So, people are idiots. And now we know where executives come from.

Been busy at work this week: the production environment at work is having another medium-size seizure. Since work has also been my only real Internet access, I haven't been writing much. I've had the most astonishing run of bad luck and frustration trying to get any of my machines to talk to the network. That's eased up, and what I have so far is a laptop talking on a wired connection to my room (since I couldn't get the wireless working), and my shell/music server, formerly living in a zippy overpowered 2GHz AMD machine that now won't even turn on, now plugging along as best it can in a Pentium 2. It's all better than nothing, but still annoying. On the bright side, I finally bought one of those cute little 9" black-and-white CRT monitors I've been wanting for so many years. They're incredibly handy when you have a bunch of monitor-less computers: a fraction of the size, weight and cost even of a modern small LCD panel.

The Houseness cocktail party was better than usual: I spent a long time flirting with an interesting hottie who didn't mind at all. The cute Brazilian engineer she was holding hands with didn't mind either, and he was interesting too, so that worked out. I crashed there, got to go to breakfast with the gang, and spent the rest of the day recovering and unpacking a bit.

Creeping up on my 29th birthday. No real thoughts about it, specifically; I'm aging well enough, without many complaints. Aikido actually helps my body get better with time; I need to lose some weight, like everyone else; and I'm still learning constantly. Not that I have any idea how I would stop that, since the unstoppable curiosity is almost the core feature of my personality. And anything else, I've probably been cranky about for quite some time. I've got more idea than usual about what the next few years hold--I'm mostly committed to staying near Redwood City, and at my current job--so, in fact, I'm not actually expecting anything really exciting and unexpected to crop up.

(Yes, traditionally that's the time when something really fucked up happens. But honestly, my life has been in a pretty steady state [for me] since late 2003. I've not been happy about it, but there it is, and everything remains very stable whether I want it that way or not, and in spite of my attempts to perturb the system.)

Various folks have been talking about people in bad relationships, trying to talk reason to them and such; you can't really, because in a bad relationship we get stuck, and we can't see anything clearly. Of course this person is bad for us, possibly even really horrible or abusive; but we're stuck in a loop only we can really get ourselves out of. I've been thinking about this not only as I try to offer my experience to some onlooking friends and family, but also because, in a rather stunning turn of events at the cocktail party, my ex-girlfriend from the Bad Relationship not only acknowledged I was in the room, but spoke to me directly multiple times, twice rising to the level of a brief conversation. Normally she hates me so much that she won't even tell me exactly why she hates me so much; I don't hate her, so I don't really understand it, but her terms of our truce over the past year have been that we completely ignore each other. That was a shift, since until...I dunno, sometime in 2004? We could at least talk briefly at parties, ask how we're doing, where we're working.

I chalked it up to her drinking and having fun; if it happens five more times, I'll believe something's changed. I wouldn't mind being able to have a civil conversation with her...as awful as the relationship was, we traveled and shared a lot of experiences together, and maybe one day we could at least acknowledge the awfulness of the whole thing. I could apologize for proposing; in a perfect world she'd join the reality the rest of us live in, where I didn't actually cheat on her with anybody, ever. That'd be asking a lot, though. Let's start with something other than irrational seething rage.

For now, though, the details of the Bad Relationship time live in the store of memories I carry all by myself...lessons to draw on, things to remember when I'm looking at the ocean, stories to tell people who wonder who I am and how I got that way.