We live in a world normalized for discrete functional units whose boundaries are congruent with those of financial units. And personal identities are generally problematic for those functional units that don’t traffic in identities as trade.

What I’m getting at is that once again, I am getting the definite sense that my personal web site may be about to conflict with my professional life and my income potential. That’s not okay; I am unable to be one of the people who sublimates my individuality entirely for decades in order to participate materially in the capital economy just to be self-sufficient.

Cash and bodily survival are not good enough reasons for me to commit identity-suicide; but unless I commit identity-suicide, I may not have cash or bodily survival to enjoy the sense of moral superiority that comes from taking such a principled stand.

Oh well. I speak. I will continue to speak. If that makes me unemployable or unfit for public appearance without escort, I suppose I’ll have to transition into the identity industries.

In my first three weeks on the job since arrival, I have handled 796 incoming email messages and sent 407 messages by email. That means an average of 66 incoming issues a day and an average of 34 answers or resolutions a day by email. That’s in addition to meetings (of which there seem to be an endless stream) and phone calls.

No wonder I don’t seem to have time to do any of the work that the emails, meetings, and phone calls are actually about. Especially since I’m new and still only have a half-baked idea of what’s going on a lot of the time.

Heh… There’s an element of amusement to this. (But I do also want to do a really good job, at anything that I do.)

—

Today has been very, very busy. Probably the busiest day since I got here. I haven’t had much time to attend to my email today. That’s bad, because there are currently 18 of them red-flagged “for follow up,” some of them left over from yesterday, and they’re all things that are gonna take a while, so I’ve sort of put them off.

Guess they’ll have to wait until after the weekend.

It may be time (and I may be “old enough” now to get away with it) to start telling people “no” a lot more than I have been, or “you’ll have to wait a week” or things like that.

Stresssssssssssssssssssss, aghhhhhhhhhh.

I miss the days when I had a big huge video gaming / video editing rig and a superfast Internet pipe and a massive SCSI-3 RAID and enough gaming horsepower to run games at 1600×1200 2xFSAA on my 19″ monitor.

I have to get back to that point again.

—

In the meantime, I hope today is a nice, calm, steady Friday in which I can simply crawl gradually through my work and get it all done.

Probably not, but I can hope.

It is sort of cool when your boss tells you that you’re indispensable, and always a step ahead of the game. It is not too cool to realize that you physically feel like death at the end of every day, and that if you keep it up you’ll probably take a year off of your life expectancy for every year that you work the job.

—

I lost my PayPal card. That sucks.

—

I’ve come to this coffee shop the last N nights in a row, and it has been packed to the gills every time. Now, tonight, there are a total of five people in here, and nobody outside. It must have something to do with finals.

The cheapest thing in this coffee shop is a can of V8 vegetable juice at $1.25.

—

I am so bored shitless waiting for this download I’m talking about vegetable juice.

Working full time: it’s a drag, kids.

I need to rig up a phone post mechanism on this thing.

—

I can

So I’m sitting here on a late spring night and I’m wishing and wondering and trying to remember… There is probably work to be done, but (as always) it can wait and I’ve never really been the prompt one anyway — never the one to keep it all straight.

Started the day out by replacing my blown 300 watt power supply with a nice, hacked up 400 watt unit. Then, I went for a soda and ended up giving this African guy called Fuzzy a ride to the Trax station because his radiator sprang a leak. Nice guy. Turns out he’s from Somalia… I kept wondering afterward what it would be like to be him. Then, I came back, grilled up some food and after eating it, was playing some basketball with everybody even though I should have been studying.

Now it’s dark out and I’m in here sifting through a bunch of old files and I stumble across this:

11/26/99

It is very early in the morning and I am in San Francisco, California. My life has been turned inside out and upside down…

Odd how things come back to you. I ran up about $800.00 in mobile phone bills during that trip. So I start to think about what it was like in San Fran when my grandparents were there for the winter, before they died, and we’d all go down to the waterfront and drop nets over to catch crabs for dinner… They were all very affected by the war, so the memory feels quite natural for the day…

Now I’m just wishing that my Prime Suspect 3, 4 and 5 videos had already arrived. But they haven’t. That’s how life goes. Sometimes you meet Fuzzy from Somalia and you’re remembering your past and missing some videos you don’t have yet and then other times (say, tomorrow…) you’ll be in class, and the only record you’ll have of all of these thoughts is up on your Web diary…

Buy a camera, sell a camera.

My benefits kick in two weeks from now.

I want something but I don’t know what.

I don’t know what.

I was going to write a letter this morning, but I couldn’t make it all phrase right. So I gave up. Now it’s before 8.30 in the morning and I’m at work, exhausted as hell. My life is not meeting expectation just now.

I never seem to meet expectation, with anyone, no matter how hard I try. I meet my expectations, but that’s not enough to make me happy. I mean, I have all these degrees, and I’ve written all these books, and I know all these things, and I’ve volunteered all this time over the years. But I’m always one phone call short, one nice word short, one degree short, one dollar short…

It amazes me that somehow it’s never enough for my parents, my relatives, my creditors, my prospective employers, my significant others…

Life just sucks.

I am the oldest person in this coffee shop by a margin of at least five years.

You know you are an adult when:

– You understand why people “throw themselves into” their work to escape personal problems
– You begin to plan your life years in advance, guessing that your plans are more or less accurate
– You sigh and just go with the flow, rather than actually bothering to say that you hate everything
– $1.75 for a small cola makes you want to faint
– Your back hurts all the time, not just when you say “my back hurts!”

—

I am not looking forward to anything right now.

You’re on the road
But you’ve got no destination
You’re in the mud
In the maze of her imagination
You love this town
Even if that doesn’t ring true
You’ve been all over
And it’s been all over you

I hereby declare a week of U2.

—

Well I’m a modern guy I don’t care much for the go-go
or the retro image I see so often telling me to
keep trying maybe you’ll get here someday
keep up the working, ok
I close the book on them right there
I see myself change as the days change over
I hear the songs and the words don’t change
I write them out of the book right there
See me age 19 with some dumb haircut from
1960 moving to New York City
live with my friends there we’re all taking the same steps
they’re foolish now

Or maybe a week of the Walkmen?

—

While I was driving to work today, I thought I was going to post:

I feel good. I haven

I am losing it.

—

Too often, those who misunderstand you are also unable to do anything other than mistrust you.

It’s a history lesson.

—

I was reading back through some of my older stuff the other night. Like 2000, and 2002. There are a lot of typos. I didn’t realize just how wildly and haphazardly I sometimes pound on my keys as I write these things.

—

You know those moments that you have, those surreal moments, that you file away in your imagination under “I’m sure I’m gonna remember this moment and the way it smells and tastes and feels for a long time to come, maybe even for years,” and that you then forget by next week?

I had one.

I was parked against the curb on some random Santa Barbara street than ran alongside a thicket containing a loud but otherwise invisible creek. It was dark, maybe eight in the evening. My sunroof was down and it was cold. My seat was back. I was drifting in and out of a worthless, uncomfortable sort of sleep. But anyway, the thing that impressed me so incredibly was the croaking of the frogs somewhere outside my window, alongside the creek, in the cold black of the early evenings.

There must have been ten thousand of them.

And all of them were croaking at once.

—

I am trying not to let hopelessness overtake me.

There is no answer sometimes but to avoid living in the moment.

—

And sometimes you wonder a lot about the people you’ve known over the years that you no longer know. They’re trapped somewhere inside you and never age. You never get closer to them, and you never get more distant (forgetting, as you always do, that you never talk to them anymore and haven’t done in so very long).

—

Work tomorrow.

—

I used to have clocks.

—

For years, on the wall of my room in my parents house, was the word — in giant block letters, scrawled manaically by me on a night that I can’t quite remember, when I was high on I don’t know what —

          FEAR

It’s a strange, hollow, lonely feeling that makes you want to sleep and sleep, preferably somewhere dark and hidden. But there is no respite, nor is there any escape.

All of these lives are this way. Such a waste.

Even if the edges, ebbs, and flows of my present are ill-defined and nebulous, my future is very, very bright. If you’d told me at 15 about where I am career-wise today at 29, I’d have been thrilled.

Already, I:

– Have three college degrees, inlcuding one graduate degree
– Have published five books of my own, and am working on a sixth
– Am working as an editor at a respected publishing house
– Have worked as a weekly columnist with an audience in the tens of thousands
– Am well-positioned to enter a Ph.D. program and get tenure within a decade

I’m in pretty good shape for mid-life, all things considered. Feels good.