this is a simultaneous entry, so if you read it twice, you have no one to blame but yourself.

almost two years ago, i read an article in the new yorker about blogging and decided to jump on the bandwagon. since that time, a lot has happened in the world and to me and mine. life is like that, though. and that's what this format is all about: life. along the way, i discovered that i liked keeping tabs on what i was doing from day to day. it makes sense for me. writing is a compulsion and this format allows me to feed that need perfectly.

the question now is no longer if i should write about something but under which identity i want to post it.

i once asked a friend (and fellow writer) how she knew when to end a story. "just pick a point," she said. as simple as that. well, i now know that it's not always that simple. the story always continues on and all endings are arbitrary, just like beginnings. sometimes they're the same thing. just like now.

blogger's service has gotten to the point where i'm no longer a satisfied customer. (i realize that i'm bitching about a free service.) i've already moved to livejournal for the comments. at this point, it makes sense to make a clean break and end one phase of my life and move on to another.

i still have my various blogger-based projects: the right click galleries will continue to be published and the souvenir koan may start up again at some point. but the centerpiece is ending. and that saddens me on this wednesday morning.

(note to those that care: blogger seems to have fixed their little issue with the archives. i'm still skeptical, but let's see what happens. whoops. spoke too soon. sorry.)

i just got finished stapling fifty two-page resumes together for the brassring tech job fair in tyson's tomorrow. i've got my fingers crossed. to date, i've had a lot of leads (great leads, actually) but nothing solid. so i'm plowing through my resources, in search of something to help me pay the bills. nothing is too outrageous at this point.

in other news, shannon and i are eating dinner with my grandmother tonight. that should be fun. i haven't talked to her at any great length since grandpa died but i hope she's holding up okay. i honestly wonder, though, if my mother told her about the seperation yet. weird. family... not quite politics... whatever.

i've gotten micheal's brain buzzing with my idea for a new kind of message board. information management. it's the wave of the future. or maybe it's just a buzzword that futurists use to waive the rules of the present. it's hard to say.

speaking of the future, have you seen this? the us government is going to create a corp of agents called tips (terrorism information and prevention system) who will be recruited from amongst the delivery drivers and cleaning crews of our country to keep tabs on suspicious activity. wonderful. one person in twenty four. that's a higher saturation of invisible informers... sorry, agents, than the stasi had during the height of their power in east germany.

what is it with the government right now? we've got major problems with our foreign policy, economic policy and environmental policy and now we want to add domestic policy to the pile? great. good thinking. i have to say that the current bush administration is sounding the death knell for conservative politicians who espouse reaganomics and harsh penalities for anyone not fortunate enough to be born a rich, white male. and hey, if that means that we have a shrub in the white house for the next two years (impeachments notwithstanding), then i'm all for it.

why worry about any of this? when you put an idiot in power, things are bound to go wrong. eventually. the only question is how catastrophic will it be for the american people? maybe we'll stop acting stupidly and start to think for ourselves...

one can only dream.

okay. it looks like blogger has fixed their publishing problem but i'm still not sure about the archive situation and i don't feel like fucking with it (yet).

i noticed in the mirror that my face was all dry and crunchy. guess who was being male and didn't think about moisturizer? i hate having dry skin sometimes.

i'm mildly pissed at the dipshit who called me well after i left on friday to tell me about the problems she was having with her computer. pissed because there are two operators here and she could have just as easily called the other guy but chose to call and leave messages on my machine instead. that makes sense. really, it does.

i'm also pissed at myself because our friend's car got towed last night. what sucks about that is that i had a parking pass and even said "where is your car parked?" and then completely biffed it. i think she was pissed and had every right to be. i feel really bad about that. seriously.

but other than that, the night was great. we played simpsons trivia with the hoovers (and carrie learned a valuable lesson about true/false questions) and then we watched robin williams on hbo. we were social and shit. it was fun.

saturday night we gathered with the same group of friends to see the free concrete blonde concert on g street. that was fun, too. except for the people in the crowd. people suck. officially.

hrm. i'm thinking about the rest of the weekend and trying to figure out how not to be cryptic. see, shannnon and i have been having a great time and i'm really enjoying the fact that i'm able to share stuff with her. stuff that i'd only ever talked about in fiction. (if you don't know, you don't need to know, so don't ask. you won't get an answer.)

the upshot is that i'm comfortable (or getting there) and shannon's been very supportive and that combination is making me really happy. and i hope that doesn't change anytime soon. i like that part of my life too much.

good morning. i'm still waking up, so forgive me if i'm not entirely coherent.

i now have a new haircut and, instead of looking like i have a lesbian mullet, i now look like i have a lesbian buzzcut. i just can't win. oh well, this will grow out and is far more appropriate for summer.

one of the things i did yesterday was sort out what the ending should be for my novel. this is a good thing. now i just have to write the whole thing down so i don't have to concentrate on the "what happens next" details anymore. i hate having to remember all of that. that's why i write it down, if you want to know the truth.

i've learned lessons from each of my novels. good lessons. i haven't always stuck with the lessons, but they were there for me in any case.

what the thunder said: write what you know. science fiction is a good genre, but it's tough to write. much easier to write fiction set in a universe where you don't have to explain the rules, placenames, gadgets and politics for the reader to understand the nuances of what's going on.

the podium: realistic dialogue is important. (and it's not always necessary that the person you live with like your art. even if you've worked very hard at it. not everyone has the same tastes. this was more of a life-lesson than a novel lesson, but you should never ignore a lesson when it flies at your head like a plastic cup filled with ice and captain morgan.)

not fish; duck: this one is easy - make sure you have a single, coherent story to tell. and, just because a piece will fit in, that's no reason to include it. oh yeah, a good beginning is important, too. of course, this one's headed for revision number three soon, so there could be more lessons involved. time will tell.

weapons of devotion: make sure you have an ending. a good beginning is very helpful. and dialogue. and a coherent story (sort of). but it gets depressing when the story starts to build to a climax and you have no idea how to end it. which is why the novel takes that bizarre seventy-one degree turn towards the end. i think it works, but i can understand why not everyone would see it the same way.

stephanie doesn't answer the phone anymore: it's almost too soon to tell what lessons i'll learn here. an early frontrunner, though, is "make sure you have enough time to write." of course, the fact that i'm writing during a stressful time in my life might be a lesson, too. perhaps "writing is a good way to destress" might work? except that it really isn't.

hm. something to think about when i'm done. until then, it's just another long, lonely job. don't get me wrong. writing is fun. but sometimes it can get really boring. especially when you want to get to the good parts and you're stuck having to describe the characters sitting around in the red light district, waiting for the next characters to show up so the plot can really get moving.

so those are my thoughts for friday morning. cheery, huh?

we were lying in bed last night and i realized that i had fifty-some hours of sick time accrued and my job is over at the end of august. time to take some sick leave. so today i'm at home, sick. "sick," rather. more on this in a bit.

last night was fun. we saw dan from the culture list and his friend, robin.

we also saw the hoovers and realized that between concrete blonde and robin williams on sunday (the show starts at 9pm), this will be the weekend of ze hoovers. or with the hoovers. or something. (and i can see british people reading this and saying to themselves "why is he going on about vacuum cleaners?")

anyway, concrete blonde has turned into an event, which should be fun. still no plans for sunday, though. that's on my to-do list for today, actually.

also on my to-do list for today: job hunting, picking up comics, getting a real haircut (i hate having a do you'd see on a lesbian - it just sends the wrong signals), more job hunting, getting the package from the front office, writing and, for something new and different, job hunting.

should be a full day, i think.

so work is bugging the shit out of me this morning. the most annoying aspect of working with pcanywhere (and ftp applications in general) is that there is no convenient piece of equipment for you to bang on to make it work properly. kicking your tower just doesn't do the trick. neither does cursing. i know. i've tried.

and i know that my reports are going to be a pain in the ass. the worst part is that it's not worth it for me to try and fix anything. isn't that horrible?

i got no work done yesterday and also no job searching done, which was really stupid of me. the incentive that shannon proposed though, was that for every day i don't do any job hunting, she gets to smoke a cigarette. i agreed. it's a good incentive and that way neither of us has to play the bad guy. motivation i can handle.

and, in other news, the scientific experiment began this morning. yep. we're taking the pepsi challenge. more on this as the experiment progresses.

while i may have gotten no work done, i was able to finish remixing all of the pictures i had in the remix folder. i got sixteen or seventeen (i forget which offhand) done yesterday. very abstract. i also uploaded forty some, so now i have 169 images on my site. the next month and a half of right click images are sorted, so i don't have to worry about them. they'll be presented in order of creation from here on out, so you can see the progression. if you care.

speaking of pictures, i see here that someone has stolen an image from a minor net celebrity and used it as her lj icon. personally, i don't see the issue. yes, there is some concern about identity theft, but it's not like she said "oooh look at my new picture of me." i wonder if there would have been such a hue and cry if she'd put up a picture of lou reed?

and i don't use lou reed as mere hyperbole. celebrity is celebrity and there is no critical mass that seperates one group from another - instead, it's a sliding scale of recognition. i'm quite sure that there are people on the net who have no idea who lou reed is, for example.

for that matter, it doesn't really matter if there is some kind of celebrity associated with the individual involved, does it? it could just be a picture of some other, random person. just like this case.

what i don't get about internet art in general is the expectation that no one is ever going to appropriate something for their own uses. what kind of insanity is that? once it's up, you might as well resign yourself to the fact that something you've made is going to be used without your permission. yes, permission is nice and all, but etiquette is as individual as morality. deal with it and move on. and, if you're that paranoid about having your images borrowed, don't post them. pure and simple.

which brings up the question about my artwork: "would i be upset if someone stole my artwork?"

no. why should i? i borrowed the source images from elsewhere, why would i be upset if it got appropriated in it's turn? i know i made it. that should be enough. i'd hope, of course, that someone who got into my work would do something interesting with it instead of just cutting and pasting onto their website (and i do have issues with someone stealing my bandwidth, but that's a different topic entirely).

practice what you preach.

in other news, the story is moving right along. in my head. i'm still in the "move the pieces around until they fit properly in the story" phase. shannon can tell you that it's not my most entertaining mode (because it involves me staring off into space for an hour or so at a time) but hey, i'm where i want to be. mentally, that is.

now i just have to figure out how to write at home. that's going to be a trick. or maybe not. we'll see.

okay. the archive situation with blogger seems to have sorted itself out. we'll see. (if it doesn't, you'll have to deal with the direct link and having to find your own way to the most current entry. sorry. out of my control.)

one more souvenir koan piece today and then i'm stopping for a while. i've posted what i wanted to post and a bit more besides. no more memories that i care to share right now. the next round will probably be short fiction again, anyway.

speaking of fiction, i just want to put out an update on what's going on in that arena. one of the things i did while i was in los angeles was sit down and write for an hour or two every day. i ended up with a piece that i thought sat well on it's own, but shannon disagreed. she liked it but it lacked an ending. i hate it when she's right, but when's she's right, she's right.

so instead of a longish short story, i have the start of a novel. i don't know how long the start is because i wrote it out longhand and haven't bothered to type it in yet. and i didn't know what to write next, which is why i ended it where i did. well, now i know what to write next. except that i have no time to write here at work (my preferred place to write) because i have to look for a job. so i guess i'll be writing longhand for a while. this should be fun.

anyway. so that's the status there. other stuff is going on, too, but it's inconsequential to anyone but me. and shannon. and my family. the people that need to know already do. if you don't, then the story is simply not worth relating. after all, i see no reason to go on about the shitty things that have happened to me in the past week (not that anything shitty happened to me last week - i'm just using that phrase as an example). if it's sorted, then it's sorted. going over it again for the sake of having something interesting to say just isn't me.

bah. time to pay the bills.

yeah, yeah. i know that somehow my hyperlink script didn't allow you to jump to the right page on my blog. whatever. i didn't feel like troubleshooting it from los angeles. so sue me. it still doesn't seem to want to show friday's entry in the right archive. hey. not my fault. (now it does.)

anyway. argle bargle and all of that. i have a lot of things to do today. check email (200 messages from the culture to go through - and if that sounds like a lot, i went through around 200 yesterday), look for a job. all that fun stuff.

so here's something until i get settled.

motherfuck. so blogger doesn't have autoarchiving. or some such bullshit. so you get what i can provide. enjoy!

vacation has been swell. i have done nothing all week and have enjoyed doing same. i had to park the car last night, which was the first driving i had to do in a week. ah, the luxury.

(i have been so relaxed that i was able to start and complete a full story. now that's what i call a vacation!)

we are, as usual, bringing home too many books. we sent home ten or so in a box and my bag has an additional fifteen or so. thank god i only bought a few of them (the rest were scavenged off shelves of friends).

let's see. clothes on melrose are great but too damned expensive. the ocean air makes things colder than you'd expect for los angeles. the hustler store is surprisingly tasteful (as tasteful as you can get when you sell t-shirts of naked women that say "porn star"). there were more fireworks on the streets of san pedro than the city was able to afford. that was odd.

so tomorrow we go home. 500 list mails to check. mail to go through. a job search to start. whee.

so i think i'll go back to the white stripes and my bartle bull novel about africa. just for these last few hours.

good morning. it's been really quiet so far and i've been having a great time. so has shannon, so that's a good thing. only shannon could tell you what we've been to so far. i've just been along for the ride. but that's okay.

(this keyboard is really pissing me off, but i think i've gotten the hang of it.)

logjamming was down yesterday, but it's up now, so you can see the pictures of shannon. and yes, those are of shannon. i just kept taking them further and further out into the world of abstraction.

oh. and watch deconstructing harry, if you get a chance. that movie is so me. the wonder boys is very me, too. but deconstructing harry really is me. almost disturbingly so.