Writing in the Corner

Another change in plans

To quote the great philosopher, Cher, when she filed for divorce 9 days after marrying Gregg Allman:

I think it’s best to admit to your mistakes as quickly as possible.”

I won’t be doing database consulting from home. I lack the self-discipline and the temperament. I need a company with a name, a phone line, and a list of tasks to be accomplished. And at the end of the week (or month) I want a paycheck, with taxes withheld, and health insurance would be really nice, too.

Perhaps I will continue reading all about Java, but I think it’s unlikely. I’ve started the process of looking for temporary work, and hope to do some data entry in the evenings to keep money coming in. My unemployment runs out next week. I’m hoping for a benefits extension, but I doubt it will come in time. Perhaps I lack faith.

I was very nervous about telling the managing partner, but it was all good. I was rather depressed about this yesterday, but today, I am much better. I have faced my demons! Say it loud, I’m a flibbertygibbet and I’m proud!

I have trouble concentrating on one (look! a bird!) thing at a time.

Have you any dreams you’d like to tell?

I’m not a big fan of “dream interpretation,” because I think the dreams we have must be interpreted according to our own personalities, life experiences, and fears. But I do think dreams tell us things about what is going on in our subconscious. Remember the scene from the film Annie Hall , where she had just gone to a shrink for the first time? She’s telling Alvie about the dream she related to the therapist: “I was being suffocated by Frank Sinatra.” “What did he say about that?” “He said that your last name is Singer.”

I usually remember the dreams I have early in the morning, but I don’t remember them later in the day unless I tell somebody about them or do something else to cement the memory of the dream. I had two strange dreams last night that made an impression on me, and I told my husband about them first thing because I wanted to remember them.

In the first dream, DH and I stole a bunch of lumber and fabric to make a canopy for our bed. It was a lovely canopy, but I was overcome by guilt and went and confessed to the person I needed to tell, and then paid them for the materials. I did this RIGHT BEFORE he was going to call the police and set them upon us. We had to pay for the canopy, but we didn’t go to jail.

In the second dream, DH had an additional wife. We are Mormon, so the second wife thing probably has some relationship to this (insert disclaimer here about plural marriage, blah, blah, blah we haven’t done this since 1904, blah, blah, blah.) In my dream, I knew her, but I don’t REALLY know her. They were preparing to go spend the day at the temple. In my dream, I wondered about the nature of their relationship. Did he enjoy sex with her? Did he love her as deeply as he loved me? Did he treat her the same way? In my dream, he was very remote and uncomfortable when present with both of us, which probably is what caused me to wonder (in my dream) what were the qualities of his relationship with her.

I have some ideas about what these dreams may mean to me, which I will keep to myself, because I could be completely wrong. If any of you want to comment, tell me how you see your dreams. Do you get insights? Do they ever frighten you? No need to share the dreams unless you REALLY want to.

Boilin’ season’s on

I will be spending most of my time the next two days looking at the Java Development Environment. Yikes. Nothing like jumping in to a new task with both feet. I just hope the water’s not too deep.

My internet connection was out most of the day yesterday and all morning today, and now it’s mysteriously all better for no apparent reason. I am not going to call off the repair people. I think the crawfish eat through the cable buried in my backyard. No kidding.

Speaking of crawfish, every year my church holds a crawfish boil for the congregation. Fun stuff for the kids to do, and more crawfish than you can possibly imagine, and it’s free. Last year, I left without a doggy bag. Once you learn how to peel the fish, it’s possible to get to the meat really efficiently, so I will try to grab enough extras to take home and freeze some tails. Later in the week, then, we will have crawfish fettucine for dinner (though I will use nowhere near two teaspoons of cayenne pepper in the sauce).

When I went for a swamp tour a few years ago, a woman was cleaning whole boiled crabs for gumbo. She was working on a monster of a crustacean, and I was very interested in figuring out the process. Perhaps I should look for step-by-step video instructions on the web, as all the local signs for “fat crabs” are starting to get my attention, too.

And to finish up my meanderings on creatures with exoskeletons, here’s a website all about crayfish (crawfish).

Taking an “un-” out of my self definition

There are ways of describing myself that are most accurate in the negative. I’m what my friend Peggy Tatyana calls a Failthful Unbeliever. My political beliefs are unAmerican, if you listen to Ann Coulter. But apparently, I am no longer unemployed.

This may seem odd, but I find this a bit frightening. For a long time, I’ve had nothing going on but looking for work, home stuff, and school. School was going well, home stuff is…eh, what can you say about housework. I failed and failed and failed at looking for work. I only had one or two interviews that went at all well, and in both cases someone else was hired - for one of those, I didn’t even get a second interview. But now, something has happened, out of the blue, just on a whim, because of networking. It’s not a job, per se, but a consulting gig. I’m going to give it a go and see how I do. I like to think I am very motivated to succeed at this, because we need the money and the situation is just ideal - work from home, learning new things, in an area I’m very good at.

In any case, today feels much like yesterday, except now when people say “what do you do?” I’ll say “I’m a database consultant” instead of “I’m unemployed.” And that’s frightening. Because I have to produce.

Remember my post on meta? Well, yesterday, in my phone conversation with the managing partner (an old friend) he mentioned metadata. I so wanted to tell him about my meta hat.

Blogging as Therapy, Dialog, or Disclosure?

I don’t know much about the blogging community, but it seems that the members thereof claim a difference between blogging and online journaling. I started keeping this blog as a place to just do some writing, and maybe have some friends comment on it. I am careful about what I disclose, because I am aware that people out there are reading. My husband is a private person; you probably can’t figure out who he is from my Blog. I keep my childrens’ names out of the blog because they are individuals who have a right to some privacy. I try not to swear in my blog because I don’t want to offend people who are offended by swearing.

Other people are far more open about their lives in their blogs. A prostitute keeps a blog, and she describes her tricks in them. A fellow who posts very rarely on The Folk of the Fringe also has a very open blog; at least, so I surmise from some of his posts. If his blog is the one I think it is, one must have a password to read it. At the other end of the disclosure spectrum, after reading Dave’s blog for over a month, all I know about him is that he lives in the SF Bay area, and that he is or was LDS. Dave writes about ideas and subjects of interest to him, rather than about himself. (edited to add: He has an “about me” link that is pretty comprehensive. I know much more about Dave now than I did 15 minutes ago.)

Dave has a link to my blog on his blog, which is how a blog’s audience grows, I hope. It was such a rush to be linked! It made me yearn for a bigger audience, and the book deals earned by the writers of pound, belle du jour (the prostitute named above), and even Wil Wheaton. Yet when I click on By Common Consent aka Rameupton aka Adam-God Theory, and see 25 comments on a single post, I think maybe I don’t want THAT much of a bigger audience.

I’ve added a counter to my template, that shows who the last 100 visitors are to my site (but only to me). This way, I know how many times Randy accesses my page from work, and from home. Ditto Brenda. Not so sure about Miranda. And I think I know when Dave has accessed, but I can’t be sure about him, either. It would also be fun (though probably not doable easily using Blogger) to add radio buttons that allow users to select specific comments, which are then mailed to me. I would have choices like:

Intense clarity

Inspired use of the "F" word

superb grammar and spelling

deep, man, really deep

wuh?

My blogger friend Brenda was having a rough morning. One of her concerns is that people don’t comment on her blog. I enjoy comments, too. But it made me wonder why we are doing this. I read on Dave’s site: Because we can. But what do we want back? Comments, please.