I woke up this morning--for the second time, having had the joy of being awake from about 0230-0500--and came to one of those points where I have a clear choice. I can either keep hiding under my blankets and wait for it all to go away, or I can kick my ass out of gear, stand up, and take command of my life again. I locate the sphere of myself, draw the circle, and simultaneously limit and accept what I'm responsible for. This doesn't make everything okay, it doesn't hash things out with the nice girl who's justifiably irritated with me for the four or five days I was avoiding dealing with whatever lay between us (which was, I think, itself pretty irritating, regardless of how much or how little control I had over it). But I can stand up and smile and not apologize constantly, and work through it as myself.

And this is just a choice, like deciding to climb a mountain or just get off the couch to go do stuff. It just takes some time for that particular choice to become deeply apparent to me. Some of us would have been happier if I'd seen my way to that choice on, say, last Wednesday. But that's not what happened, and here we are.

In other news, I bought new hardware, finally, for the first time since 1998. Well, mostly-new. Modern. My first new-to-me machine since, um, 2001, I think, right before I got laid off, when I thought I'd have to give back the laptop from that job. (They asked for it back twice, I was set to give it back and said sure, if they could meet me in the East Bay someplace I'd get it to them. No response, but screw them: nobody who lies to me like they did gets me to haul my ass into San Francisco to make their lives easier.) I am stunned by how unsanely cheap computers are: this an AMD Athlon 2.2GHz, 260MB RAM, 160gig hard drive, DVD/CD reader/writer, relatively nice graphics card, and Firewire card, on a nice motherboard with onboard sound and 4 USB ports, in a good case, for $350. It's crazy. I remember when 6 megabyte hard drive cost many thousands of dollars. What the hell.

I have an active job lead...it's in San Francisco, so I'm being cautious, but we'll see what happens. I got another lead on a job about 2 miles from the house. w00t!