1. Work stuff is stalled. My proxy’s got no moxy.
2. I hate this season so much. SO VERY MUCH. Can it go away now?
3. I have had some Donette Gems and a cookie to eat so far today.
4. List item.
5. I am now the proud owner of a Bender (futurama) wind-up robot.
6. My insane friends rule. They gave me an excellent birthday party complete with hilariously obscene cake.
7. For some reason this birthday bothers me. How the hell did I get this old and still be this immature?

I just turned 37.

I’m coughing today; that’s my achievement. So no work, and a certain amount of boredom.

My life today simulates that of the cat.

I realized last night while washing my hands and thinking too hard that one of my greatest achievements over the last 5 years has been failure. When I was a bit younger, I did not allow myself to fail at anything. Every mistake or personal failure was fatal and a great cause for anxiety.

Probably the only reason I’m sane today is that I expect a certain amount of inevitable error, foolishness, and evil to spew out of me. It’s not that I think that’s ok, but it’s survivable.

A long day of trying to fix one problem which could not be fixed. (Geek details: Apache + SSL + client cert authentication).

It’s psychologically difficult to do the same thing over and over and over while failing. Rats get something called Learned Helplessness from this, I hear. Since my job consists almost entirely of this activity, I should read up on what happens to the rats probably.

So, the last two days have consisted of little sleep and much work to no great purpose. The nice thing about my job is it’s almost purely pointless; it makes no difference to the world what I do, or whether I do it well. So, I’m free to excel in an absurdist vacuum like a character in a Ionesco play. Therefore I stay up all night making perfectly pointless things happen.

The cat likes this; she has a nocturnal companion. She has taken to crawling up on my shoulder and falling gratefully asleep on the warm primate.

I dreamed last night that I made the best potato salad ever. I must now attempt this!

I’m starting to like these stupid tests now that this australian maniac has got into it:

I am a Chieftan Carved out of Cheese. My raspberry motivation slides transparently beyond the elongated prune. I dig widely upon the bus of my leather mangroves. Hygienic cameras pardon my curly white atmosphere. Grant the wise barnacle, forsooth? The Utterly Surreal Test

I like being made of cheese.

0712 a.m., deadline of 0500 passed, project not complete, bizarre errors which defy my simple mind. I request permission to sleep, i hope my boss responds before the brain stem takes over and I sleep anyway.

In this state of sleep deprivation everything is interesting: birds tweeting, someone sweeping outside, texture of the sofa. I kind of like the hyper-sensitivity but could do without the pain of exhaustion.

As I said before, I don’t have a normal job. Oy.

Now that I am no longer a child, but supposedly an adult (I turn 37 this month), I have actual memories.

What I mean by this is that I can remember distinct parts of my life as stories with beginnings middles and ends, rather than just “everything when I was a kid” and “now”, which was the case before.

This is, I suppose, a sign of advancing age. The memory I had today was of using the phone we had when I was a kid, a beige rotary phone with the curly cord that got tangled, no answering machine, and rang with an actual bell. It was very heavy.

And I thought.. wow. That object doesn’t even exist in a world where I’m a system administrator doing maintenance on a web server at 3 in the morning via my wireless networked laptop hooked up to DSL.

If I was a work of art, I would be M. C. Escher’s Lizards. I am a bizarre juxtaposition of the real and the unreal. Based in the realm of mathematics, my two-dimensional appearance belies a complex and free-willed behaviour which both delights and confuses people. Which work of art would you be? The Art Test

I usually hate these tests, but this was fun. I need fun. It’s 0226 and i’m working. What a WEIRD JOB i have.

Late night, jazz, muscle relaxants, winter coming.

Disneyland was better than usual, mostly due to their very nicely done Nightmare Before Christmas riff on the Haunted House.

People-watching at Disneyland is very interesting. It’s like the airport, a kind of cross section of everyone in the U.S. except the very poor. People from subcultures I rarely penetrate (Hispanic guy with mullet, hugely fat woman from the South clutching giant stuffed animal, Swedish teenagers) and lots of odd faces and bodies.

I’m going to READ BOOKS tomorrow and not deal with humans so much, I think. But I say that a lot and end up going out into the world for more abuse and tragedy.