22.02
Tuesday
18 July 2006
You feel chilled because you have no character. You're a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you're perpetually on the brink of being obsolete—whether it's labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it's all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You're glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn't a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it's a five-year hardware obsolenscence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.
—Douglas Coupland, JPod
The little break-up I had with the internet has done me a tremendous amount of good. Of course we are going to reconcile, I know we're destined for each other, but sometimes you need to take a break in order to remember what it is that you really love about someone, and also about yourself.
[NB, as a sidenote for the psychoanalysts: Don't anyone read anything into me and Bo from that. He's still the cat's meow in a million ways, my favorite tall drink of water, and the biggest thing that terrifies me about moving to New York—not because I don't think we can make it, but because I know I will have a pervasive notion of bewilderment: "where is he?"]
Opening up a fresh new template for a journal entry is the best fresh feeling I've had in a while, though. Don't no one worry that I'm going to abandon this little corner of mine here in cyberspace. You might want to worry that I'm going to change the fuck out of it sometime soon, though.
Dramatic Life Changes Require
Dramatic Results.
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The strongest signs to have hit me: there's only one or two weekends that would be left for a going-away party (either August 11th or 18th, save the date?), there are things already being planned here in Atlanta which I will miss, a lovely fall; I always loved the weather in Georgia at the end of October being exactly the way it was and feeling like a birthday present to me.
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I got my first email back about any of the jobs I've started to apply for in NYC, and despite the fact that it was just to say that they'd already filled the position unfortunately, the fact that someone successful at a company I love who does technical things in this silver city of my dreams: the fact that he sent me a short note, the fact that he was encouraging and complimentary, it was a quick bright moment.
I also got a call from a recruiter for Microsoft a few weeks ago.
"Would you be interested in a full-time position in Redmond, Washington?"
"..."
"..."
"..."
"Kinda no?"