My life currently has a dose of the sort of unfortunate drama I'm used to seeing in other people's lives. I generally keep it away by not hanging around with drama-laden people, but one of them showed up in disguise, and while it took a while to get going, we're all enjoying the repercussions. I have my own shit to deal with, and this person may get written off, though circumstances make that awkward. Still, I have to wonder how much drama I brought down on my friends during The Bad Relationship; a fair amount, though I don't think anything quite so personal as this, or so awkward for them to manage. Maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better about that period. It was dark, maybe the darkest of my life (and I know from dark times); but it was a pretty logical result of everything that came before, and a needed gateway to everything that came after.

I have so many incredible books to read that I won't bother listing them. Eventually I hope to get off my ass and write the little bit of software that will catalog my books and CDs, with me entering the barcodes through the CueCat scanner I bought for twelve bucks a couple years ago. I'm really curious to see my book collection laid out by computer. I have something on the order of 300 CDs--feeling clever, I measured them when I put them all back into jewel cases--but I can't really guess at the number of books. The final tally almost certainly sounds less impressive than it looks; I'm going to guess it's in the 900-1300 range. Check this space for updates.

The laptop I keep by my bed continues to die, slowly. The hard drive goes through spells of making really, truly unfortunate noises, and now it's started periodically pegging the hard drive activity light and freezing up the machine for a couple minutes. All the data is backed up, what little there is, so that's good. It's mostly just watching technology fail in slow motion.

There really is no voice to hold onto except your own. It's a funny feature of even the closest relationships. It's never fun to learn again that your world isn't as reliable or safe as you thought, but every time I'm forced to confront the fact, to find and trust again my own voice, I'm always grateful for the rediscovery.

I really enjoyed work today. I spent some of the day explaining to people why I shouldn't be doing something they thought I should be doing, and most of the day doing what I thought I should be doing. It was lovely, trying to get some of this work in before something else catches fire and I get distracted. There's a secret-agent race-against-time element to it: everything has been working for the past week or so, so there's a short pause I have to enter into quickly and claim for my own. I even stayed late enough to grab some of the company-provided dinner.

With my friends, I enjoy a lot of offbeat movies; The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore come to mind. I think we see in them echoes of our own offbeat existence, and we incorporate them less as fiction than as skilled stories, maybe even myths. It's not such a huge leap from those films to our lives, filled with wonder and richness and the sheer ability to do stuff, some opportunities granted by our bizarrely fun-enabling careers--why should anyone get paid like this to do such cool stuff?--but a lot of chances coming just from our being smart people with wide-ranging interests and a desire to go do and learn and understand. We take our intricate inner lives and spend time together, creating relationships and connections and communities of dizzying richness and complexity.

Of course, sometimes it's a real pain in the ass.