*A sleepy wave*

I haven’t written anything the least bit introspective or personal in quite some time, which makes this place a rather boring place to hang my hat.

*steps into the spotlight*

Good morning.

A lot of my energy this summer has been spent strengthening my relationship with WO. Not that it required a lot of energy, but I have let it take up my processing power because I want it to.

I have not broken out of my old philosophies enough to say that someone else makes me happy, but WO certainly helps me get there. There are few facets of my personality I cannot share with him: I can rage at all the transgressions I oh-so-sturdily endure that piss me off despite their insignificance; I can lie on the floor at his feet and laugh at my or his or our goofy and retarded antics; I can share with him what’s behind the sex-obsessed facade; I can show what little mother instinct I have.

There’s more to show, and it’s hard sometimes to go, “Okay, it’s okay to trust this; he won’t judge you poorly, even if you are insane,” but I’m getting better at it.

I also spent a decent amount of energy working this summer. My first set of projects (WebDAV, podcasting) were interesting, and more of the long hours I worked were due to interest in the work than the fun in taunting Nathan with the number of hours I worked.

Despite the fun of the technical work, I still hit a lull a while back when my projects lost my interest. Nathan would say I burned myself out; I say I was doing boring shit. I bounced back off of that decently quickly, though, and I think I’m making up sufficiently for lost time/effort.

Nathan is an interesting character, and it’s been fun to work with him this summer. He’s surprisingly curious; I’ve held out several tidbits (KoL, blogging, screensavers) and he’s bitten (haha, Bitten-boy has bitten) a good bit of them. He’s as transitory in his anger as I am, and his ability to at least fake being ignorant of things staring him in the face (office politics, for one) made the earlier part of this summer endurable.

Not endurable enough, though, in some respects. Talking about the job on the blog is always a bad idea, but I’m increasingly glad I chose to move to doing laptop hardware instead of first-tier tech support. I’ve lost a little too much respect for all the wrong people to stay in my previous school year’s position.

It’s been interesting working a job where no one really has any clearly pre-defined results they want. A few weeks ago, though, I remember Nick (who’s supervising [sorta] the redesign of the TSC website) saying that the layout change should be doable in a day.

A day? Quite frankly: fuck that.

I got under full swing Monday at 06:00. It’s Tuesday night at 22:00 and I suspect I’ve got another four to six hours to ensure I’ve got XHTML code that will validate across all the content that will be published. I still need to write another damned Perl script to parse the FAQ section of our site, and it doesn’t help that I want to do it in a way I’m fairly sure Nick will disapprove of. I shall follow what I suspect his advice would be, however. Lord knows I bug them enough with idjit questions as it is.

Let’s add to this the fact that one of my coworkers is about to earn himself an amazingly unpleasant tongue-lashing in a public space for recent behavior, and I find myself working long hours just to get the goddamn project overwith so I can go back to the other projects of the summer that require less interaction dependence on others’ ability to work efficiently.

I remember that one of the most hilarious parts of the Iowa trip happened at the wedding reception. (This is related, trust me.) Luke said that he was being allowed to transfer in credit for the class he failed so that he wouldn’t cause trouble for the administration at Rose.

Sexy Short Stuff, rarely one to let a bullshitter bullshit in peace, said, “What exactly would you be able to do, Luke?” Honest confusion. I’d heard this from Luke before, and formed my opinions on the matter long ago, so I just sat quiet and sipped my illegal champagne.

Luke said something about there being people he could talk to that would hurt recruitment or somesuch. Don’t know if that was a Masonry reference, if it involved his former Thorn position, or if it was just bluster, but I just listened, because again, I’d heard it all before.

At SSS’s further prodding, Luke said, “I’ve only failed two classes in all my 22 years, and they were both with the same prof. There’s something wrong with that.”

Short Stuff said, “Could it be that you didn’t work hard enough?” Indeed.

Luke seemed to think not.

I want to see a similar discussion happen with my coworker. I want someone with a pair of balls walk up to him and ask him why he’s complaining now of having a lot of work to do, when there are logs of the way he’s spent his work hours the past couple of weeks all over the goddamn servers. I want someone to question his paranoia and the quick browser-switching when anyone approaches.

He can get the fuck out of my face with his excuses about what’s not getting done. Shit not getting done? Work the fuck harder.

Hmm. I moved from throughtfulness to extroverted anger. Let’s talk about physical stuff.

I regained a hard-won (if slippery) grip on my eating this summer. I have a better understanding of why I overeat, and I’m doing better at stabilizing my diet. Weeks like this week, though, I swing wildly from 1100 calorie days to 1800 calorie days, and both extremes are due to me letting little stressors bother me. Every time I interacted with my annoying coworker today, I took and ate another piece of chocolate from the cabinet at work. That shit adds up, and I felt absolutely like shit from the sugar by the time I got home at 19:00 tonight. Blurred vision, sluggish physically and mentally, all the usual stuff.

Days of eating over 2000 calories are largely gone, however, and the average is under 1600 calories.

I’m managing to workout five or six days a week. I feel like I’m on the cusp between rehab and ordinary training in my workouts. I’m still doing shin-specific exercises (much to my father’s disdain) and I’m very conscious of the recovered injury to my shoulders that is slowly, slowly getting better. I still can’t move my arms through a full range of motion without painful pops and jerks, but the strength is returning.

Luke’s lasting legacy. I’d be angry, but I know his body is exacting a better revenge on him than I ever could, so I just sit and watch the changes each time I see him.

I want to write more about my relationship with WO, but I’m not sure how much he’s fine with. Suffice it to say that I like him [a lot], that my own attachment scares the holy hell out of me for the risks it means I’m taking, and that I’m gonna do it anyway.

Now I must sleep so I can work in the morning and run in the afternoon.