Half the company has been laid off at a stroke. I feel strangely calm, under the circumstances. I guess your priorities just come into sharp focus at such a time. Why waste time feeling angry? I have things to do. The only galling bit was to be told (in effect) that I wasn't enough of a generalist. Five years of not being specialized enough, and now this. I'm employed until the 17th, but it's mainly in service of wrapping things up. Loose ends and such. Heh. At least I'll be able to retrieve my personal files and music off my machine. The company will be reeling for years. Oh well, as I've been saying since May, Not My Problem Any More.
I'll have UI, and references, and I'm not without resources. But still. That ol' iceberg sure showed up fast, didn't it?
Monday, September 29, 2008
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Sauve Qui Peut; or, Arashi ga Kitta.
Did it bother you, needing to deal with your ex's paperwork? Asked C, over salad last Monday, wondering why I was so detached and sealed in my own head.
She was right, of course. I'd been in a foul mood all that week, and much of it had come from needing to scan and send off to L a nastygram from the BCSL people. Her payments bouncing because she hadn't put money in her account, the letters coming to me because she hadn't changed her address with them. I've warned her about this, and about her need to file taxes, but it's ultimately not my responsibility. I think she's gotten bad advice - potentially disastrous advice - on the tax front, but what can I do? Warn her yet again?
Of course, it stirs bad feelings because she owes me a little money. This has happened before, and of course I stepped in each time and did what needed to be done, but no longer.
In the scheme of these things, it's not so much. I have a friend who had his bank account cleaned out and his car stolen by his girl, (he eventually married her) and a cousin who was almost murdered by his wife for the Life Insurance (and if not for the RCMP intercepting the plot when her new lover was a little too clumsy when mail ordering poison, she might have succeded). So, perspective is helpful at staunching- or at least slowing- the curdling of feeling. And it's more the money that she doesn't owe me per se, anyways, that galls, the gifts unreciprocated the year she was away, the inability to remember my birthday, and so on. She has a gift for me, she says, that she will bring back from Korea when she comes back. Of course, she's postponed her return many times, so that only reminds me of other broken promises, so you see the problem. She says I'll see her in the Spring. Sure. But she said that last Fall, too. And then went to the Phillipines, with her lover, as it turned out.
She says, and has said, she will pay me back, and I don't doubt her sincerity or desire so much as her finances and her - well, let's just say that she and I both are bad at keeping things organized, if in different ways. We both thrived in chaos long before we met and will continue to do so as we tumble through the cosmos on our increasingly divergent paths.
But in any case, I should count on no financial help from that quarter. Certainly not in a timely fashion, or enough to change the big picture. How many early colonies or besieged cities scanned the horizon looking daily for the relief that would never come? I feel shamed, and petty, to think of it at all. But it chafes, slow and unyielding. All I want is a gesture. A card, even. Something to keep in my pocket while I cut my way out of the trap in which I've been caught. This is Stalingrad, and the snow has started to fall, and it's sixty miles of Russians and landmines between me and anything resembling safety.
So, what to do? It seems, now, that junking this job unless absolutely necessary is to be avoided. For the storm has finally come, and like most of my generation, I am still paying off the debt of 1980's educational policy. How is it that I didn't lay a solid foundation in my 20's? writes my new acquaintance the sex columnist, but of couse, almost no one our age did, because there were no careers to be had, and no one had any idea what to do about it, least of all our elders. Education is valuable for its own sake, they said, and Student Loans are a great deal. It's free money! When I hear my baby boomer colleague complaining about how kids today don't seem "passionate" about education and learning, or I read that professional flibbertygibbet Margaret Wente yack about how we've all done it to ourselves with our Student Loans and Credit Cards, I want to commit an act of violence. Or introduce them to my English Advisor, a briulliant woman who was still working as a sessional instructor in her late forties, her Phd juat allowing her to be a better class of temp.
We were all fleeced, you fools. It's a casino and the game is rigged.
Anyway, priorities. Redouble my efforts to pay down debt, whatever the cost. Perhaps a second job. Well, after the election, anyway, which will see me working as a registration officer. Anything will help. But what about all my friends, my countrymen, in worse positions than I am? I at least have options. I'm afraid for you all. Even L, rich family or not.
We have been standing and talking when we should have been running. And all my years of education may have done is let me see, clearly, what is coming, and what it means as the snowflakes start to fall, ere the snows begin to swallow us and everything we hold dear.
She was right, of course. I'd been in a foul mood all that week, and much of it had come from needing to scan and send off to L a nastygram from the BCSL people. Her payments bouncing because she hadn't put money in her account, the letters coming to me because she hadn't changed her address with them. I've warned her about this, and about her need to file taxes, but it's ultimately not my responsibility. I think she's gotten bad advice - potentially disastrous advice - on the tax front, but what can I do? Warn her yet again?
Of course, it stirs bad feelings because she owes me a little money. This has happened before, and of course I stepped in each time and did what needed to be done, but no longer.
In the scheme of these things, it's not so much. I have a friend who had his bank account cleaned out and his car stolen by his girl, (he eventually married her) and a cousin who was almost murdered by his wife for the Life Insurance (and if not for the RCMP intercepting the plot when her new lover was a little too clumsy when mail ordering poison, she might have succeded). So, perspective is helpful at staunching- or at least slowing- the curdling of feeling. And it's more the money that she doesn't owe me per se, anyways, that galls, the gifts unreciprocated the year she was away, the inability to remember my birthday, and so on. She has a gift for me, she says, that she will bring back from Korea when she comes back. Of course, she's postponed her return many times, so that only reminds me of other broken promises, so you see the problem. She says I'll see her in the Spring. Sure. But she said that last Fall, too. And then went to the Phillipines, with her lover, as it turned out.
She says, and has said, she will pay me back, and I don't doubt her sincerity or desire so much as her finances and her - well, let's just say that she and I both are bad at keeping things organized, if in different ways. We both thrived in chaos long before we met and will continue to do so as we tumble through the cosmos on our increasingly divergent paths.
But in any case, I should count on no financial help from that quarter. Certainly not in a timely fashion, or enough to change the big picture. How many early colonies or besieged cities scanned the horizon looking daily for the relief that would never come? I feel shamed, and petty, to think of it at all. But it chafes, slow and unyielding. All I want is a gesture. A card, even. Something to keep in my pocket while I cut my way out of the trap in which I've been caught. This is Stalingrad, and the snow has started to fall, and it's sixty miles of Russians and landmines between me and anything resembling safety.
So, what to do? It seems, now, that junking this job unless absolutely necessary is to be avoided. For the storm has finally come, and like most of my generation, I am still paying off the debt of 1980's educational policy. How is it that I didn't lay a solid foundation in my 20's? writes my new acquaintance the sex columnist, but of couse, almost no one our age did, because there were no careers to be had, and no one had any idea what to do about it, least of all our elders. Education is valuable for its own sake, they said, and Student Loans are a great deal. It's free money! When I hear my baby boomer colleague complaining about how kids today don't seem "passionate" about education and learning, or I read that professional flibbertygibbet Margaret Wente yack about how we've all done it to ourselves with our Student Loans and Credit Cards, I want to commit an act of violence. Or introduce them to my English Advisor, a briulliant woman who was still working as a sessional instructor in her late forties, her Phd juat allowing her to be a better class of temp.
We were all fleeced, you fools. It's a casino and the game is rigged.
Anyway, priorities. Redouble my efforts to pay down debt, whatever the cost. Perhaps a second job. Well, after the election, anyway, which will see me working as a registration officer. Anything will help. But what about all my friends, my countrymen, in worse positions than I am? I at least have options. I'm afraid for you all. Even L, rich family or not.
We have been standing and talking when we should have been running. And all my years of education may have done is let me see, clearly, what is coming, and what it means as the snowflakes start to fall, ere the snows begin to swallow us and everything we hold dear.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The cake is a lie.
It's been strange, seeing what gets in this blog and what doesn't. No great chunks of biography, just small, often cryptic notes. For every one I write, at least three don't get written, or hang around under drafts. For four months I've been reevaluating everything, and yet my perspective keeps changing, shifting, and I keeping seeing new possibilities amid the deaths of old ones.
For example, I met someone on a personals site with an entertaining blog, who, while a curvy gal herself, has decided to date only men lighter than her. Why? because the people you hang with have an influence on what you do, and who you become. A heavy partner will make you heavier, an active one the opposite.
The horrible thing is, she's right, you know? It sounds so very cold, but on the other hand, you are what you do, and being inactive will kill you. It's not the weight, it's the lack of exercise. In May, I found myself turning away from a lot of my hobbies - gaming and so forth - because they were sedentary. Married men's hobbies, Settled hobbies. Not places to meet women. Instead I got active, hit the gym, poured energy into constructive things. And I kind of miss the craziness and the horrible energy and the not being able to sleep, because damn it, when you sleep an hour a day you get things done. And yet when I started to sleep and I started to get back to normal and see my friends again socially, what was the first thing to go? Time for exercise. And when I have gotten out and met girls? Well, I've been doing a lot of things with C, but they tend to be things like shows, and gaming. And that's not what I need. Or what she needs, either, come to think of it.
Is that really it? A choice between friends and no exercise (and an early exit), or exercise while snubbing friends?
People say that you need balance. But my life, thanks to my sedentary work that I have to drive to, is already unbalanced. My coworkers eat like birds, trying desperately not to let the job kill them. I step outside and see dozens of programmers and office types desperately jogging around the compound in their every spare moment, trying to stave off the inevitable. It's madness, all of it. And it's my life, at least for a few months yet.
Is the answer really to throw it all out? Throw it away? Renounce my deskwork and do what? Become a day labourer?
I need to throw out scads of my life, I know. May made that clear. The things that used to bring me joy suddenly turned to poison, to reminders of things that will never happen. I have a bookcase full of books about Japan, for instance, against the day I would return to Japan to work, or get that fourth year of Japanese and go work for Monbugakushoo. I could have been a Japanese bureaucrat. There might even still be time now. But I won't go back there alone, and my dream of going with her is dead. She'll go with her lover. Maybe I'll go in five years, or ten. But it's a young person's game, and so all those books have to go. I've started already. I could have been a Lawyer. Could have gotten a masters in English, or Theatre. But there's no money for such things, certainly not if you're over 30. I doubled down on a Library degree and a job with my all-but-fiancee's family, and the house won, hard.
All I can do now is simplify, and so I have been. Giving things away, selling some other stuff, giving some of her things back to her Aunt. But there is so much yet to do. I have been sleepwalking so long, and I awake from dreams, and I awake, and awake, and awake, yet never seem to reach daylight. I am a trained librarian working as an accountant, and the time has come at last, dispassionately, to weed.
Prospero or Faustus, either way, the end is the same, if you want to save yourself.
I will burn my books. Ah, Mephistophiles.
For example, I met someone on a personals site with an entertaining blog, who, while a curvy gal herself, has decided to date only men lighter than her. Why? because the people you hang with have an influence on what you do, and who you become. A heavy partner will make you heavier, an active one the opposite.
The horrible thing is, she's right, you know? It sounds so very cold, but on the other hand, you are what you do, and being inactive will kill you. It's not the weight, it's the lack of exercise. In May, I found myself turning away from a lot of my hobbies - gaming and so forth - because they were sedentary. Married men's hobbies, Settled hobbies. Not places to meet women. Instead I got active, hit the gym, poured energy into constructive things. And I kind of miss the craziness and the horrible energy and the not being able to sleep, because damn it, when you sleep an hour a day you get things done. And yet when I started to sleep and I started to get back to normal and see my friends again socially, what was the first thing to go? Time for exercise. And when I have gotten out and met girls? Well, I've been doing a lot of things with C, but they tend to be things like shows, and gaming. And that's not what I need. Or what she needs, either, come to think of it.
Is that really it? A choice between friends and no exercise (and an early exit), or exercise while snubbing friends?
People say that you need balance. But my life, thanks to my sedentary work that I have to drive to, is already unbalanced. My coworkers eat like birds, trying desperately not to let the job kill them. I step outside and see dozens of programmers and office types desperately jogging around the compound in their every spare moment, trying to stave off the inevitable. It's madness, all of it. And it's my life, at least for a few months yet.
Is the answer really to throw it all out? Throw it away? Renounce my deskwork and do what? Become a day labourer?
I need to throw out scads of my life, I know. May made that clear. The things that used to bring me joy suddenly turned to poison, to reminders of things that will never happen. I have a bookcase full of books about Japan, for instance, against the day I would return to Japan to work, or get that fourth year of Japanese and go work for Monbugakushoo. I could have been a Japanese bureaucrat. There might even still be time now. But I won't go back there alone, and my dream of going with her is dead. She'll go with her lover. Maybe I'll go in five years, or ten. But it's a young person's game, and so all those books have to go. I've started already. I could have been a Lawyer. Could have gotten a masters in English, or Theatre. But there's no money for such things, certainly not if you're over 30. I doubled down on a Library degree and a job with my all-but-fiancee's family, and the house won, hard.
All I can do now is simplify, and so I have been. Giving things away, selling some other stuff, giving some of her things back to her Aunt. But there is so much yet to do. I have been sleepwalking so long, and I awake from dreams, and I awake, and awake, and awake, yet never seem to reach daylight. I am a trained librarian working as an accountant, and the time has come at last, dispassionately, to weed.
Prospero or Faustus, either way, the end is the same, if you want to save yourself.
I will burn my books. Ah, Mephistophiles.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Monstrous Wheel
I want to write, but don't seem to get much time to really get into the details of what's going on. It's been a busy week or so; in the past 10 days I have seen (and heard from) easily 90% of the people who are dearest to me in the world, friends of twenty and even thirty years' duration, loved ones near and far, related and not.
And yet, as I settle to the end of this odd vacation, I find myself mulling the news of my friend's niece, who at 14, went to the doctor last week for a soccer injury and thanks to a random question discovered she has cancer of the bone marrow and the lymphic system, with no clear origin point.
Beautiful, athletic, sparkling. Fourteen. My niece's age.
It makes me angry, in a profound and subtle way. Words seem irrelevant, in the face of that. Except perhaps in the sense Ondaatje meant in White Dwarfs and Other Worlds, writing of the deaths of stars and mutilation of mules, of snuffing out of talents and cutting out of tongues, profoundly sad and yet refusing to surrender something to the dark, something small, human, undefined. Dignity, perhaps.
So after such an obscenity, what would I want to write of, anyway.
And yet, as I settle to the end of this odd vacation, I find myself mulling the news of my friend's niece, who at 14, went to the doctor last week for a soccer injury and thanks to a random question discovered she has cancer of the bone marrow and the lymphic system, with no clear origin point.
Beautiful, athletic, sparkling. Fourteen. My niece's age.
It makes me angry, in a profound and subtle way. Words seem irrelevant, in the face of that. Except perhaps in the sense Ondaatje meant in White Dwarfs and Other Worlds, writing of the deaths of stars and mutilation of mules, of snuffing out of talents and cutting out of tongues, profoundly sad and yet refusing to surrender something to the dark, something small, human, undefined. Dignity, perhaps.
So after such an obscenity, what would I want to write of, anyway.
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