in lieu of an actual post, i figured i'd post an email i just sent someone (with some slight modifications to protect the innocent [her] and the guilty [me], of course) that wraps it all up nicely…

[bipolar readers],

hello, there in work land. i'm trying to be jovial, even though things with [someone] aren't exactly on the best footing.

why? why would i try to be jovial?

i'll tell you why…

you ready?

because i thought i was having a shitty day. i had to get up at normal work time and get all gussied up (as seen on the current cam picture) and cruise into work for an interview, this morning. i had my god given right to drive 85mph stomped on by about 6 different slow motherfuckers in the fast lane. didn't matter. i still got to work in time for the interview. i stopped in the office to inquire about getting my check a little early, since i'm leaving for chicago today.

then the girl in the office said i most likely wouldn't be able to get it until tomorrow. which seriously hinders my ability to go to chicago, as you may realize. so i walk out of the office, slightly dejected, and head up to my interview.

and i felt like i did a good job on the interview. i answered the questions well. played up the pursuit of knowledge, my ability to work with people. never brought up the pay or the schedule. dazzled them with wit and charm. then they told me that there were 22 other techs getting interviewed. it's a stiff field. lots of tough competition. i don't handle competition well, especially when there's nothing that i can do but wait and hope i'm the better guy (this is sounding a little deeper than the job thing, huh? i'm not meaning this to reflect on [she and i], but i guess it kinda does).

so i get grilled for a good half hour and then i'm cut loose. interview over.

so i went back down to the office to basically beg for my check. she said there may be nothing she can do, since they're changing the policy, but she wrote down my email address, just in case.

so i got home. i was worrying about the state of my trip. it didn't look like the mail had come, therefore i wouldn't be seeing the small stone (the lost pedal) today, either. as i rolled in the front door, i saw a package on the stairs! rob (downstairs neighbor) had brought it in off the porch for me so nobody would swipe it! inside? small stone! woo!

and it sounds dreamy…

i sat down at la computeridorio (that's brian-spanish for computer) and typed joy (the payroll lady) an email so she'd have my email address (my handwriting is shit, you know) and she emailed me right back saying:

Brian,

Good news! Management is not going to change the policy until next
pay period so you can drop by after 2 pm today to pick up your check!
Thanks!

woo! i don't have to cancel the chicago trip!

and so i'm trying to extend my good day to you. i'm sending you a positive email, trying to stay positive about life. it sure would be nice if you …

hope you're having a good day, as well.

heart,
brian.

on the way into work, this morning, i stopped at the coffee shop for my semi-regular mocha. it's nice to be able to walk in and they say "medium mocha, extra chocolate, no whip cream, right?" it's definitely a better way to start the day.

while i was waiting for my java, i saw a good friend walk in. i hadn't seen him in a while, so it was a pleasant surprise. i smiled. he looked at me and said "hey brian…you look like shit." it kinda struck me. not the usual way to start a conversation, i guess. but when i thought about it….i guess i do look like shit.
"i just got up, rob."
"that's no excuse. so did i."
"i guess i'm just not sleeping as well as i could be."
"are you stressed out? what's bothering you?"
this is the point of the conversation where i was starting to think that all i had wanted to do was get some coffee. i didn't want to have an in-depth conversation about stuff that is obviously causing me to be stressed out, especially when i'm on my way to work. to put it bluntly, i'm slightly ashamed of my loss of sleep over these particular issues, but it's just something i can't help. i definitely didn't want to make him feel like i was putting him off or ignoring his advice. so i tried to deflect the conversation…
"yeah…i'm a little stressed out. but i got a new car!"
"that's really not helping you sleep at night, is it?"
he's a wily bastard, that one. he was on to me before i started.

so i sucked it in, accepted his advice (and quite a bit of it, there was) and tried to maintain a pleasant conversation, despite instantly starting to feel bad about my lack of sleep. we talked about road trips (he recently went to new york and i'm headed to chicago tomorrow night) and rock music. he'll be at the big krazy fest, this weekend, and we made a tentative arrangement to go and see planet of the apes on friday night.

but the fact remains: aside from the night before last, i'm sleeping like shit. when i finally get to sleep at night, it's always a couple of hours too late. and then i keep waking up early in the morning and can't get back to sleep. i wake up from a half remembered dream about this or that and then i'll just keep thinking about everything that's running around in my head and can't get back to sleep. the worst is when you wake up 15-30 minutes before the alarm goes off. you're convinced, the whole time you're lying there, that that short amount of time would be the little scrap of sleep that would have left you bright eyed and bushy-tailed. completely rested. and then you just can't get back to sleep. completely maddening.

and it's always nice to have carrie to talk to in the mornings.

now the coffee's cold and i still feel unrested. it's gonna be a long day…

i don't know why i'm so incredibly wound up, right now. i feel stressed beyond belief and i can't really put my finger on why. the odd thing is…i have an incredible amount of stressed out, nervous energy running through me…and i'm tired as hell. i almost fell asleep, here at work. crazy!

could it be the fact that my small stone still hasn't arrived? i sent an email to the guy and he said both pedals (i ordered the small clone at the same time) were shipped out at the same time, priority mail. well…we all know what kind of problems i've been having with the post office…. to the guy's credit, he said if i didn't get it by tonight, to let him know and he'd file an insurance claim and send me a new one out, immediately. sounds good, but i just want the damn pedal.

could it be that when i went home on lunch to see if the pedal arrived (it didn't), i found out that the phone had been mysteriously turned off? it seems jess must have forgotten to pay the phone bill. the funny thing about that is that the dsl line was working fine. weird.

i went out and found a payment center and took care of the phone bill on my lunch break that was rapidly approaching two hours in length. oh well. shit happens, right?

i just want to go on record and state that i just typoed "shit" as "she." i wonder what i'm thinking about…

so why am i so stressed out? why do i feel so off-center?

is it her? i don't think so. i feel better about that, over the past couple of days, than i have in a long while. i'm going to try to rule that one out, i think.

so what is it? possibly just a giant combination of all of the above? the fact that i'm still at work, working what seems like the longest day ever?

i need a fucking nap.

sitting at work before a "meeting." i've got some time to kill…

i hate walking out of this building into the beating sun. it feels like i'm going to go flashblind, walking from florescent lighting to the harsh, glaring sun. damn that sun. damn it to hell.

or something.

there's a guy here at work that is addicted to those yahoo and match.com personal ads. he seems to think he's going to find the lady of his dreams through some matchmaking website. i told him he'd have better luck finding a quality woman (on par with the ones on those sites, anyway) walking into a trailer park with a pack of marlboros and a book of mcdonald's gift certificates. screw flowers, those women want the staples.

this is, of course, ironic because the girl i'm currently so messed up about met me through this very website. yep…she messaged me by accident and just didn't understand what she was getting herself into. god have mercy on her soul.

i always wanted to say that, you know…"god have mercy on [possessive pronoun] soul."

i'm headed up to chicago on thursday. i'm gonna be dropping in on that there hey mercedes and get up kids show at the house of blues. i'm rather stoked that the alkaline trio also got added to the bill for that evening. after the show, i'll be catching some z's at a friends house (and if it's anything like last time i'll be drinking my fill, as well) and then heading home in the morning. why such a quick trip? well…small brown bike will be in town for that krazy fest hoo-ha on friday and then bob and the boys will be playing on sunday. with alkaline trio again, no less. after that it's straight over to the clifton center to catch shellac.

i'd say that's a pretty full weekend of rock. if you plan on being at any of those events, and let me know.

if it was important, they'll call back.

and now the "meeting" calls…

quick note:

download the joycam project wallpaper: 800×600 and 1024×768. now you can have pictures of people you don't know and places you don't recognize gracing your desktop. enjoy!

that should hold you over for a bit.

a proper post later?

it was my intention, this morning, to write something witty about coffee and work on a sunday morning. something like i seem to try to write every sunday.

the truth of the matter is, i don't feel very witty at all.

my weekend has been a blur of nothing. i drove my new car quite a bit. got rained on friday. a lot. i met matt for a late lunch and we opted for the exact worst time to do it. right in the middle of a torrential downpour. that's about the only exciting thing about the lunch. matt and i discussed some design ideas for the joycam project (still on the back burner, folks). woo! exciting.

i've spent the majority of the weekend recovering my system from the horrible crash and burn i suffered, the other night. i lost all of that email. that bit of information is still plaguing me. it fucking sucks, i tell you. i've been slowly reinstalling all of my software, as i need it. i bet you're reading this and thinking "what the fuck do i care about your windows install and all your shitty ass programs?"

you're right. what the fuck do you care?

why are you reading this?

hmmm….that's an even better question, i think.

you're probably asking yourself that same question right now:

"why am i reading this shit?"

you'll have to answer that one, not me.

i picked up the dogma special edition dvd. it's a really nice set. i still have yet to dig through the 100 minutes of deleted scenes on that fucker. i did watch it with commentary, though. kevin smith commentaries are the best in the biz. especially when he's joined by mewes, affleck, and the seemingly always quiet jason lee.

i finally launched the redesign of transmission3000 the other day (they're all blurring together, at this point). you should head over there and download a show and make yourselves feel happy. music soothes the savage soul. unless it's metal, in which case it just makes the savage soul's soul more savage. the front page is now blog enabled, so i'll try to update a bit more, over there. my next goal is to finally get that newer june of 44 set posted.

only one of my pedals came in.

and my coffee is fucking cold.

to tell the truth, i wonder how i was able to write so much and say so little…i never seem to be able to touch the things that are really bothering me, anymore.

well…here's what's bothering me (i'm gonna catch so much shit for this, down the road, that it's not even funny):

me: i just don't want this between the two of us.
me: it hurts.
me: it's like a white hot iron in my heart.
her: Let it go and it will stop hurting you.
me: let what go? that i'm apparently handling this badly enough that the one girl i care about doesn't even want to talk to me?
me: and who knows if she ever will?
me: there's my white hot pain.
her: Bye Brian
me: don't go.
[she] signed off at 10:15:37 AM.

ladies and gentleman…you see a true pathetic idiot in action. come one, come all…pay a dime and spit on the moron.

i really need to learn when to quit.

if there is any time when i've felt the pain of total defeat, this is it. i've spent the entire day trying to coax windows into reinstalling correctly, and now that it's working…i'm defeated all over again.

the day started off great, with the dsl tech arriving early for the appointment that i had made. we begged and pleaded my computer to work properly until we finally ended up setting the dsl up on an external ethernet router (not really a router, but an external pppoe [ppp over ethernet] modem) and then i was cruising along, just fine.

and then i tried running windows update. i got through some critical updates with no problem, but then the eternal bane of my existence, service pack 2, decided to lock my computer up and send the boot sector (and ntloader and just about everything else) to that big developer circle in the sky. i tried to repair the install, but it didn't work. i ended up having to format the entire system partition and starting from scratch. this process went every way but smoothly (every which way but loose?). i'd say that the install process for windows2000 locked up a good seven or eight times before i finally got the fucker working. and you consider this piece of shit working, or i'll be a monkey's uncle. i take that back…it'll end up not working anymore and how am i gonna explain a little monkey nephew?

windows is now working. the dsl is reinstalled and working. all of this adds up to great, right? wrong. now come the details…

i lost every shred of saved email i had. every email to or from her. every email that you sent me and that i wanted to save. my address book gone. all of it. poof. somebody please so that i stop feeling so empty inside…

on top of all that, my complete and utter defeat, she won't return my calls or email. it's just salt in the wound, i guess. what should i expect? i never did anything wrong. i should know that when you do nothing wrong, you usually get the worse treatment than when you are a total shit.

this would be where i'd say one of those typical guy things like "women…i'll never understand 'em."

well…as typical as it is…it's true.

she tells me i'm amazing. she tells me i'm attractive. she even told me once "if i had met you here, i'd want something with you." but since that didn't happen, no matter how amazing i am, i'm shit out of luck.

"here" being there and not really here at all.

i let this girl run rampant through my heart and mind. i felt like i finally found someone out there who wanted the same simple things that i wanted in life. things were amazing when we were together, but it dragged out in the doldrums between. constant obsessing about what we were and what we might be (granted this was mostly on my part)…the distance in between…her lack of wanting a relationship…these things all equal up to me getting the shaft, in the long run.

i've been holding off on writing about this situation for a while now. i felt hopeful. i felt like things might work out. i felt like i might be able to pull something out of this.

i thought things between she and i were starting to come to an understanding. she says she doesn't love me, i say it's because she won't let herself. maybe because of the distance, maybe because of whatever. i held out. i wanted to be there. i wasn't about to give up.

my worst flaw: i don't know when to quit.

i was hoping to drive down to see her, this weekend. i had gotten the new car and i was all anxious to get it out on the highway, take it on it's first roadtrip (with me, anyway). i wanted to spend some time with her. she waffled. said it was a bad idea. at some points, she sounded like it wasn't a horrible idea. and then she said that it wasn't going to work. she was going out with some friends on thursday night and that would effectively kill the amount of time we'd have to spend together. i relented, said maybe next weekend would be better.

i then put a two and another two together and made four. she was going out with a friend and a guy she's being "fixed up" with. stupid, foolish me.

and then it became apparent that i'm about as delusional as they come. seeing the world through rose colored glasses and ignoring all the important facts that are punching me in the back of the head. a fool to end all fools.

so what do i have left? nothing. a new car that doesn't seem so cool anymore. some effects pedals on their way to me in the mail. what i don't have is her. i wonder if i ever had a shot, a chance in hell…

the times we did have were beautiful…something i won't soon forget. i wish things had worked out differently.

i wish i had been worth her effort. for some reason…i don't feel so amazing.

this is why iggy pop will forever be a god amongst men.

amen.

update: i have the keys. the car belongs to me. it is mine. i am now incredibly happy.

pedals: the guy hasn't emailed me to let me know they've been shipped, so there's nothing new on that front.

more later when i'm not so delirious.