1 April 2004 Thursday ... Yea OfficeTeam! I’ve got a job! Second step: accomplished. ... Fortunately, I’ll be paid weekly at a higher rate, so by my figures, I will be able to pay back Step One, the rental loans. ... I’m really jazzed about this A+ class I just found out about! I walked up there last night and it’s an even
Job search. I’m getting a late start on the Mission To Reseda; hopefully a good showing here will assuage my guilt over getting out late. :> Actually, I knew I should not have played Empire late last night. Or at least walked away from the game I began. Though I began it just to chill out. I’d just finished, what - not quite a third
Is there life after 30? Is there life before it? *** ... The baboon upstairs is moving around much earlier than his typical appointment with consciousness. I can tell, of course, because I’m hearing the very muted depth-charge impressions of his stamping meat-pads from the ceiling. It’s as if he’s acting out his typical incontinent
I read yesterday a promo piece in my email about a couple of IT guys who specialize in computer operations outsourcing. Incredible breadth of services they provide: web hosting, database creation... lotsa buzzwords for business... I’ve got fantastic hours at this job, I’ll say that much about it, I LOVE having the time to myself to write before the day begins
[For the collected journal entries for this period read, “this job is worse than I thought, here are reasons n, n+1, n+2 ... for any positive integer n as to why it can’t be as bad as it seems, I’m now going to talk about my exit strategies and various other emotionally leavening topics.”] [There, that was much quicker!] <!-- Ju-Anchor-Footer-Sta
Highlights: First day of work today. Bill feels pangs of unease, deals with it. Although I’d set the alarm clock for 6:30 am, I was awake at 5:17. Pretty refreshed, too. Dreamt a lot last night, but unusually, I can’t recall anything specific. Yesterday opened kind of dark and overcast but rapidly got warmer and brighter. Your typical haz
Orientation today at this telefundraising outfit. I’m too keyed up to be tired, even though the baboon upstairs had some sort of parasite infection and was bouncing around. All freaking night long. What is that monkey’s problem? ... I’m a bit out of it this morning. Cold outside & overcast. A little dark, and there is a lot of moi
Good dreams. Lots of agreeable people, palatial settings. Enjoyed a nice long walk around an estate which sported a couple of percolation ponds... I’m dimly recollecting something about driving a car. I much more clearly remember lounging about a really cracking estate with lots of smart, interesting people. We were all there for some purpose... This (waking) cont
Interview today. ... Pardon me, I’m enjoying the silence of the zoo, for sure, its not even 6:30 am. But I’m listening to El Dorado (ELO) ... you guessed it... “Boy Blue.” Okay, back to writing. ... Right now I’ve got the water running in the bathtub because it is a pleasant mask for the elephantine groaning of the guy next door.
I now have $337 in the bank. $308 of that has got to go to rent for the next two weeks. Hopefully... I’ll get hired ASAP tomorrow & get moving. I may well end up a caller for non-profit orgs. Today I wrote a promising opening section for an Amy:Zerodancer story. She’s got a theatrical flair about her, part, just a sliver, of the prima donna. Queen of her own
I just located a couple of Rumpole Of The Bailey audiotapes at the LA Main Library. John Mortimer yer my god. Some episodes I don’t think I’ve read or seen before; one of the tapes is read by *Robert Hardy*! ...but a note attached to it says the tapes are “corrupted.” That can’t mean anything good. Also have located a Bruce Sterling Shaper/Mechanist collection,
***************** Quick blopic: the American space program is not, and is not intended to be, an American space presence. ***************** That’s it. That’s enough spaceflight retrospectives for me. No more film-grainy beauty shots of Saturn Vs riding that drawn-out columnar cataclysm out of the atmosphere we’re all born in. No more narration of milestones met before my time, or of the names of the men who risked life and career to achieve them. The feelin
**************************** Quick Blopic: There is no point in spending the $$ on public-access information, if there’s no commitment to using it for timely information. **************************** So we had this transit strike over October – November 2003 here in LA (The MTA bus system). Wouldn’t you know it, I’d moved to downtown L.A. just a few months earlier. “Your mission, should you decide you need to pay the rent, is to get to your temp assignment, through al
Blog! Marketers must be gnashing their teeth. It’s like a wildly popular SUV named the “Treacle” or maybe the “Cytoblast”. It’s actually kind of curious when you think about it: how can such a homely collision of an oral plosive with an interrupted cry of pain come to represent such a wildly popular Internet development? Grind them pearlies, Ms. Marketer. Dr. Suzuki, in his commentaries on Zen, instructs that the path to enlightenment is one of creative destruction. Fo
Hmm. Smart tags This could be just the thing I’m looking for. These beasts are a benefit of the autocorrect capabilities of Microsoft Office. When the program recognizes certain words, such as names which match your contact list in Outlook, it will pop up a discrete little button which will permit you to, say, schedule a meeting with that person, or take other actions. Right now they are of interest because I have to reconcile a lot of information at my job. Specifi
Bloody-handed space opera rules. Got some chores today, got some creative time to catch up on. But soon, I’m gonna get a pizza, a bottle of some disgustingly sweet carbonated whatever liquid, I’m gonna sit down in front of my superannuated Emachines 633 Celeron box and I’m going to show some digital emulations of alien pugnacity how imperial expansion’s done. Because I will stomp on their little pixilated tails in the doing! There is something refreshingly honest about my curr
This morning saw an export market for New York weather in downtown Los Angeles. Pedestrians in eyeshot of the corner of Figueroa and Seventh slouched around like soggy guinea hens in earth tone overcoats and hasty shelters of newspaper. (Take that, evangelical Internet newshounds! Blogging will not be *truly* ubiquitous until you can use a Dvorak web column as a hood in a sudden downpour...) Not that even such a URL-sensitive brolly would have been much help, because the precipitation’s
With a trivial flip, I can change the color of my belt from brown to black - and back again! I didn't know they made reversible belts. But I have been their raving fan since picking one up at Ross Dress For Less, emporia to those craving fashionable discount camouflage. Features like a fully reversible belt head are perhaps the only bridgeheads of appeal to your typical guy. The silk wearing and model-hiring segments of our economy are terra incognita and somewhat spooky t
The Author recollects from yesterday's wait on the freezing cold train platform for the Los Angeles Green Line to Redondo Beach: If the wind was any faster, there would have been no problem, really: we'd all have been dead in three seconds of hypothermia. Wilmington Station was like some monsterously ill-conceived junior high science fair experiment fancied up by a slow kid with a convalescent sadistic streak. I can just see it, a brood of bewildered and angst-shot gerbils
So recently there I was kibbitzing at the house of an old freind when she grappled my elbow with one hand clammy with Scriber's Fervor (not an antonym of Writer's Block; it's what happens when people who write get to enthuse about the *tools* of writing - and when was the last time you got buttonholed by a writer about a really sexy new eraser he just saw in Popular Mechanics) and - Blew my mind. Sure, it was Harry Potter fan fiction, but under the regard / goading of a rabid audien
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