Goose and a 1.75L of Dewar's (which, I've decided, is plenty good enough for day-to-day drinking, has the advantage of being pretty good straight out of the bottle, and isn't exorbitantly expensive). After that, despite my phone's battery being almost dead due to its constantly trying (and failing) to find a cell while I was in Lewiston, I felt like calling Ratha, so I did, and we talked for about ten minutes before the battery was completely trashed.
I drove on as fast as I safely could (where safety includes perceived unlikelihood of getting a ticket, not just avoiding accidents), because the trip was boring, because driving faster made it more interesting, and because I wanted to be able to talk to Ratha.
At home, I felt too tired to get back to work on Bikini Shoppe, so I just talked with Ratha until about midnight, then went to sleep. A couple of mildly tense issues came up, but we dealt with them, and as she pointed out in email, it's hard to feel too anxious, because it does seem like everything is going to basically work out. And that nice feeling of closeness, of not really needing to be afraid, is definitely there, and it makes it a lot easier to cope.
Charlie ended up telling me what it was that he earlier hadn't wanted to say because he was worried about my overreacting: he told me that he's not emotionally capable at present of “maintaining a long-distance relationship”. I asked for clarification and he said he'd do what he could, when he could, but that it was kind of hard to predict emotional reactions, which I have to admit is only fair.
I'm glad to know what he is thinking (and still a little confused that he thought, even if only for a bit, that he couldn't trust me to act reasonably on this information), but it does make me a little uncomfortable. First of all because while if he says he's not emotionally capable of keeping up contact with me after I move, I guess I have to trust him, but it seems so counterintuitive to me, because to me, it really doesn't feel very different than the time when I was in college. But also, because I feel like I owe Charlie, and I wish I could repay that debt; but at the same time, I feel like the Albany area has very little to offer me at this point other than Charlie's presence. (I don't know how long Pittsburgh will be the place for me to be, either; not forever, it seems; but it's also pretty clear to me that right now, Pittsburgh is the place to be.) I guess the only thing for me to do is to look at the fact that I've had a great deal of success already in my life at setting right things that were wrong, and to trust that some day, somehow, I'll be able to make this right too.
I kind of feel that by rambling as much as I have about the weekend, I've overstated its importance in my mental framework. In my defense, I was bored, and a detail unrecorded is a detail forever lost, so there you have it.
At lunch today with my dad, I ordered two slices of pizza, but was only able to finish one. I had ordered two slices not because I felt especially hungry but because I thought, at a rational level, that I would be benefitted by eating more. It occurred to me on the way back to work just how unusual my situation with regards to weight is.
There are several factors which might be contributing to this syndrome:
One negative fact about this issue is that it's hard for me to find psychological support from other people; probably the most common reaction is “I wish I had your problem”. I guess it's something I have to deal with on my own. Of course, there are positive factors:
Okay, I think I've exhausted this topic.
Some people, particularly some of Ratha's friends in Pittsburgh, think that I look and dress funny. This is true. One of those friends, Chris Maverick, has proposed to give me a makeover, and I have accepted his offer.
I have conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand, the outrageousness of the idea, and the fact that I immediately noticed its similarity to my Matrix Date senior year, made it appealing. This is basically why I accepted: because I like to keep life interesting. And Mav has reassured me and informed other people, numerous times, that his goal is to keep me me—to “update” my look rather than replace it. There was a little tension regarding my hair, because a haircut is the one thing that can't be backed out of if I decide I don't like it, and because I'm pretty attached to my long hair. But it looks like I won't be losing years of hair growth, so it should be okay.
And, of course, there are positive factors, like getting attention and a welcome to the city, and of course clothes I don't have to pay for! So, overall I'm slightly nervous about the prospect, but mostly excited.
I don't think anyone reads my journal who doesn't already know about this, but if so, give Mav money. :-)
Yesterday, I gave notice to DMV that I am leaving in two weeks. I was nervous all day, and in fact not sure I would be able to force myself to do this, but I emailed my boss and my boss' boss to set up a meeting. When the time we had set up came around, it went very well. One thing that helped was that I told them I thought I would be able to complete my current program before leaving, since most of the red tape is out of the way and the features are close to complete. Also, my boss' boss was very understanding of my explanation (that being that people have been offering me contract work which would pay a lot more than DMV), and actually seemed happy for me; he kind of knows that I've been underemployed at DMV, but it didn't even occur to me to consider that he was, you know, a human being, in addition to being a DMV employee.
I got a ton of work done yesterday, due to my desire to make good on my promise (it would be a little hard to live with myself if I left DMV completely in the lurch when they're in the middle of a deployment process, in a hiring freeze, and so on). I think I should be able to do it. Actually, I've been feeling pretty competent lately, as though life might throw a lot of issues my way, but they're all manageable. This degree of task-orientation also makes me a little unemotional, but that's okay for right now. I do hope I'll be able to let go a little bit when it becomes appropriate to do so. Abstention from caffeine and/or consumption of alcohol can help with this.
So, my last day of work is Wednesday, March 24. Thursday I pack, and Friday I drive, arriving some time in the evening. Ratha and I are planning to spend most of the weekend getting settled in and hanging out. Some time in the Saturday–Monday-ish range, I'm planning to seriously begin the social element of the settling-in process; I already have a list of eight people I'd like to see.
There's still a lot to do, but I feel relieved now that everything is set in motion.
Parts that look like this are digressions and/or counterweights to the main thrust of my argument.
I have noticed a disturbing lack of intensity in my life since coming home from Pittsburgh. The quality that I mean by “intensity” seems nearly impossible to describe (and I'm not convinced that most people have ever experienced it), but it's also similar to “drive” or “determination”. I discussed some of the worries that I think have been causing this with Ratha last night.
However, I still feel a desire to articulate them more fully. The difference between the week that I spent in Pittsburgh at the end of January—probably the most intense period in my entire life so far—and all other times seemed at the time to be that I stopped being evasive. That is, when an issue would come to mind, I would face it squarely, and generally bring it up pretty much immediately with Ratha also. But I've realized since then that there were actually worries that I shoved aside during that week, although they didn't seem important at the time. Each time Ratha's and my level of intimacy or commitment increased, they would run something like “gee, that may not have been a bad decision, but shouldn't you have thought a little more about it first?”
I pushed these worries aside because they seemed like the exact opposite of what I was trying to do. But since that week in Pittsburgh, they have festered, and I think the realization to which I've now come is that pushing anything aside is a fundamentally unworkable strategy, because it just stays there looming in the back of your mind waiting to jump up at you again.
Ratha once wrote “He does not seem like the Forever Person.” Well, Ratha is not as I imagined my Forever Person, either. I always thought that a woman who might become my wife would be inexperienced (and that she would be a virgin, in particular), that she would be somewhat shy and timid, and that she'd be a lot less smart than I am. And I certainly didn't think that she'd be 5 years older than me. I don't know how I pictured my relationship with her working, and now faced with the new evidence of Ratha's existence and of our evident compatibility, I am left with a dilemma: how do I make myself discard this old, quite possibly unrealistic and useless picture of what my life would be? It doesn't seem possible to do it by deliberate action.
So, during the week in Pittsburgh, it often felt like I was being dragged along by a force that, while inside my head, was outside of my control. I mostly liked where it was taking me, but the lack of control was still disturbing. So one thing I'm worried about is that Ratha and I might end up committing to each other, perhaps even at such a level as marriage, and then that things might somehow go horribly wrong. I have no clear picture of how this could happen, but my mom's parents and my parents both got divorced, so I am a child of divorce, and the onus is now upon me to break the cycle.
Now, once children were involved I don't think it would be difficult to stay together. I could always decide to stay together for their sake, and in fact I think I would choose to do so. But if I still had doubts, then this might be almost as bad as divorce—being locked into a life that would never seem quite right. And I'm having trouble picturing that one last step that would make it truly impossible for either Ratha or I to ever consider splitting up. We both seem so cerebral and focused on possibility that I can't see how we could ever totally dismiss it, although I do hope that if we decide to commit permanently to one another, that it will be in that context.
I honestly wonder how much of my current aversion to divorce is simply an opinion that I absorbed whole from Charlie. I wasn't really averse to divorce before encountering his moral objection to it, and in fact as far as I can tell I felt nothing when my parents split up. And there is even now a module in my mind that doesn't believe it is possible for Charlie to be mistaken, about anything. In the past this module has been in the driver's seat even while I was romantically attracted to other people, and even while I was dating Alison. This has been intensely disturbing to me, and in fact, though my relationship with Charlie has been very beneficial to us both, I also think it has been pretty unhealthy, at least on my side.
One way of seeing my relationship with Ratha is as the tool I finally needed to break free from Charlie, especially because he's told me about his emotional incapability of maintaining a long-distance relationship (which still seems like bullshit to me, but maybe that's just sour grapes). I don't think this view is accurate, but it disturbs me that it is even possible.
Another view whose existence disturbs me is that I have been manipulative towards Ratha. Indeed, this has been discussed to death on LiveJournal, and about all I can say is that I was at each point acting on how I honestly felt at the time. But was that part of some larger unconscious pattern of manipulation? There doesn't really seem to be any way to tell.
Ratha said last night that her actions up to this point could still be viewed as her being unable to choose to hurt someone (me) rather than as seeking out value. She immediately said that this view seemed unlikely, and I agreed, but to be honest, we both have an interest in dismissing this view, so again, how can we tell if it's true? (This does not mean that it is true, only that we do not know.)
All of these things have been part of a pattern of my systematically up-playing any evidence in favor of my and Ratha's going out and down-playing any evidence against it. The arguments have seemed completely reasonable to me, and lately to both of us, but that doesn't change the fact that in another light they can be viewed as attempts to justify this decision that we have made.
There is a part of me which is driven by nothing but the desire for sex, absent any broader considerations about whether it's a good idea. I think this is true for almost all males, but I wonder sometimes if this part is running the show. Even if so, I'm not convinced it would be a disaster; fully actualizing myself sexually seems in fact to require the achievement of my broader-life goals. The problem is that the sex-based module can be short-sighted and not only take attention away from other things, but even fail to understand how to achieve its own goals. Also, being very focused on sex can be kind of off-putting. (But Ratha actually seems pretty okay with it.)
My relationship with Ratha is different from any I've had before. Generally I get so demanding that I suck people dry, and they give up on me. I try to cut back, but it's not that I actually want to, it's just that I'm afraid of losing them entirely. This cutting back has always ended up being too little, too late.
With Charlie the problem was different. I never had to worry too much about sucking him dry, because it didn't seem like it took anything out of him to give me what I wanted or needed. But although Charlie viewed our relationship as mutually beneficial, and that was the length and breadth of it for him, I always felt bad for being unable to offer him anything of comparable value to what he offered me because (in his own words) he doesn't need much.
But with Ratha I've been repeatedly surprised by her failure to finally give up on me. Many times, it has seemed to me like I had pushed too far and she would decide to cut her losses. But so far, every time we've discussed this kind of thing afterwards, she's told me that she's still felt a strong desire to interact with me.
This makes it a little bit easier to believe that I might not be a charity chase for her.
I discussed this with Ratha a couple of days ago, and I've told a few other people about one or another detail of this, but I've never expressed the full extent of it, not even during the dozens of therapy appointments I've had. I have a problem.
As a brief perusal of my journal would reveal to any astute reader, I tend to be obsessive. However, that same perusal would not reveal all of the repetitious structures that go on in my mind. I would tend to classify those structures into three types: obsessions, compulsions, and intrusive thoughts.
Obsessions are thoughts that are basically fine, except that they come up at inappropriate times or repeat themselves more often than is useful. An example is my focus on finding meaning in license plate numbers, and numbers generally, over the past few months. I saw a few numbers that were interestingly correlated with my life at the time, and I started obsessing about numbers in general. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with noticing that the number “227” is my birthday, and smiling when I see it, I think; but when it comes up as often as it has been, maybe there is a problem.
I say “maybe” because I've only really been focusing on numbers when there was nothing else going on for me mentally, and the alternative was to be bored. (I tend to get bored to distraction pretty easily when doing things that don't involve my mind's verbal center, like driving or walking.) So, I'm not convinced that any individual instance of an obsessive thought is a problem—the problem, if there is one, would have to be in the pattern of repetition and the potential for it to eat up mental energy that would be better spent elsewhere.
Compulsions are similar to obsessions (and in fact, in my case, each compulsion seems to be associated with an obsession), but concern behaviors rather than thoughts. In my case, one of the strongest compulsions is symmetry. If I do something with one side of my body, then often (though not always, and I don't know quite what the rule is) I will feel physically uncomfortable until I do the same thing with the other side of my body. This is not tied into any higher-level value structure; I am not afraid that God will strike me down or something if I don't do it. And, in fact, I am capable of deliberately ignoring it when I choose to, although I find it pretty unpleasant.
I have been doing these things for probably 10 years or more now. (I have a distinctive memory of some of these behaviors developing while I was in the Academy building, and I'm pretty sure it was when I was in LEAP rather than when I was a student there.) Ratha told me that she had the exact same pattern, and that she overcame it through force of will in fourth grade. I was proud of her for doing that, and at the same time I found it baffling, because my experience has been that the harder I try to overcome these things, the worse they get, whereas if I ignore them, they abate to some degree. And again, the compulsions seem mostly harmless. Who cares if after clenching my left fist I have to clench my right? It doesn't have any effect on my life overall, it seems, and when it is actually important to me to do something unsymmetric, the compulsions just don't happen in the first place. So it seems that the compulsions might be my brain's way to deal with an environment that provides me with insufficient stimulus to keep me mentally occupied, by inventing a superstructure that I can then adhere to.
Intrusive thoughts are the most troublesome of the three. They don't happen all that much, and their effect is more to dull the sensation of whatever I'm doing at the time (by making it feel absurd) than to actually disturb me. And again, so far as I can tell, they have little effect on my actual behavior. I would distinguish intrusive thoughts from obsessions in that obsessions seem like normal thought patterns gone awry, whereas intrusive thoughts are totally inappropriate. For example, I'll have a brief thought of engaging in sexual activity with someone with whom I'm interacting, even though I'm not interested in doing so, I have no reason to believe that they are, and I'm not even attracted to them. Actually, I think most of these thoughts involve sex in one way or another, but that might just be because sex tends to be one of the more potentially disturbing topics for me—as near as I've been able to tell, the intrusive thoughts are calculated for the specific purpose of annoying me.
Despite these obsessions, compulsions, and intrusive thoughts, I'm able to cope with day-to-day life quite well. In fact, they mostly seem to step out of the way of their own accord when I need to get something done. I looked at the DSM description of OCD, and although my symptoms seem a little similar, I doubt that my issues are actually part of any clinical-grade disorder at all, simply because they don't interfere all that much with my life.
Still, I think that this complex might be the most important problem in my life right now. The only way I have found to deal with these issues so far is to push them aside—to ignore them. But this is a form of evasion, and evasion has as far as I have been able to tell been at the root of every significant problem in my life. It seems that there has to be some way to overcome these issues through deliberate action (Ratha did it!) but the more I focus on them the more prevalent they become. And although I can cope with life as I am, it really is distressing to me to be unable to listen to my favorite song in a mode of pure experience without thought, or to be unable to make clear decisions because of these useless cyclical patterns.
I am inclined to be opposed to the use of drugs to treat this problem, not on religious grounds but simply because it seems likely that they would have unavoidable side effects on my personality. Also, people would start to see me as if I had a “disease” that had to be “treated”, and that is not acceptable to me, because if I ever did attempt to lessen these symptoms with drugs (alcohol does seem to decrease them, incidentally), I would absolutely require that I be allowed to retain the option to decide that the cure was worse than the disease and go off the drugs. And I really don't think I have a disorder, as I said above, because I am able to function, and I'm completely confident that these issues will never cause me to do anything “crazy”, like attack someone or put myself in danger. (If they could cause that kind of effect, they would have already done so.) So I'll have to try to deal with this at a cognitive level. Maybe Ratha can help. I recently helped Ratha with a psychological issue of her own (having to do with emotionality and its expression), and she seems to be doing a lot better with it now. If I'm lucky, then truly realizing that this is a problem is a good chunk of the battle all by itself.
Minimal journal entry.
Tuesday morning on the way to an endodontist appointment, some idiot backed into my car right after I turned onto a side street. I was nearly as much of an idiot and didn't think to call the police or get nearly as much information as I should have. If it weren't for the assistance of my father and Nance, I might well not have been able to make it to Pittsburgh when I did. Nevertheless, the damage appears to be essentially cosmetic, so I can live with it.
Tuesday evening, despite the accident, I still wanted to visit Charlie one last time. My dad let me borrow his car so he could take mine to the garage to get it looked at.
The visit was actually a bit less awkward than the previous one had been, as it seemed that we had enough to talk about, and didn't focus quite so much on my moving. I told Charlie pretty soon after arriving that although I'd had several good ideas for presents for him, I had put off dealing with it for too long and arrived empty-handed, so I offered to take him out to dinner. We went to Sushi Thai Garden and had a good time, just like we have so many times before.
Charlie gave me a small jade plant that had grown as an offshoot of his. I hope it survives. It seems symbolic somehow.
Wednesday was my last day of work. In the morning, Tim came over to my desk and asked me to come with him. I assumed he had some last-minute issue with my program to deal with and grabbed my notebook.
As it turned out, they had bought a cake for me and set it up alongside food, and a card that everyone had signed. I was pretty shocked, because I had never thought that anyone at DMV noticed me. After I sent a thank-you note to the office, I had to go to the bathroom because I started crying.
My thought was almost along the lines of “why are people senselessly kind”? It almost seemed useless, and at the same time it did make sense, in a way, and it was very nice of them. And I realized that no matter the obvious benefits of my new life, there actually are things I'll miss about the past nine months.
Thursday was supposed to be packing, but I was very tired and allowed myself quite a bit of slack, so I didn't really start until the evening. At that point, I moved a bunch of stuff into the kitchen, then got my dad to help my organize it into boxes and move it into the car.
At some point during the process, it occurred to me to wonder what portion of my typical laziness when moving is due to low blood sugar. I went through probably 3 cans of soda (in addition to the food I would normally have eaten) just through the exertion of moving stuff from point A to point B. It looks like there's quite a bit more of that in my immediate future, too.
In the morning, my mom came down to Catskill. She and my dad both helped me finish packing, and I said my goodbyes and drove off. It did feel a little different than any time before that I've left, even though I've felt like sort of a guest at home at least since college started.
Driving was easy and fairly mundane. I kept my speed down, as I have now realized that the benefit of excessive speed does not outweigh the cost, particularly with a fully loaded car and an entire life of ahead of me. I also stopped fairly frequently, because the mile markers at which I had chosen to call Ratha happened to be right near rest stops.
I left at 11 or so, and arrived some time between 19:30 and 20. As I pulled up alongside Ratha's apartment building to unload my stuff, I played One Love to set the stage for the days to come.
It took Ratha and I maybe an hour just to carry all my stuff inside and barely begin to set things up. After that, I drove my car over to Maggie Mo, where as Ed had said, I had little difficulty finding a parking spot.
I had bought a bottle of champagne on Thursday at the liquor store, because I had never had champagne before and it seemed like an appropriate occasion. We didn't actually have champagne flutes, so around midnight I poured us each a glass in my martini glasses (which, as Ratha and I both noticed, are pretty close to the opposite of champagne flutes in terms of shape). Between the alcohol and the long days both of us had had, we did manage to get to sleep eventually.
Saturday morning we had planned to go to a Pitt job fair, but that didn't end up actually happening until early Saturday afternoon. I talked to their computing services department and it looks like the only entry-level positions they have available are NOC jobs, which basically means a lot of troubleshooting and not a lot of programming—something I could do if I were in dire straits, but not really my ideal job. Ratha learned that they're using PHP and may be hiring around when she's free from her current contract job, though, so the trip was worthwhile.
In the afternoon we looked at several apartments. It seems difficult to balance three factors: budget, location, and size. We'd really like not to spend more than $1000 per month, and it doesn't seem like we should have to spend more than $800 or so; but we want to be reasonably close to CMU, and we'd like to have two bedrooms. We've set a decision date of May 1 (if by that time, there's nowhere better than where we are now, then we'll just stay here).
In the evening was the Roselawn party. I brought a bottle of 160 proof vodka as a party favor. Evidently Laura arrived after Ratha and I had left and ignored the explicit directions on the bottle not to drink it straight. Not that I blame her—I probably would have tried the same thing.
The party was somewhat unusual in that, even though it was enjoyable, Ratha and I ended up spending probably half of the time we were there just sitting next to and talking to each other. Neither of us knew all that many people there, though it was good for me to get to see Ed and Shawn.
At 22:30 or so we left. We might not have gone so early, but I had forgotten my long-acting insulin, and that was about as long as I felt I could let it go without throwing me off. It was probably just as well, though; we both enjoyed it, but I don't know how much longer that would have lasted had we stayed.
Early Sunday afternoon, Ratha and I left for a shopping excursion. This ended up taking most of our day. Itinerary:
I'm sure you found that fascinating. What is mildly frightening is that 1) I'm almost sure I missed a bunch of things, and 2) we already have about 5 more shopping lists since Sunday.
Monday I started to actually work on enhancements to PC Torque's site. The first such enhancement is real-time shipping quotes, since they've been having to exert a lot of human effort to look up shipping prices for people, which is a waste of their time. I'm hoping to have this feature ready to deploy by Sunday.
In the late afternoon, we went to the KGB meeting. I brought Robert with me, which may not have been the wisest decision, as I perhaps ended up paying less attention to the meeting than I should have. I still found it enjoyable, but I do wonder whether the KGB and I have drifted apart such that I'll never again feel like an integrated participant. If so, it wouldn't be a disaster, but it does seem that it would be unfortunate.
Immediately after that, Ratha went to tutoring (she was showing her student Logo this time), so I had to actually spend a couple of hours without her. Horrors. ;-)
Tuesday and Wednesday we worked. Sometimes. Other times we talked. Tuesday evening we went out for Mexican with some DPB people. We had both just had glasses of champagne, and were kind of quiet and non-participatory, but we still enjoyed ourselves, I think.
A lot got done today. We plan to go see a movie tonight. I can't remember what it's called.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Mon Aug 4 19:38:28 2008