(more)

Nothing to see here, move along.

Is there a Gean-Luck-Pikard here?

Tonight I had dinner with some long lost relatives. Actually not really; I hadn't seen them in about a year and a half. I see family on my dad's side (aside from Dad, his wife and the kids) so seldom that when I do see them it feels as though they are long and lost. I’ve never lived so close to so much family. It’s nice.

Also: my dad bought a new car. It was about time that old clunker was way too small for the size of the family. It’s so weird to think of my dad driving a car with those modern curves. I instinctively think of his car as being a boxlike refugee from the 1980s. Apparently Lara misses the old car. Reminded me of how heart broken I was when my mum sold the Tercel. That was years ago.

It was actually even pretty nice to talk to my step mother tonight. She treated me like shit when she first started dating my dad (that was years ago), but I’ve tried not to hold a grudge against her, as I think that would just hurt my dad, and solve nothing.

She is ethnically Chinese, so I got to ask her intelligent questions about which dialect of Chinese that her family spoke (she is herself essentially a native English speaker), and where her family originates from. Before I started studying Chinese input methods I was aware that there were many subtle regional differences in Chinese languages and culture, but totally ignorant about what they might be. I’m still pretty ignorant, but at least I am learning. I tried to get them to show me Tristan and Lara’s middle names, which are Chinese, and so have Chinese characters that correctly represent them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my laptop out of simplified Chinese mode, and my step mother only recognizes the traditional variants.

I’m pretty sure that “David”^[1] is a jerk. He came by tell me that I was working on the wrong thing today and that the resolution on my monitor reminded me of the cruddy old days when X Windows was all the rage. Hello, if you didn’t give me shit to work on then the shit that I work on wouldn’t look like shit. Blah, whatever. Either it will get better, or I’ll be gone soon. I don’t much care which.

---

1. guy at work who offered me the position that no longer exists

at work today...



co-worker: what's that you've got on your desktop?
me: oh that's just an image I put there so that I can tell it's me that is logged on and not someone else.
co-worker: yeah, but what is it?
me: a picture of some rust that I took in New York
co-worker: *looks at me strangely*

I feel misunderstood.

it rained last night, dispatching the bulk of the fire
up here.  i understand from the news there are some
south of here still.  the skies really cleared up today,
making today the best beach day i've had out here.  we
hiked up the skillion, basically this big chunk of earth
thrust up in complete contempt for gravity at the edge
of the ocean.  i wished i had brought my camera up
there, as the contrasting colors, dark blue ocean,
golden yellow beaches, blue-green australian overgrowth
and light blue sky were worth beholding.  maybe it was
just as well, because film, be it virtual or no, doesn't
seem to do the real thing justice, you know?
 
i hope you had a good vacation (or is it not over yet?).
how is life in america?  i will shortly have to
readjust to it.  i will give you a call from chicago, in
case my flight is delayed.  happy after now and good
future years.

I wrote that on January 8, 2002 from Gosford, Australia. Fires seem to happen in places which I call home, and there were some bad ones near Gosford at the time. When the rain cleared some of the smoke and I could see the blue skies for the first time in days, I had this perfect moment (maybe it was a moment of total clarity, whatever that is) at the top of the Skillion, and I had to share it with someone. My heart told me that I should tell this girl I liked back in the states. Thus the e-mail. Later I would find out that she had a boyfriend. It feels like it has been so long since I had a moment like that. I'm not even sure who I would tell if I did have another such experience.

Anyway, that's not a very happy thought. I'm headed off to Maine tomorrow, for the National Folk Festival and probably to do some hiking. I'm going to stop in New Hampshire to visit a friend who has left The Company to study patent law and get a degree. I will be sure to take lots of pictures and hopefully post some of them here. I will need all my low light skills to capture some interesting moments at the festival.