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.

On a better note, I made a really really good roast tonight, because the simple fools at Ralphs were selling ribeye steaks for 99 cents a pound and I bought a huge one and roasted it with garlic and potatoes.

My friend’s band is playing Saturday night, with another band I really liked back in the day (The Insect Surfers) and with Joe Baiza, who is a sort of guitar hero of mine. He was in Saccharine Trust and Universal Congress Of, both of which rocked my world in the 80s. Sort of a post-punk Carlos Santana.

I get “evaluated” at work tomorrow. Boy do I hate that. It’s nonsensical. What to do? I must put up with it for money.

On a totally different line, I am looking into becoming a eunuch. I think it can result in weird body type problems and hormonal issues, but it’s been clear for at least 10 years that my sex drive is a complete waste of my energy, and I’d be better off using those calories to improve my score at Tetris or throw heavy objects slightly further. I think the last actual real “date” in the “might get some” sense I had was in 1987. No really. If I had to choose, I’d prefer a metaphorically masturbatory existence to a literal one.

So, we went out to have fun tonight: Odradak, red_maenad, reggiT, and myself.

And we saw a bad, bad singer songwriter guy. He sang John Cougar. He sang Bruce Springsteen. He sang Van Morrison. None of them well, whether you like those or not. He had short crewcutty spiky hair, and his friends all had mullets or near mullet hair. He was Country. You know, one of those guys what you know is sincere by how he squints his eyes real hard and tilts his head to one side while singing sincerely. And I pretty much wrote him off as that.

And then reggiT happened to wander behind him and saw the 3-Ring Binder he had for his music, and the pic he had in front of him as he played to inspire him. And it was this picture. And then we fell over cackling and left.

Things were better when we go tot the Irish bar and the Italian Stevie Wonder was playing.