Category: Personal

Driving into San Francisco the other night, I noticed a bunch of signs attempting to establish another ethnic community along with North Beach, Chinatown, and Japan Town: Little Saigon.

Now, I’ve never been to the city, and for all I know it’s a beautiful place. But doesn’t it still have a lot of, err, negative connotations? If you’re advertising a Vietnamese community, why use an image of a smaller version of a war-torn city under seige? Do you reach Little Saigon via the Ho-Chi-Minh Path? Or am I making too big a deal of the city’s earnest attempts to promote pho restaurants? (Which, don’t get me wrong, I support entirely. Especially if they’re called “Pho Shizzle.”)

The Game Developers Conference is going on in San Francisco this week, and what with the weather all nice and the deadline at work looming at end of day today, I’m feeling like the kid stuck inside with violin practice watching all the other kids outside playing. Thanks to action man Bret and his surfeit of passes, I did get to go to the Sony party at the Metreon last night, and that was a hoot and a half. I got to see a bunch of people I haven’t seen in months or even years. It sounds like the game “industry” is going through another expansion phase as people get fed up with (or fired from) the big companies and starting their own, so there was a lot of “let’s get the band back together.”

But then again, I’ve got an etrade account. And it turns out I can put a price on job satisfaction and creative fulfillment, and that price, apparently, is $70 per share.

Finally some good weather this weekend. I was starting to get the Seattle Depression. I went to Fort Point and took some pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge before my camera battery went dead. The old Chuck would’ve planned a big page of San Francisco pictures for this website, but I’m more mature now and won’t show such hubris. Still a good weekend, although it went by way too fast.

I finished Half-Life 2 a few nights ago, and I still say it’s just about the best videogame ever made. I’ve been waiting for when we could talk about games in terms of story and setting and plot instead of just filtering and antialiasing and how much stuff you get to blow up. This game does it for me; it’s one of the few games I’ve ever seen (the You Don’t Know Jack series is the only other one that comes to mind immediately) that just assumes you’re intelligent and that you’ll “get it.” Now that I’ve finished, though, I’ve just got to find another game to fill the void.

At least World of Warcraft will never leave me.

Still nothing interesting for a website update. This has been about as uneventful a Saturday as I can remember. But that’s not a bad thing. Woke up around noon with a hangover from hanging out with Alex & his Australian visitors last night; that was pretty fun, they’re good people, and I managed to get pleasantly drunk instead of obscenely drunk. Went to Amoeba and picked up some CDs, made plans to do a lot more stuff and then just came back to the apartment and took a nap. I made some progress in Half-Life 2, so I guess I can count that as an accomplishment. The World of Warcraft servers were down, so I couldn’t use that as a time-waster. All my Sims 2 families are settling down into gay and straight marriages or having babies, and I didn’t really feel like being that domestic.

Would’ve been a perfect day to actually update this website, but laziness wins again. In a quest for True Ultimate Boredom, though, I’ve decided to post regular photographic updates of the status of my beard, on the about page. (Taking photos of paint drying would actually require me to paint something, which sounds like too much work).

Apparently I only update the whole weblog thing when things are going lousy. Just as well; seeing as how my past year in turmoil turned out to be pretty dull reading, I can’t imagine how mind-numbingly boring it’d be to hear about my life now.

Because everything’s going great. And I mean everything. Work is busy but manageable and I actually like what I’m doing now. Personal life’s going swimmingly. I’ve got free time at home. Bills are paid, car’s running fine. I look forward to seeing movies and I see them and they’re actually really good. My friends all seem to be happy or at least chugging along. Family’s good. I’m back into enjoying videogames, and even have time to keep up a World of Warcraft character.

I still haven’t done any work on the website, as the broken links at the top of the page indicate. And I’m wracked with guilt about the whole thing. Except inasmuch as I’m not at all. I did put a goofy picture of myself on the about page, so that’s progress.

Uh. Well, Bush is still president. I guess I could complain about that. And there’s a war and all. Lots of civil rights violations all over the place. Unfathomably horrible devastation from the tsunami. But I voted, and protested, and donated, and there’s not a whole lot more I can do. Except be happy.

This is weird.

So this has been about as good a four-day weekend as anybody can hope to have. Caught up with friends, played some videogames, watched some movies, had a generally awesome Saturday and a pleasant Sunday. I’m going to work tomorrow and I’m actually looking forward to it; how the hell did that happen?

Things are going so well, in fact, that I’m expecting to be killed by a falling piece of masonry, Edward Gorey-style, at any moment. So if anybody’s reading this: it’s been nice knowing you, remember me fondly, and be sure you play “Beyond the Sea” and “Sweet Thing” at the funeral.

Well, this has been kind of a bummer of a Thanksgiving week. I flew home to Georgia Sunday night, had a plate of fried chicken and potatoes waiting for me when I got home, finished Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind while I waited to get tired and fall asleep, and then started having dull pains in my back and stomach.

At first I thought it was just indigestion, and then I thought I’d just gotten too upset from the movie (I was crying like a mafia widow, as Rain would put it), and then around 6 AM I started to realize that something was seriously wrong. The pain kept getting worse and worse, until it was like the sharpest part of a cramp, but non-stop. And then I started throwing up, and instead of making everything better, it just made the pain worse each time. I’ve had attacks like this twice before, around five years ago and then five years before that, but they weren’t nearly as intense and always got better once I either threw up or just forced myself to go to sleep. There was no sleeping through this one.

I got Skip and Daddy to drive me to the doctor’s office, where they made me fill out a lot of forms, took a blood sample, wait what seemed like an eternity (but I was able to keep going to the bathroom and throwing up to pass the time), took some X-rays, gave me a shot of some anti-nausea drug (after which I threw up again), and told me that it was probably a gall bladder infection. The doctor prescribed some antibiotic and said that if it weren’t better in four or five hours I’d have to go to the Emergency Room, have some more tests run, and might have to have surgery.

Through the whole doctor’s visit I wasn’t able to even think straight because of the pain and lack of sleep, but whatever they shot me with and prescribed must’ve worked. I was almost asleep by the time I got home, my stomach settled down, and the pain pills they gave me are just awesome. They don’t make me high or anything, just completely pain free. I don’t think I’m ever completely pain free. It’s going to be tough to give those up. At any rate, apprently the doctor knows his medicines, because I haven’t had any more flare-ups, the pain has died down, and I made it through Thanksgiving dinner (but smaller portions) without incident. I’m just going to avoid the chili peppers for a good while, I think.

Other interesting things I learned from the whole incident: according to the scale at the office, I now weigh 171 pounds. Which means that over the last 8 months or so, I’ve lost about 35-40 pounds. I didn’t mean to do this; I’ve just had my mind on work and other things besides eating. The other bit is that gall bladder conditions are brought on by overdrinking (okay, I’m guilty of that) and stress (which if you ask me, leads to the former). So from that I conclude that my job is now literally killing me. I’m taking the whole thing as a sign that some changes are in order.

Another night of web-browsing trying to get to sleep led me once again to Grandpa and Drella’s family pictures. And I’m struck once again with, although I don’t see them that often, how beautiful a person Ruby’s turning out to be.

Frequently I find myself dispensing advice (although I clearly don’t have all the answers), and it always come down to the same thing — you have to put up with the bad to be able to recognize not just the good, but the wonderful. And I wonder if it’s easier for me, as an outsider who doesn’t have to put up with tantrums and the day-to-day existence of getting a new person ready for the world, to recognize how wonderful it is to be able to see the world through a new person’s eyes and re-discover everything along with them.

And I think that maybe that’s what it’s all about. Maybe your reward for just being two awesome people, is that you get to bring somebody new along for the ride and show her how the world works. And that gives me the reassurance that maybe there’s hope for someone like me in this post-11/2 world.

Maybe the watering-down of Jack Daniels’ wasn’t such a bad thing, because I’ve drunk just enough to be pleasantly maudlin, but not enough to feel sick.

It’s just really hit me over the past couple of weeks that this has been a pretty rough year for me. I hadn’t really noticed before, because I was always too busy just trying to keep on top of things and stay in control of it all. I think on the whole it’s been a net gain, but it definitely hasn’t been easy.

And once again, when I needed it, my friends started popping up and helping me out of it. Either by knocking some sense into me, or giving me some practical advice, or giving me the chance to give some advice and feel useful, or just listening to me. Usually I’m neurotic enough to wonder, “What did I do to deserve this friendship, and what bad is going to happen next to make up for this?” Now, I’m just thinking, “I don’t know what it is I’m doing, but whatever it is, I must be doing something right to be able to have friends like these.” And that’s a pretty damn good feeling, whiskey or no.

Huge dark clouds were looming over the bay for the longest time today, until they finally broke and pissed all over the residents of a city dealing with the beginnings of its post-traumatic stress disorder.

And I spent the day just coming up with over-dramatic lines like that. The weather put a damper on my plans to “see San Francisco,” so I spent the day wallowing in self-pity, staring at the inbox that didn’t fill and the phone that didn’t ring. Occasionally interrupted by a mournful, dramatic sigh.

But on the bright side, there’s only so much of that even I can take, so once that was over I was able to come up with a plan:

1. Get my shit together.
2. Do the stupid stuff that I always planned to do when I had more time, like working on the website and learning Japanese (I really think so!) and seeing more movies so I’m not such a cinema illterate and I’m not wasting all that Netflix money.
3. Stop spending so much time online. It’s a huge time-suck, it’s generally unhealthy and depressing, and unless you make the effort to see people face-to-face, the relationships just end up being shallow with no real solid ground.
4. Quit smoking.

I’ll get around to that last one.

Seems I’ve been very distracted over the past few months, and over the course of that I’ve forgotten what I used to do in my free time. There are clues scattered all around my apartment; apparently, I used to watch movies on DVD’s or play these “games” on the television or computer device. Occasionally, it seems, I would read a book. Especially this week, I’m going to have to slow things down and figure out how to get back into my hobbies so I don’t freak out so much when I’m not working and not going out.

Did nothing, seriously, nothing today except vote. Voting in California is like taking the SAT’s or something; you’ve got to study and take a cheat sheet to the polling place. I think I voted correctly on all the various city and state propositions. I’d assumed that it would be as simple as finding out my governor’s position on each proposition and just voting the opposite, but it turns out politics is a shade more complicated than that.

I flip-flopped on a bunch of them, and can’t even remember which side I came down on for some, for instance the stem cell research bond. But I know that I did vote to keep Candlestick Park named Candlestick Park. Screw the tax revenue; having to call the thing “3COM Park” is just an embarrassment.

And speaking of symbolic propositions, there was a weird one to make the city’s official position against the war in Iraq and for a recall of all our troops. I voted in favor of it, because I’m against the war, but still think it’s a pretty boneheaded thing to do via a city proposition. I can’t imagine the kind of stuff they’re voting on in Berkeley.

And I’m still smoking.