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collect flowers
Tuesday, January 19 1999
I want to quit my job and live under the Ocean Beach pier with the other bums. I want to hike into the hills to collect wildflowers and lie on my back, oblivious to time, watching the maidens dancing by. I want to catch fireflies and keep them in a jar and taunt them until they illuminate my nights so I might again reread my tattered and stained back issues of Wired Magazine. Editors note: as I write, I'm neither drunk nor stoned.
Young as the winter is, Spring is in the air here in San Diego. Yesterday I saw a male-female pair of a species of duck courting in the San Diego River. They were facing each other, alternately bobbing their heads in a surprisingly tender display of affection. I have to admit I found it transpecially arousing. A cliché co-worker Al is fond of saying: Love is an international language.
A few days ago I saw a pair of Ocean Beach pigeons engaged in a courtship ritual. He clapped his wings loudly as he flew slowly across Cape May Street and then stormed about a rooftop with his feathers all fluffed out. An enchanted female nearby looked tiny in comparison, what with her feathers submissively held tight to her body.
It was yet another very stressful day at work. My company has come to depend on my copy-over robot (written in Visual Basic Script ASP mind you) to transfer files from the development server to all 13 web servers. Today, though, a load balancer system was being tested and I was expected to somehow make my robot work in the new environment. Try as I might, the robot refused. Since my robot is so important to the update of the website, the onus was then placed on the networking guy to make the load balancing system compatible with my script. The strange thing in all of this is that I was originally hired to do basic web page construction, but now the whole organization depends on complex widgets that only I really understand. It's job security, but still I'm frustrated. I'm extremely overworked and extremely underpaid. It's ultimatum time. I've shown what I can do and I need to redefine my relationship with this company. I shouldn't have to hear what I heard tonight, that certain tone of disappointment in my boss's voice when I left at 6pm after a ten hour workday on this 9th straight day of work. I think he really expected me to pull another 14 hour day. But no, now I'm in a position to set the rules.
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