Unfinished Stories

Mike sat at the computer while Andrea cut photos out of a half-foot stack of magazines. the clippings, which she pressed with a glue stick onto a posterboard collage, were women's forms, women's faces, women's lips, and skirts.

"When does he get here?" she asked, not looking up.

"He should be here already. I hope he didn't get lost. I probably should have gone to the train station to meet him."

"He took the train from Vancouver?"

"Yup, three days."

"Romantic," she said, attacking a makeup add with scissors. "Romantic, but, stupid."

Geekdom

I found this article on OSNews to be funny. Thus, I am pretty much irredeemably geek-tastic.

South Central

Starbucks in South LA

There are many ways to meander from Crenshaw to Orange County, and when time is not pressing, I'll explore the surface streets.

Today I headed south down Crenshaw and meandered south-east until I hit Imperial Highway in Lynwood.

Unintentionally I passed Florence and Normandie, an infamous intersection where a white trucker was hauled from his rig and beaten. This was caught on camera from one of the swarm of newscopters that encircle LA.

In LA, we spend a lot of time mythmaking, repackaging real neighborhoods and real people into symbols, meanings, and shorthand. It is what we do in the SouthLand. (I am no better, filling up bytes in cyberspace repackging my boring life.) This intersection is a symbol, as well as being the Florence and Normandie that has gas stations on three corners and an AutoZone on the other.

For the unitiated, it might be surprising how suburban and pleasant the residential neighborhoods are. The yards are well tended, and the houses are well maintained. There is money here, too. I watched many well-heeled families walking to church.

The business districts are another story. There are many sad, unmaintained storefronts. The businesses that do exist tend to be those that require little startup capital and little corporate backing: barbers, liquor stores, small markets, small restaruants.

I have been living for two years at the extreme north-west corner of South Central, and, to be honest, I've been something of a failure at finding community or creating community. I've met all the neighbors yet barely know them, and they probably all hate me for never mowing the lawn. Here, just as in Fullerton, my community is divided between people from work and lifetime friends.

I have changed somewhat. I've certainly become less skittish. I've learned to judge neighborhoods not by their commerical districts, over which people have little control, but by the houses and gardens. I've learned to say hello to my neighbors, when, in Orange County, not saying hello and letting people get on with their lives is actually more polite.

Old Navy stores near South LA

But, the fact remains that any outsider that gets lost coming off the 110 and drives around the main streets, looking at the sad storefronts crammed with churches and liquor stores, and barber shops, with nary an Old Navy or Starbucks to be seen, will have the legend of South-Central reinforced by the vista of it.

Sunday at Work

If I don't get this doc written right now, I'm fucked. My company will look foolish. My personal repuation will suffer. The reputations of my team will also suffer. And in a business for which reputation is the only currency that matters, it is a big deal.

But I just can't do it. I'm so burnt out. I'm so beyond caring.

All the time, my mind is buzzing, full blown ADD. Hopping from topic to topic, bouncing between bizarre intellectual persuits and dark fantasies of escape and freedom.

I click all around the blogosphere, stuffing my head with useless trivia: Pakistani politics, Fortran libraries for linear equations, memes and rants about memes, C++ windowing toolkits. All this minutia and trivia fascinates me, and my job does not. ADD, information addiction, these are often an asset in my work. But when my job become writing technical documents about studies about poorly designed Giant Robots, inability to focus on the boring suddenly becomes a career-ending shortcoming.

A life in Los Angeles is hard won: buying a house requires a life lead without serious missteps, without diverting from "the path". High school, college, work. Save money. Nose: grindstone. After a childhood of financial insecurity, I pushed forward on "the path". Here I am. I win, I win, but, I live a gray-colored life.

But if I run away, if I bail on this, I may be forever destroying my chance to live this life. Property values, dwindling number of on-shore engineering/science jobs. A precarious position. What if I bail and find that this was as good as it gets? What if I bail and find out that my unease is always present with me: a broken soul, a malformed API, and that I've screwed up my position for nothing.

Someone once said that you are what you cannot throw away. I cannot throw away this home, this job, this life. I am this home and this job. I hate this job.

Sigh. Listen to me whine. It is so pathetic. "Pity me." I'm pulling in a buttload of money and living in my own place. How dare I whine about how hard my life is, when China and India (1/3 of the world's pop) have a per capita under $1500 a year.