I spent five months at her mom’s house in a town I often couldn’t stand just to be with her. I agreed to move there even, took a job because she wanted to be there, and then stayed another seven months despite her unexpectedly having left once I got it. I waited for her to come back, all because I believed in the relationship that much. Twelve months I sat in Santa Barbara, trying to make it work.

She finally came back in October after a trip two months longer than last year’s, once I’d finally given up in a panic and decided to leave the area. She asks me to spend an extra month in Santa Barbara, which I do, and then spends just over seven weeks in Salt Lake City before leaving — without my even knowing she was leaving for good until afterward. She says she doesn’t like it here.

She was gone for six full months in 2005 and barely three months after I see her again, she’s gone again and there’s every possibility I won’t see her for ten months this time, if even then, unless I am willing to go right back to Santa Barbara, even though I just barely f*cking left it in November, have no work there, can’t really afford to live there right now, can’t really stand to see the f*cking place right now, and even though I suspect there’s every chance she’ll leave again in March once I manage to arrive again.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh! What gives? Does she hate me? She certainly seems determined to keep leaving me behind in such a way that I can’t accompany her, while I try to follow somewhere behind. This is driving me f*cking crazy. F*CKING CRAZY. I can’t do this anymore. I am physically ill. I cannot function. I refuse. I am going to bed.

listen to neil young

– don’t like Santa Barbara
– can’t afford Santa Barbara
– already got stuck there once
– no particular reason to stay in Salt Lake City once I have money
– don’t have money yet
– won’t have it until maybe March or April at the soonest
– will know about schools by then
– will have to move to school by fall regardless
– only a few short months between having money and moving to school
= move directly to school’s area in March or April?

Seems like the wisest course of action. Damn emotions for getting mixed up in it all. And damn everyone and everything while we’re at it.

There are still some layout bugs, most notably with the photo stuff I’ve posted over the last year (some container or other is not behaving the way I want), but who cares, I’ll worry about it later, if ever.

The navigation is hopefully clearer and more sane. The editorial business page will come shortly. I’ve thought about changing the color, but nothing else really looks good, so for now it stays.

Somehow I can’t believe that my life looks like this right now. It’s all just so f*cking… off from what it should be.

Just spent a few hours reconstructing the blog data, which had become corrupted when I ran out of host space a few weeks ago in the midst of all that Alaska-ness. (As an aside, that’s why all months of entries prior to Jaunary 2006 had suddenly dropped off the face of the earth.)

The sick thing is that if Greymatter loses its entry count for any reason, rather than totaling up the number of existing .cgi entry files in the archives directory and beginning in sequence from there, it just starts over again at #1 (that’s right, “one”) and counts upward, overwriting old data as you add new entries.

Luckily, I had some backups, and was able to cycle the new entries to later sequence numbers and edit the index files. Unfortunately, the formats for things like gm-counter.cgi are not documented anywhere that I can tell, so unless you feel like crawling through a shit ton of perl, you just get to give it your best shot, which I’ve done.

If this entry doesn’t overwrite #1, but instead turns up as #585, then the restoration work has been successful.

I’m tempted to say “time to replace Greymatter,” but I just love Greymatter too much, it’s so old school and so easy to hack into various different frameworks, formats, and structures using only your own elbow grease and a pile of HTML/CSS. See here or recall the old Defarge site, for example.

In case anyone remembers it.

Ever.

etc.

—

Oh yeah, and some things on the site are getting updated for 2006, too, including a new page that will sell my editorial services to the unsuspecting buying public — hopefully.

Downness is hitting me like a heavyweight boxer today. It’s proving difficult to get anything done, as I just want to sulk. Still, there are time-sensitive things that demand my attention and that have been left on the back burner too long already.

I need to have a less crowded life. Right now I would trade everything just to be free of debt, poor with a trade, living in the third world with a wife and kids.

And just like that, with no fanfare and almost by stealth or sleight-of-hand, she went from having just gone for an interview… to simply having left, indefinitely. More indefinitely than ever before. I suppose there’s a message in there somewhere.

I suppose school is the thing at this point. If that doesn’t happen, things will be very, very bleak indeed.