A and I sat in her car in the rain, talking about volunteering and working in emergency and disaster services, pondering plans for the future, the flux between joining up and running off. I talked about my feeling that some day someone will convey to me that I’ve done enough, and I’ll finally slow down and find myself a porch. She hoped not.

I just made my first pot of coffee for the night. An optimistically small one. I’m on plan ‘c’ of rebuilding a Microsoft Exchange infrastructure before the sun rises. In the interim, OKCupid and I are pondering the uniqueness of people, while I uninstall many years worth of java updates from this workstation.

I’ll be in Maine in less than a month; I thought it was more like two. I’ll be there for a shorter period than I planned on, but this has been such a busy quarter at work. Maybe I’ll go back after the next deployment, after July. I can’t tell you exactly why getting through July is my goal, but I’ve already spoken about enough bits that make sense to hold it up against too much inspection. As I nudge servers along, solving one little issue at a time, drinking coffee to keep me nudged along, I’m listening to Sarah McLachlan, which makes me reminisce of Surry and my father.

I was waiting outside the building for A, and I picked up a WSJ lying in front of the bank. I noticed this article.

The family income of the Johnsons is a fifth of what it used to be. And the children are about to feel the pain. Mr. Johnson’s two oldest are attending his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, at an annual cost of $50,000 apiece. And his youngest daughter, 15 years old, recently began her own college search. Mr. Johnson isn’t sure whether he’ll be able to help her to go to college, or even to get the older kids to graduation.

Further expenses such as first homes and weddings are out of the question. “They’re going to have to elope,” he says.

Really? This is the upper-middle class struggle? I always assumed I grew up in an upper-middle class family, but let me tell you, my “college savings” weren’t anything near $50,000, let alone for four years. I think I spent most of them on flight training for my private pilots license (which I still need to finish) anyway. Maybe it’s my bias against the path of school, school, school, college, maybe more college, (* change the world), job, marriage, house, kids… my sarcasm recently engaged a facebook thread about this that was apparently only funny to me… but, hey, crap-tastic entitlement. Yeah yeah, I know, I’m lucky, most people can’t get jobs without college degrees, but I’m still unconvinced that if they had started working as young as I had and worked as hard as I have, they wouldn’t have had more to show for it. I’m fairly certain I’ve been making more money the last couple of years than my father ever did. A asked me what class I thought I belonged to, and I realized had never stopped to consider these matters. I’m not against college, if that isn’t obvious. I just sense something really wrong in the way we’re finding out what to do with our lives, and the money we spend in between.

Anyhow, *grumble*.

Sometimes I wonder if I can leverage reminding myself that which emotionally upsets me now, won’t in five years, since the good things don’t really feel like I pendulum quite so far that way as well. But then there’s me, bouncing up and down on my touring bike last Sunday purely at the thought of fries. Is that happy? Silly? Crazy? Oh, bother.

Oh, exhausted.

Over in Bellevue today, thinking about three years ago when I worked here. I keep being reminded of different periods in my life like this. Interactions, or attempts, with the past have been across the board lately. I suppose I always knew there were people in my life I don’t talk to anymore because we drifted apart, “Tried to be Just Friends (again). Epically disastrous. We never spoke again.” has got me thinking about the people I don’t talk to anymore for different reasons.

Facebook tricked me into reading Goodreads today. For non-nonsensical reasons my heart was briefly ripped out. Also, Honk is coming up. Same rules apply. It’s too bad sometimes that I can’t not care.

I know I’ve written about this before, but I’m pretty sure it was in an email to M the last time we were talking.

I walk into my room and I have two laptops on my bed. Why do I need two laptops, let alone in bed? I have lots of reasons, but they’re technical opinions and aren’t all that interesting. Anyway, I see this and think about how much of a dork I am. Then I remember I just racked up a fixed gear bike in a garage filled with a few others of mine, and how I just spent two days biking around the city for fun with friends. Because I’ve had this conversation with myself before, I recognize this thought pattern and remember that I’m not any one thing. My identity isn’t tied to any one group, and the older I get the further the lines blur together.

This weekend was exhausting, surely partially physically, but I had enough. I can’t decide if I should be waiting or moving on anymore.

Current mood: Lucero – Nights Like These

Saw a rabbit on 6th Ave S in SODO tonight. Rode the Resurrection 3 Alleycat today. I finished, somewhere in the middle. I had fun, but I got bothered by the people at the checkpoints leaving because it got cold. This reminded me of the MFG Cross race where I didn’t get to finish because I was lapped 100 feet before the finish line on the next to final lap. Thus, I felt for those who didn’t get to finish, especially those who hadn’t raced before. Life’s hard, I know, but that’s poor advocacy.

Many of my bike friends are going to another bike friend’s birthday dance party tonight. Another friend invited me to a movie night at her house. I just want to be around what’s comfortable tonight, ‘in my own element’ I said. So I’m biking more and drinking at the 9lb. Funny element you have there, sir.

I live for watching the trees in the street lights at night now. I think I’m going insane.

I know, I know.

This made me cry: http://www.darcomic.org/2009/12/29/theend/.

[This is an email, I’ve found everyone else is happier in the long run if I don’t actually send these anymore.]

I’m working with a piece of software that runs every five minutes. It has to, as it collects data about the present state of the system from trending. If it doesn’t finish in five minutes, it’s supposed to commit suicide (makes me think of STONITH code from clustering: Shoot The Other Node In The Head). It currently takes a few minutes to collect all the data it needs, and only one copy of the software can run at a time, so there’s a small window of a minute or two where I can initiate testing runs. If I knew I’d still be waiting like this, I probably would have built a development copy of this system.

Instead, I’m wandering the Internet; reading for work a bit, reading comics, poking around social networks. I clicked random a few times on xkcd and hit this early comic I had forgotten. I’ve been thinking a lot this year about goals. Granted I was thinking about them this fall, but they were specific about moving away from some certain things and toward others. Lately I’ve been more meta, nearly in a “what does it all mean” way, but mostly in a “what would make bryan shut the fuck up already” way. I don’t complain about much, but I make up for that in ranting about meaning. Anyway, isn’t it funny that comics like that still remind me of you? Hope you’re well.

As I sat on the phone listening to someone describe what they had tried to select the VCR on the TV, I got thinking, “really, how hard is it to follow wires from one box to another box?” But then, I’m good at troubleshooting systems. I know how to break something down into parts and isolate which parts matter, and which don’t to quickly judge the amount of attention to give to each at different points in the troubleshooting process. Input devices, output devices, switches, connecting cables, I identify the roles that devices in an entertainment system play without consciously thinking about it in a split second, like the scenes in movies where spy type roles brag about identifying exits, weapons and people upon walking into a restaurant.

Then I got think about something J said about how my intensity in relationships, and how I really try when many others don’t, as well as her recent comment that if M had any interest in a relationship with me at the time, it would have been a priority and she would have made time. Ultimately, she simply did not care. Which is fine, and important to hold close to me. Because so many people care so little about so much, and so much about so little.

And so, at 10pm at night, where I haven’t been home for 36+ hours, I’m trying to build aggregate graphs out of data points that I deem relational in the multiple clusters worldwide that host my product from which to make capacity planning decisions. Why? Why would I do anything else? I’m unable to convince myself to leave.