Electric Ladyland

Sick day

Doing slightly better even though I've been feeling ill as a result of what I guess is light food poisoning.  Went to the Mets game last night with Mom -- got free tickets from a friend -- and we had a great time (someone else did not, unfortunately... we were glad we walked down the ramp...).  That lightened the mood.  Baseball never fails to improve my state of mind.  That is, unless it's, say, the 2003 ALCS.  Actually, as I'm writing this the Yanks have just taken a 13-9 15-9 lead over my beloved Sox.  Not so mood-improving.  But I digress.  And besides, I have this to chuckle about.

Spent a good portion of my sick day sleeping and watching TV on my MacBook Pro:  episodes of John Adams, Atsu-hime and Karei naru ichizoku.  After having watched more Japanese historical dramas than most Americans I've been yearning for the opportunity to watch a few reflecting the history of my own country.  I'm disappointed that John Adams is just a miniseries because it's a thoroughly fascinating look at our American heritage and the people who made the country we take for granted a reality.  They were similar to us yet not the same.  I find the accents particularly intriguing.  They reflect the fact that the Americans of that time were really British Americans in the process of separating politically and culturally from the mother empire.  200 years later the differences are more pronounced, of course, and our country has gone on to write its own distinct history -- severely tarnished of late but one that can be rehabilitated in the near future, I hope.

A wobbly path

I had an extraordinary month in March, off the chart.  I was everywhere:  doing webinars, rolling out a new security policy, leading a group of my peers at a tech conference, being a panelist at a women's teleconference, running an afterparty for said teleconference, and also giving what my boss called a "kickass" presentation on my department to my board committee.  Also partied like a rock star in New Orleans amidst some of this (see earlier post).  It was an exciting four weeks, if exhausting.

Now here we are in April and I finally have time to come down from all this high-octane go-go-go living.  I'm trying to be good to myself and rest well and I think I'm doing a fairly good job at that, having spent a quiet weekend at home reading short stories, watching baseball and napping a lot.  However, the mom stuff has come back in full force and I am having an awful, awful time with it.  Burst into tears at the slightest provocation (or even no provocation) awful. 

What's worse, everyone around me seems to be having family health problems to boot.  Even my roommate had to suddenly jet home to North Carolina this weekend because her grandmother is passing away.  Even Dan Savage's mom passed away last week.  He summed it up with a quote from his mom before she died: "Shit."

Mom says she's been waking up in the mornings and thinking something similar:  "Fuck."  Because this is not going away.  This is forever. 

I don't know what to do with myself.  I've opened up to friends and family and I don't feel any better.  Maybe it's ridiculous to expect that I could feel any better this soon.  I am so furious at the hospital and the way various staff there have treated her that it's hard to contain my anger.  Mom's been slowly sharing stories with me that she never did before and they cast the whole situation in a new, worse light.  Rage doesn't cover what I'm feeling.  There aren't any words that can. 

I just want to cry.  And I think I'm going to be crying for a good long while now.

I think that's where I'm at for the moment.

I even got approached by a culty Christian-y sect while trying to enjoy the apple blossoms by Central Park this evening.    I wanted nothing more to sit in my church -- the natural world -- and be healed by it but instead I got quoted Bible passages.  That really wasn't what I was going for.  I think that attempt to find solace ended up being a do-over.

On the positive side, I haven't been rickrolled yet.  Don't get any ideas.

Also, as I was walking down my block on this lovely spring evening it occurred to me how many of my friends have been absolute angels to me since this whole ordeal began.  As I said a while back, they taught me a lot about love.  They're still being incredibly loving and supportive even now and I'm so lucky to have them in my life. 

My family too.  Mom and I were talking earlier tonight about how lucky we are to have this bond to support us now.  I can hardly imagine what it would be like had we been estranged.  Little surprise, then, that when I think of the silver lining or the ray of sunshine to come I think about spending time with my family.  This year I want to spend my vacation time catching up with them.  Mom and I are talking about a trip to visit our family in Texas within the next few months.  I haven't been there since I went down to attend my cousin's wedding at age 16 and I know Arlington has changed massively in the intervening years.  It would be great to reconnect with my relatives there.

Dad and I have also tentatively booked the time we're going to be spending at the family ranch in California this summer.  We're going to arrive several days before the reunion this time and, what's better, two fishing rods will be waiting for us.  It'll be about a week in all that we'll be in that very special place together enjoying the silence and the togetherness.  There's no place quite like the ranch and fortunately work will not be getting in the way like it did the last time I went out west.  It'll be me, Dad and the fish.  I couldn't think of anything more perfect.

So I guess the right approach is just to give this pain some room.   It's already taken up residence as it is.  Maybe if I accept it rather than battle against it, integrate it into my life rather than trying to submerge it, then over time it will lessen just a bit.  And with enough healing days to balance it the painful ones I'll begin to feel more myself.

Oh the humanity

I'm hung over in New Orleans.  I may still be drunk, in fact.  Not sure.  At least I didn't put two contact lenses in the same eye.  Someone just texted me saying she feels like she's looking at the world through a tube.  Yep. 

Haven't been blogging much for a while.  Here's the abbreviated update:

• Work is awesome, I'm rocking out
• Haven't felt this creative and optimistic in years - I've rediscovered some of the joy of tech that I used to have when I was just starting out
• Things with Mom, not so good.  She is amazing and objectively there is progress being made (she's meeting with the lawyers as I write this) but I am having real trouble adjusting to this.  I haven't accepted it, won't until I'm ready.  Very very angry when I think about it

Strange to have this cohabitation of joy and great pain.  They commingle in my system occasionally and I'm not sure when that's ever happened before.  As I told Mom, overall I know I'm fine.  I'm good and I'll be okay.   

Not exactly okay at this very moment and that's not in an emotional sense (life is good, I'm in New Orleans baby!) but a physical sense.  Ow.  Ow, ow.  I'm leading a session at this conference in a few hours.  Gotta figure how to get back up on my feet before then.  Queasy stomach.  Delicate condition.  When's the last time I felt like this?  Oh yeah!  Mike's bar mitzvah!  ;)

On rage

Ok.  So it's been a tough weekend.  I don't really want to get into it but let's just say we had a terrible scare after Mom's hysterectomy and it ain't over yet.  She was seriously mistreated by a couple of people at the hospital and it got me mad.  Real mad.  For the first time in a long time I felt pure rage. 

I'm the biggest infovore you're ever gonna meet so, true to form, when I felt that unfamiliar rage I wanted to understand it.  I once read somewhere that all data is interesting to Gemini.  That is certainly the case with me.  So I looked up rage in Wikipedia and was like "Yup, that's it."  Not exactly anything I didn't know already but I wanted to check it out since I don't exactly have the impulse to break things on a daily basis and it's rare for me to feel that way. 

Anyhoo, I was sorely in need of some comic relief to keep me level because I had to be strong for Mom and make sure to leave no stone unturned in getting her the care she needed.  So I could freak out in private but when I was back at the hospital I had to be focused again.  I found that comic relief in a most unlikely place. 

You know how Wikipedia always has links to related entries at the bottom of an article?  Through the Rage entry I found a sub-entry:  Computer Rage.  It's hilarious!  So dry but it captures exactly what it is... and I witness this phenomenon on a pretty frequent basis.  See also the legendary Bad Day video.  Sometimes you just gotta lose your shit.  Just make sure your data's backed up.  ;-)

Béibhinn

Tonight I'm singing along to the special mix I put on my mom's iPod Shuffle.  It's putting me more at ease than any other thoughts I've had or reassuring words other people have given me during the last few weeks.  And so fitting -- Mom's a singer girl.  She made me one too when she named me Bevin (Gaelic for "Mistress of Song," my middle name), then proceeded to surround me with harmony for all of my childhood.  Tomorrow she's going in for surgery to get rid of the cancer they found last month.  I'll have to be alert and provide a sense of calm for the family.  Tonight's music is helping me return to that good state where I can believe -- and feel -- that everything really is going to be ok.  I don't think I've sung this well in years.  I'm joined to the music tonight.

They have it in for us: New York blows up again

Went to see Cloverfield today.  The verdict?  It was good.  Go see it.  Really liked it.  I think I'll go again with Mom when she's back on her feet. 

But something's sticking in my craw:  what's up with New York getting the snot kicked out of it again and again in the movies?  Seriously people, I think I saw my office get nuked again for the nth time this morning from the comfy chairs of the 42nd Street e-Walk and although having a Deus Ex Machina fantasy involving never having to go to work again does have a certain appeal to it, there is the whole thing of having my home city blown up too that more than offsets that.  I'm not the only one wondering what's up.  Mom just sent this Daily News article to my aunt in Texas trying to illustrate why we New Yorkers are getting a little tired of having our backyard trashed.  People are kicking this question around on Yahoo too.  For chrissakes, go after L.A. for once!  Volcano doesn't count and don't tell me you wouldn't like to see some Hollywood producers stomped on right about now.

I know, I know, New York has the most recognizable landmarks of any American city and there would be a much lower shock and awe factor were Cloverfield to rampage through the cornfields of Iowa ("Go... the distance... RAWRRR!").  Fine, I get that.  And as I said, I love a good disaster movie.  I got a kick out of watching the New York Public Library ice up in The Day After Tomorrow and although I was creeped out by the icky Alien-style pods in Madison Square Garden, Godzilla was still thrilling.  But two disaster movies in the space of a month?  We've reached critical mass.  Last month I saw Will Smith lose his mind while tromping around a few blocks from where I have my calligraphy class and this morning I saw some freaky beast dine on helpless twentysomethings right where I've napped away some lazy summer days in Central Park.

That's not even getting to the point of what really bothers me about this movie, though.  Here's what really bothers me.  There was a moment during the movie when I saw a building in Lower Manhattan collapse upon itself and my breath stopped.  That was too close to home.  Waves of ash rushed through the city streets, turning the sky black.  Also too close to home.  Not cool.  Take a chunk out of a building, whatever, just don't take me back to 9/11.  I was here and while you're entitled to your opinion on when's a good time to move on, my memories of that day aren't going away anytime soon.  Neither are my memories of evacuating Manhattan via the 59th Street bridge during the 2003 blackout, when we didn't know what was going on at the time but knew we had to get home before dark.  (Aside:  if Cloverfield decided to show up one day I'd head straight home to Queens.  Hollywood monsters don't do boro and they don't like the hood.  Maybe it's not as crunchy?)  Watching those kids cross the Brooklyn Bridge as it got taken out by that lethal critter took me right back to that hot summer day when I could actually feel the 59th Street bridge sway.  Again, too close to my direct experience as a New Yorker over the past six years.

Also found it darkly unsurprising that the filmmakers went after the Time Warner Center.  More than a few people here noted a bit of hubris in having twin towers constructed on the island of Manhattan so soon after 9/11 and I'm sure that's what the movie was playing on as well.  Maybe Middle America likes this but that's where I pick up my groceries, man, and I do not like the idea of getting squished underneath a pile of rubble while checking out the produce.

This is not to say that I didn't like the movie.  I like watching things blow up as much as the next person, I really do.  And I don't mean to be so negative in my review but you know, I'm developing a bit of New York Disaster Movie fatigue.  It would cheer me up a little if I knew that people from elsewhere in the country felt the same way.  I mean really, can't we do target practice on San Francisco or something?  They've got the Golden Gate Bridge.  I hate to say this given how much I love the megalopolis I'm about to name, but... Tokyo?  Hello?  Darling, to my knowledge Hollywood hasn't seen fit to lay waste to your skyscrapers in quite some time and you're the frickin' home of Godzilla!  I'm just sayin'.

Ok, end of rant.  I still had a good time watching the movie despite all this.  Only thing I'd recommend you watch out for is the Blair Witch Project-style hand-held camera jiggle-a-thon.  Disorienting to me, actually nausea-inducing for some others.  While in the restroom answering Mother Nature's call after the movie I heard a very odd retching sound coming from a few feet away and when I emerged, there was this poor girl looking all green with her head drooping over a sink.  She was actually halfway through a later showing and had to leave because her stomach was turning.  Said she was going back.  I didn't have the heart to tell her it was going to get worse.  I hope she didn't hurl again! 

How to know you're being profiled

Ok.  FaceBook apparently knows too much about me now.  It's pandering to my geek side a little too well!

Just got home from a fun night out.  Went to a housewarming party in Harlem.  A friend who was there was really on tonight with his humor and he was slaying us pretty hard.  It was good to reconnect with everyone and also celebrate my friends' new home.  Go Shan and Todd!  They certainly did well with this one.  I'm so happy for them.

Was going to head from there to Williamsburg to see my friends in The Shondes (one of whom's been sending me test donation cards in the mail with prankster quotes like these inside, cracking me up) for their record release party, but unfortunately I started coming down with something so it was back to Astoria with me.  Chugged some Emergen-C and a lot of water.  Here's hoping I don't get friggin sick again.  Now would be an especially bad time but, seeing as how I haven't been able to sleep this week, it wouldn't particularly surprise me if I did.

In other news, I was profiled in Midtown Lunch this week!  That was fun.  It prompted a funny email from a coworker of mine.  He'd been admiring my badass homemade sandwich during the docket presentation earlier in the week and, after that meeting got out, claimed he was going to have to step it up to compete with me.  I was like "Ok, it's on!"  I forgot that he reads Midtown Lunch, though, so when the profile came out I got an email titled "Oh come on now!"  Inside, it read "You have really taken this to a whole new level."  Yep.  If it was on before then it's definitely on now.

So go me for getting some fun press.  If the Wall Street Journal article comes out I'll be sure to mention it.  I think it would be a fun surprise for my boss.  He often reads the WSJ and gives me clippings from the technology section.  It'd be a hoot for him to find his IT Director quoted there talking about FaceBook and Web 2.0.

Glad the weekend's here.  I had an abortive start to it this morning when I woke up lazily thinking "Ahh.... I'm so comfortable in my bed.  What do I have to do today?  Oh right, brunch with Nina.  Mmkay.  Maybe I'll sleep in a little more.  But wait, I have to do some errands before my haircut.  I should get up.  What time is it?  8:30.  Ok, I'll get up."  And then it hit:  "Oh shit!  I'm late for work!  You mean I have to work again?!?" 

Ugh.  So of course I hightailed it out of there.  But I have a second shot at my Saturday morning coming up now.  Think it'll go better.  Time for some Zzs!

Having the hard conversations

Today I bit the bullet and initiated a hard conversation I could have opted not to have had at all.  I'd been thinking about it for a while, having that whole debate of "Do I do it now?  I don't want to get too emotional and I want to be constructive" versus "If I don't do it soon I'm probably never going to do it and I'll be pissed at myself for never having said anything" in my head.

Well, I went ahead and grappled with the discomfort of it all.  Glad I did.  I was upset but didn't go in guns blazing, getting all accusatory.  Instead, I asked if the person realized that I'd been unhappy during a couple of prior incidents and went from there.  They hadn't picked up on it, as it turns out, and were really sorry to hear that they'd upset me.  So we cleared the air and at the end of that talk I felt better than I have since maybe Thanksgiving.  A weight was lifted from my shoulders.  Our trust has been re-established and that's the key to keeping everything going in a positive direction.

When people get mad we often jump from (A) I'm Mad! directly to (B) And So-and-so Must Know!  So-and-so Doesn't Even Care!  That causal link is not in fact always there.  Glad I detected its absence.  It's all about good communication, doing a little detective work and finding out what's really going on. 

I'm still kind of wobbly, though.  Between this, my mom's cancer and finding out about a close friend's sudden diagnosis with cancer yesterday I'm reeling a bit.  Worried about them, hoping they're going to be all right.  Feeling helpless because it's their bodies that are at war with them and there's nothing I can do to fix that -- I just deal with bits and bytes all day. 

Just like Mom said the other day, we had a bit of vacation from our worries over the holidays because there was nothing that could be done -- the doctors weren't available for scheduling the surgery.  But now it's back on and I think we're both a little nervous now that a date has actually been set (now it's two weeks from tomorrow).  However, today's positive developments have renewed my belief that you can shine during these uncomfortable moments, even when you don't think you're handling them very well.  You've got to struggle on and wrestle with them a little in order to see the benefits later on.  It ain't pretty but it's worth it.

We're in ur computerz wiring ur activists' intertubz

It's gotten out of hand.  See what I mean?  A fellow nonprofit techie posted this on my FunWall tonight:

Ok, I actually got a kick out of it.  Wonder what variations of this are going to come out of the NTEN and Women Who Tech conferences.  Watch out now!

That's a nice little bit of humor to spice up the day.  That plus the fake donation acknowledgment card I received in the mail this weekend.  We've been having some problems with print quality and to make sure everything's peachy keen they've started sending me test cards every day for the next two weeks.  But see, these development folks and I have geekbonded and so I got no ordinary card but instead one that looked like a perfectly elegant card -- with a quote from Overheard in New York on it!  Aww yeah!  I love me some development folks.  They've got a sense of humor.  After all the drama trying to get their printeration to work this is a nice cherry on top.

I'm coming off the high of an A+ weekend.  Had a great night out Saturday with my friend Lisa in Forest Hills and Kew Gardens (QNS pride!).  We got some yummy Polish vittles for dinner (ever heard of white borscht?  It's good) and then went to see Juno, which was awesome.  Five stars.  Go see it now. 

Also got plenty of "me" things done - dropped off tailoring, did all the laundry and grocery shopping, cleaned the apartment with my roommate, and -- most importantly -- found, after much futzing around, a great personal finance site that I can use to track where my money's going and how much of it I've got.  It's called Geezeo and I am beginning to heart it very much.  Aggregates all of your financial accounts (from checking to investment and savings and credit cards on up... pulled in every last one of mine), lets you tag your expenses to generate a chart on what your top 6 expenses are, and lets you also create goals with little progress bars so you can track your progress towards filling up that emergency fund or whatnot. 

I'd tried Wesabe and Buxfer but unfortunately they didn't make the cut.  Wesabe was hard to configure and Buxfer, while blessed with a clean interface, iPhone access and handy-dandy pie charts, would have required me to enable OFX access on my Chase Checking account -- and Chase wanted to charge me $9.95/month for that privilege.  I don't think so.  Geezeo brought in all the accounts, which impressed the heck out of me because I've got a lot of them and Wesabe and Buxfer couldn't even get my Chase Checking account going without a lot of cajoling.  While playing around with the site I realized a few financial tweaks I could make right away that were so simple it was like a eureka moment.  Now I'm on track with one of my key resolutions for 2008 so I'm in good shape and feeling pretty fabulous.

Heard from Mom today.  Her hysterectomy has been scheduled for next Wednesday.  I'd been waiting for that to get set up already but now that it has been I'm feeling a little sober and sad about it for some reason.  It's real and it's happening and boy, it's a little bit scary.  But we'll get through it.  I'm planning on being there with her that day.  Whatever she needs, I want to be there for her.

Getting all teary eyed thinking about it so I'm going to head back to all the fun stuff I was up to just now.  More later, surely...

Social networking: new school and old school

Oh, social networking.  Socnet.  The buzzconcept du moment, is it not?  I was not exactly sold on this until relatively recently despite the fact that one of my biggest fascinations with technology is and always has been the way it facilitates communication between people. 

Well, I'm coming around.  As I posted a while back, I'm beginning to really appreciate FaceBook.  It's shown me more useful applications by far than MySpace or Friendster ever did.  It's the American version of Japan's Mixi that I'd been waiting for.  I hardly ever get spam from random people I don't know wanting to be my friend (what's up with that?) but I do get stuff of interest to me.  I recently found out about a telesummit for women in technology through FaceBook and was able to link up with fellow participants of that group through Twitter, for example.  And a fellow JET alum happened to post a New York Times article on trends in Japanese education which I'd read, so I started a conversation with him and another alum about that based on our previous experience as Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) working in the Japanese education system. 

In these ways I've come to see the utility of FaceBook and that's to a large degree why I'm becoming a fan.  I have practical as well as personal reasons to use it.

And get this:  my enthusiasm got me interviewed by the Wall Street Journal today.  W00t!  It was because I'd been such an active user of TripAdvisor's Local Picks application, reviewing NYC restaurants left and right, that I apparently drew the attention of someone from TripAdvisor who'd been contacted by the WSJ about setting up an interview with a user.  The journalist and I talked not just about Local Picks but about FaceBook in general:  FaceBook versus other social networking sites, why FaceBook is useful, and especially how I'm linking up with other people through applications on FaceBook.  I mentioned how FaceBook is unique in that it merges my personal and professional networks.  Never did that with Friendster or MySpace and LinkedIn, while useful for professional networking, is still a bit staid.  FaceBook's a whole new ball game.

Anyway, tonight I ended up exploring some nonprofit techie and progressive political groups on FaceBook while chatting with some fellow techies on Twitter (Guy Kawasaki started following me yesterday -- woo!  Me and 3,000 other people, but still -- he's the Mac Evangelist so I'm pretty psyched) when it occurred to me that I might want to go a little old school and see what was happening on my very first social networking site (if you think of it in a loose sense), LambdaMOO. 

LambdaMOO's not Web 2.0, it's not even Web-anything.  It's a telnet session -- no GUI here -- and you have to specify the TCP port because it doesn't answer at 23.  I've been on there for 14 years now, since I was in high school, and I still chat with friends there once in a blue moon.  When I logged in tonight I found a friend I'd met lo those 14 years ago and got an automatic virtual text hug from him as a greeting.  Little script activates whenever it finds a friends of his logging in, I think.  So I paged him and briefly caught up with how he's doing, remembering how we first connected on the basis of our shared interest in francophone culture (him as a professor and enthusiast of Cajun culture, me as a Franco-American).  We both had French names on the MOO and that was how we found each other if I recall.  Simple as that.

Social networking is far more sophisticated now.  Finding people is almost too easy to the point of being a little uncomfortable.  Privacy is becoming a thing of a past along with these avatars and virtual identities people used to love cultivating on LambdaMOO.  And aggregating things, bringing them together under one neat and tidy umbrella, is becoming oh so convenient with mini social universes such as FaceBook, which I saw someone ominously describe this week as "All Your Bits Are Belong to Us."  Hard to tell what's coming down the pike but for now I think I'm going to keep all my options open. 

Despite the fact that I bemoan the ever growing number of methods in which people can get in touch with me (email, phone, text message, IM, snail mail, Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, comments on this here blog, FTF, and the list goes on... there goes my iPhone bleeping with an incoming text as someone pages me on LambdaMOO and another person messages me on Twitter while I write this) I still do like being reachable in all these different ways.   I guess they can cohabit for the time being.  But between you, me and the blogosphere, I wonder how many people on this hot app Twitter have ever heard of LambdaMOO.  I have an inkling of how many on FaceBook have heard of it because there's a group for it there, but still... out of the general online population?  I suspect we're a a dwindling group of old net fogies.

One of my friends on LambdaMOO just alerted me to the fact that my page echo message says "Rosie seems to be absorbed with her Power Mac."  Oh boy.  That is dating it waaay back.

Anybody remember Usenet?  IRC?  Yeesh.  I'm going to go check for white hairs now.