Grinchin'

The thing I hate the most about being sick — and today I’ve been hit with a double whammy of a mild cold plus a mild stomach flu; nothing exciting in and of themselves, but the combination is exhausting — is that I have a tendency to feel really lonely. Lying in bed, looking forward to the next time I can use one of my inhalers or take another aspirin, is not something guaranteed to make me feel happy or real good about the world around me. It’s better, of course, now that Jennifer’s around, but when she has to go to work, it’s still easy for me to get lonely during the day, even when there are four or five overly affectionate cats to keep me company.

It was easy to cope when I was a kid or even when I was a teenager or even in college: I’d just flip on the television and watch whatever weird shows were on during the day. I’d avoid the talk shows, of course, but daytime TV used to at least offer alternatives to the junk — reruns of old comedies or old movies during the day. But now there aren’t old TV shows during the day, and old movies are exclusively on cable or videotapes. And with the VCR and TV in the other room, I haven’t even been watching movies anymore.

Watching television wasn’t the only way I’d amuse myself when I was sick as a kid. I spent a lot of time reading, too. Now that I’m older, and television just doesn’t hold the appeal that it once did, I find myself reading more when I’m sick than I did when I was a kid. And the loneliness that afflicts me when I get sick becomes mixed up with a strange feeling of nostalgia.

Today I was sick, and lonely, and nostalgic; so I pulled up some books that I’d enjoyed over the summer and that I was planning on re-reading anyway: the Harry Potter books. I think it’s probably because the Harry Potter books remind me so much of the books I read when I was a kid, or of the stories I used to make up for myself (and sometimes still do); or maybe it’s just because these books are so good. Whatever the reason, I found that curling up with these books today felt like hanging out with old friends. And re-reading them, I found levels in the stories that I hadn’t noticed before; subtleties of foreshadowing that I appreciated, politics among the other mages, and so on. J. K. Rowling really is a good writer.

I’ve written about the Harry Potter books before, so I won’t repeat what I’ve already written here.

But bear with me, I’m going somewhere with all of this anyway.

Two weeks or so ago, Jennifer and I went and saw The Grinch at a local movie theater (Jennifer’s recounting of that particular evening is much more eloquent than I could ever be). It was a fun movie; Jim Carrey is, in my opinion, underrated as an actor (I think he ought to be doing more serious parts like The Truman Show); and Anthony Hopkins is a suitable replacement for Boris Karloff as the narrator for the story. Naturally, the writers expanded the story; it’s hard to turn a short Dr. Seuss book into a 90-minute movie. Most of the expanded story fit into the spirit of the tale, some of it kind of grated, but on the whole it was good. And, I thought, it had a good message about the over-commercialization of Christmas in general.

Said message, of course, being rendered more than ironic by the insane amount of merchandising which has surrounded that movie. Honestly, I think that Theodore Giesel, Dr. Seuss himself, must be spinning in his grave. I don’t remember him licensing much more than educational products when he was alive. Still, I suppose his estate needs to get their money somewhere.

Of course, it’s not just the Grinch who’s been the focus of so much marketing and merchandising this year. Just two weeks ago, we went to do some Christmas shopping and stopped in Barnes and Nobles; and I found myself practically drowning in the sheer volume of Harry Potter merchandising that had seemingly exploded out of nowhere in the space of a few short weeks. When I stood in line until midnight in early July with Jennifer to buy Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as a birthday present for my niece, I didn’t see the Harry Potter mugs, calendars, T-shirts, keychains, clocks, and bathrobes that are available now. Of course, with the movie just about a year away, this sort of marketing and merchandising can only be expected, I suppose. Still, it’s a bit distressing.

The Harry Potter books are good, and I firmly believe that in spite of the Muggles of the world who try to sue the author (over the use of the word "Muggle"), or the nutty teachers who try to ban the books, these books are actually good for kids. Kids learn to use their imagination, they read, they learn the importance of friendship, and so on. But what do they learn from the merchandising and the marketing? That it’s good to spend close to $70.00 for a "special edition" of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone? That you need to have the Harry Potter’s Collectibles Guide to make sure you have the latest parephrenalia in order to be as cool as the other kids?

I know that J. K. Rowling certainly licensed all of these things. And I imagine that she’s more than a bit overwhelmed by her sudden wealth. And I certainly don’t begrudge her success. But I have a sneaky feeling that Harry Potter himself might not approve, and that all of this money-making is something that his mean-spirited uncle, Vernon, might have nodded approvingly at.

Still, though…

That midnight-blue bathrobe with the House Gryffindor seal on it is really appealing, and I compare it to my own tattered bathrobe and think how much of a Muggle I am.

A Bonding Moment

I’ve written before — and some of my readers might say, "Too much" — about my feelings for Jennifer. About how much I love her. About how much I adore her. About how strong I feel our relationship is. And so on. Read my November 6, 2000 entry on the subject, and believe me when I say that that particular entry is probably the best expression of my feelings.

Jennifer and I have been dating for just over six months now, and we’ve had many moments of close intimacy and bonding. But Sunday night marked a new stage in our relationship, one that I never have reached with anyone else before. One which is truly meaningful for both of us.

But first, a bit of backstory. Not much, I promise.

We decided some months ago that this was going to be our last year celebrating Thanksgiving with our separate families. We could have opted to spend Thanksgiving together with her family or with mine, and neither family would have objected; but it seemed best not to do so for one last year. So on Wednesday night, I drove down to San Jose, spent a few wonderful days with my parents, my sister (and her new boyfriend), my aunt and my uncle, and had a great time. On Saturday my mom informed me that she was essentially kicking me out; in years past I’ve stayed with them until the last possible moment on Sunday evening; but, then, I’ve never really had a strong reason to return home. Now, I couldn’t wait to get back home to see Jennifer again. My mom, wise woman that she is, sensed that and told me that it was perfectly okay for me to leave early. My dad put up a token objection (more in jest than anything else), and my mom replied, "I’m kicking him out!" To which my dad replied, "Well, that’s all right then."

So late Saturday night, after dinner with my sister and her new boyfriend, I drove back up here to Woodland and came home to be with Jennifer again. I’d missed her terribly.

The next morning, Jennifer woke up early with a stomach flu. She’d awakened earlier to throw up, and… Well, let’s just say that the rest of that day was not a pleasant one for her.

When the stomach cramps started up, I asked her if she wanted to go to the emergency room. She told me no, she’d be fine. So I let her lie, bringing her water or soda when she asked for it, and I spent the day reading. In the early evening I got hungry and decided to go to a cafe to get something to eat and do some writing. As I left the parking lot, I called Jennifer on my cell phone and asked her if she wanted me to pick up anything for her on the way home.

"No", she said. But then she told me that she was feeling really bad, and that she thought she should probably go to the hospital after all.

I drove home quickly, visions of abdominal cancer and civil ceremonies in December (instead of our planned ceremony in July) flying through my head, and got to Jennifer’s bedside. I called the advice line listed on her insurance card, and went through her symptoms; and something about tenderness in Jennifer’s abdomen caused the advice nurse to say, "I’m recommending that you take her to the emergency room.

So I did. Nurses and doctors poked and prodded at her and said that she was probably suffering from a virus, possibly a parasitical infection. No idea where that could have come from, of course, and it was really unlikely. Nevertheless, the doctor wanted a stool sample for laboratory analysis, just in case.

Unfortunately, Jennifer could not produce a sample for testing. "Well, that’s all right," the nurse said cheerfully. "Just take this pan and these vials home with you tonight, and collect it yourself. Then bring it back here to the lab later tonight."

Ugh.

Double ugh.

The thought of collecting a stool sample from myself is nauseating. The thought of collecting someone else’s is even more so. But Jennifer is Jennifer and I love her, so I was willing.

Honest to God, that nurse had no right to be that cheerful.

We got home, and Jennifer informed me that she would spare me the thrill of collecting a sample, and that she was willing to do it herself. I asked the token "AreyousurebecauseI’mwillingtodoithoneyokaynoproblemyougoaheadandthankGod?" and let her have at it. When she was done, she handed me three little vials in a plastic bag.

"These have to go to the hospital lab," she said.

I took the bag with two fingers. "Ew," I said. The idea of taking this plastic bag and what it contains in my brand new car to the hospital was, honestly… well, not too pleasant.

But, this is Jennifer, and I love her. So, of course, I did it. I took the bag, and the samples therein, in my brand new car, to the hospital. I handed it to the laboratory technician, saying sarcastically, "I’ve brought some treats!" The lab tech, to her credit, didn’t even blink when she opened the bag and looked at the samples. "Oh, okay," she said. "This is perfect."

Perfect. That’s what she said.

So, to all you men out there who think you’re truly in love with your mates, I ask you this: do you really love her? How far are you willing to go for her? Will you feed her cats? Will you wash her car? Fix her computer? Deliver her fecal matter to the hospital? You have to think about these things carefully, especially if you’re considering marriage.

I’ve said that one of the reasons why I love Jennifer is because she won’t take shit from me. Apparently, the reverse can’t be said now, because, after all, I’ve proven that I’m quite willing to take shit from her.

And, furthermore, I’m even willing to take it to the hospital. And I’d do it again.

Jabberwocky

‘Twas Boston, and the slithy code Did sputter and crash within the web All flimsy was the buggy code And the home page outgrabe.

The fact that the last stanza of "Jabberwocky" is the same as the first has always haunted me. It’s the story of a hero who goes out and kills something — or, as Alice says, "Somebody killed something, that’s plain" — but I’ve always had the sense that even at the end of the story, things go back to the way they were, and everything starts over. In our own lives, there’s repetition; but even if you think you’re in a loop, there are always changes; and frequently the changes are for the better, if you can work the loop just right.

Sometimes you just need to get away. Sometimes you need to get as far away as you can from normal, everyday reality and find someplace that turns words inside out and lands everything on its head.

It was on the first night of my trip to Boston. I was looking at the upcoming couple of weeks and realized that between various business trips, it looked like Jennifer and I were going to be seeing very little of each other throughout mid November. Things had been pretty crazy up until that point as well, and the day in Boston had already been overwhelming, even though I’d only been there a couple of hours.

So, I called up Jennifer from Boston and told her that between everything that was going on and everything that we figured would be going on, we were going to definitely need some time away with just each other. I suggested that we do something that I had always wanted to do, but had never done because I had never had anyone with whom I would have wanted to do it: go to a bed-and-breakfast inn.

Originally, we both wanted to go to someplace in Carmel, which is a really beautiful part of the central coast. But after looking at various inns on-line for half an hour or so, we stumbled across a place called The Jabberwock Inn, located in Monterey. Instantly, we both knew that this was the place for us to go; I mean, with a name like The Jabberwock Inn, how could we not go? I called, made our reservations for this past weekend, and we spent the next month eagerly anticipating our getaway.

It’s about a three-hour drive from Woodland to Monterey, especially if you decide — as we did — to take the scenic route and go down Highway 1. After a bit of confusion in the San Francisco area (we were saved by a kindly tollbooth operator who gently told us exactly how to get to 1 from 80) we managed to get to the right stretch of road, and southward we headed. And after several playings of Billy Joel and Barenaked Ladies albums, and passing by miles of fields filled with mysterious green growing things (later identified as brussels sprouts and artichokes), we arrived in Monterey and at the Jabberwock.

It was like stepping into a little world all its own; from the moment we drove past the hedges and onto the brick of the parking lot, I felt like we had passed through a doorway leading from a hectic world of broken product releases and insane development schedules and into a world populated by dodo birds, playing cards, talking rabbits, and just plain quiet. The Jabberwock was decorated in a Victorian style, with intricately patterned wallpaper, bookshelves filled with dozens of copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; and in just about every corner, hidden from view in almost every case, some new figurine or ornament or detail relating the Wonderland. A statue of a dodo bird in the foyer. A pewter statue of Alice in the garden. That sort of thing. The innkeeper served us sherry and hors d’oeuvres before dinner, chocolate chip cookie and milk before bed, and breakfast in the morning.

Our room was large, with a huge bed, a comfortable couch and reading chair, and no stereo, TV, telephone, or even a place to plug in our laptop computers. Not that we’d brought out computers, of course; the whole point was to get away from that sort of thing for the weekend. We spent a very relaxing night in the inn, enjoyed a great breakfast in the company of friendly strangers, walked along Cannery Row in Monterey, listened to the seals barking in the harbor and the seagulls crying out overhead, and generally just enjoyed ourselves.

On the way back, we passed more mysterious green growing things, bought two stalks of brussels sprouts, showed off Spiff II to my parents (who both cringed when they saw the brussels sprouts — but that’s a story for another day), and drove back home with enough time left over in the day to go out and see Charlie’s Angels — a cheesy but fun film.

So the weekend passed, and Monday came back at us, with more flimsy code, more broken products, more bugs, more meetings, more insane development schedules. The borogoves were mimsy all over again. But when you can take time to work on things, or even just take a couple of days to leave the world and focus on who you are and who you are as a couple — even if you don’t spend a lot of time in "deep conversation", like we did at the Engaged Encounter weekend — something still changes. The Jabberwock — the monster, not the wonderful inn — might still be lurking around the tulgey wood; but now it’s just a little less intimidating, because you’ve come just a bit closer to the partner that you’re going to be spending your life with.

The Circus is Over. Why Won't the Clowns Leave?

When it comes to politics, I agree firmly with Douglas Adams: anyone who is capable of getting themselves elected President should, under no circumstances, be allowed to have the job. And for President this year, I was very close to writing in Colin Powell’s name, for no other reason than because he stated quite publicly that he is not at all interested in the job; I can’t think of a better qualification than that. (Of course, there’s also the part of me that wanted to vote "No" for President, or "None of the Above", or to write in the name of Cthulhu — after all, as they say, why settle for the lesser evil?)

Politics, especially partisan politics, disgusts me. I’ve voted Democrat in just about every election I’ve participated in — which, I assure you, has been every election that’s occured since I turned 18 — but it’s not because I believe that the Democrats are morally superior to the Republicans or any other party out there; it’s just because, out of all of the crop of politicians that are out there, they disgust me the least. That’s not to say that I really care for the Democrat party, of course, or that I’m even registered as a Democrat — I’m actually registered as an independent, in the hopes that this keeps me off of partisan mailing lists when election years roll around.

I admit, though, that I do get a sick joy out of watching Presidential campaigns; it’s like looking into a Kleenex you’ve just blown your nose into. The depths to which people will sink in order to become President inspires me, sometimes, to think back to the one class I took in college on Abnormal Psychology and wonder what might be going on through these peoples’ minds. But, all in all, watching a campaign makes me realize that there really is nothing about any of the candidates that really inspires me to vote for them. With the 2000 election, I had some respect for Al Gore until he announced his position on the Elian Gonzales issue, which made me realize that he really was into it for the politics, just like Bush. I only voted for Gore because I knew that with him, I might wind up a little less annoyed than with Bush in office.

But this year’s election has really brought things to a new low, I think; and the ironic thing is that the election is, technically over. We just don’t know who won.

Neither side wants to concede defeat, of course, and with less than a thousand votes in the balance, I don’t blame them. Al Gore’s campaign wants a hand recount of the ballots in Florida, which makes sense to me. What angers me, though, are those Republicans who call Gore a "whiny bitch" (this is a direct quote from a radio talk show host); as if Bush would have done any differently had he been in Gore’s position.

And now Bush’s campaign is seeking to put a halt to the recount. This, honestly, disturbs me more than any other aspect of this year’s election. Frankly, I’m frightened of a President who would be willing to halt an election if there was even a slight doubt about his prospects of winning. It reminds me far too much of some of the autocratic techniques I read about in Eastern European countries, or of the old Soviet Union. This sort of thing is a direct threat to our nation’s democratic process; a President should not even consider the possibility of interfering with an election, let alone a Presidential candidate who hasn’t even won the election. If nothing else, it tells me that Bush is scared of the will of the people and the possibility that he might lose, and that convinces me even more that Bush is not at all qualified to be President.

I admit, sadly, that Bush will probably be the next President of the United States. This, coupled with a Republican-dominated Congress, will probably set our nation’s social progress back a good ten to fifteen years, and further alienate us from the rest of the world. My only consolation is that Bush will understand, at least on some level, that he won only by a technicality, that the people of the United States don’t really want him there, and the Republican majority in Congress is held only by a hair. And, in some ways, I’m kind of glad that Bush will be president; I predict that the US is going to go through some very shaky times over the next four years, and I’d much rather have a Republican take the fall for what’s coming up than a Democrat. This same thing happened in 1988, when George Bush, Sr., was President; after eight years of faked prosperity under Reagan, things started to go downhill once Bush became President, and in 1992 the Republicans lost the white house. If nothing else, we will probably have another Democratic president in 2004 (and we will probably see Hillary Clinton running for the nomination that year as well). I’m not joining in the debate over the continued existence of the Electoral College; I understand its importance and its place in our nation’s history.

Presidential campaigns are like a circus: a long, dull, vitriolic, angry circus filled with surreal clowns and an audience who is too annoyed to laugh but too morbidly curious to leave. But now the curtains have supposedly been drawn over this year’s show, and I really wish the clowns would leave. Or, at least, that they would all stop trying to convince us that they were the best part of the show. Sheesh.

Autophilia

Spiff is dead.

Long live Spiff!

My old 1992 Geo Metro had been on its last wheels for some time. The engine was still in good shape, true, but the brakes were starting to get a bit rough, the suspension was rocky and made a continuous "miffed mouse" sort of squeaking noise which really disturbed me (especially as it was audible even when I was driving 70 MPH down I-5), and the electrical system, never perfect to begin with, was developing a few shorts that were starting to irritate me. And, one day last week, while driving to work, the engine just stopped. The "Maintenance Required" light flashed, and all of a sudden… Nothing. The car was still moving under its momentum, the electrical system was still functioning, but the engine had simply ceased to be a factor. I pulled over to the side of the road, worried that it might have seized up on me or something, but when I turned the ignition key, the engine started up again just fine. I gave it no more serious thought for the rest of the day, but informed Jennifer once I got to work and had Instant Messenger going that it might be time to consider buying a new car. So that evening, we went to several different dealerships, test drove a few different cars, and we both fell in love with the dark green 2001 Honda Accord LX. After a few hours spent hammering out financial details, we drove home after midnight that night in our new car, followed by the salesman from the Honda dealership who had to come to our house to pick up the title to the Geo.

Spiff II is the first new car I’ve ever owned. Every other car in my life that I’ve ever had has been at least six years old when I purchased it. My old Datsun pick up truck (remember Datsun? They turned into Nissan at some point when someone realized that Datsun was a dirty word in Japanese, or something like that) was nearly ten years old when my parents gave it to me; it was a canary yellow truck with a white and brown camper shell and two front fenders that had, through various accidents and misfortunes, been replaced with primer-black ones. It looked like a big bumblebee. I named this truck Nero, after my uncle’s old basset hound. When he asked me, "Why Nero?", I told my uncle that it was because the truck’s acceleration, like the dog’s, was iffy. "It’s not so much the acceleration that’s a problem with the dog," my uncle replied; "it’s getting him to stop once he does get moving." So I said, "Yep, and the truck’s brakes aren’t that good either."

When Nero died the death of a thousand head cracks on I-80 on the way to Fairfield, my parents bought me my second car: a 1981 Honda Accord hatchback. This thing was tiny. I named it Emmet MacNero, because it was the color of Emmet’s Irish Creme, and was the "son" of Nero. I drove that Honda into the ground; for the last two years of its life with me, it was not allowed to drive on the highways, because its CV joints were shot to hell and I was never able to afford replacing them. I finally got sick of a car that wasn’t really street-legal, so I eventually was able, somehow, to get a car loan from my bank, and I bought Spiff. I got $250 trade-in value for Emmet. Which was much more than I actually god for Spiff.

Jennifer’s family has a tradition of naming vehicles, and each vehicle that the owner has gets the same name; Jennifer has Lucy, and each car she has even owned has been called Lucy. I can’t really bring myself to use the same naming convention with regards to my cars, but I did like the name Spiff — named after Spaceman Spiff, Calvin’s alter-ego in Calvin and Hobbes, the great comic strip of all time. So I decided that this new Honda is Spiff II.

I’m not really into cars or driving. I can recognize a Porsche on the road, as long as it’s clearly marked "Porsche" (otherwise, I’m liable to mistake it for a Camaro); I am quite capable of drooling over a 2001 Jaguar SLE; and I once drove a 1967 Karmenn Gia, which gave me quite a thrill. But cars just don’t do it for me. I know that calls my masculinity and possibly my sexual orientation into question, but it’s true, and I’m secure in it.

But I tell you… Driving this new Honda is a blast. Driving a car which responds to the gas pedal, which can take turns without shaking, which has an air conditioner, doors that open and windows that roll down, and can brake without protesting… It may be enough to make me think that perhaps driving can be fun, after all.

Breathing Lessons

I’ve been plagued with asthma since I’ve been two years old. It’s a nasty condition: when you have a full-blown asthma attack, trying to breathe is like breathing through one of those tiny coffee-stirring straws. Air actually can go in to your lungs just fine (unless you’re having a really bad attack), but breathing out is the difficult part. Your lungs spasm; the smooth muscles that line the bronchial tubes contract, narrowing the airways; in addition, the lung tissues can also swell, and excess mucous can be produced, further blocking the airways. Your chest feels tight, like a weight is sitting on you. I’ve even heard it said that an asthma attack can feel like a heart attack. And I know of at least one doctor who believed he was having an asthma attack when he was, in actually, having a heart attack (two hours later, he was under the knife, undergoing a quadruple bypass operation).

Last Sunday, Jennifer and I were cleaning the house. I’d been short of breath for the entire day and the day before, but had shrugged it off, figuring it was the side effect of the new hypertension medication that my physician had given me. But on Sunday night it got so bad that I had I to have Jennifer take me to the emergency room. I guess more than sick, I was annoyed that this was the second time in two weeks that I’ve had to go to the emergency room, after being away from hospitals for over a year (the time prior to that, I was in for a week for pneumonia). Some day I hope to go for an entire year without having to go in for one problem or another. While I was in the emergency room on Sunday night, Jennifer stayed with me the whole time, making me laugh and smile, and generally keeping me cheered up. She made some observations about the sounds in the ER resembling a routine by Stomp, and that made me laugh through the facemask that the respiratory therapist had hooked me up to.

One thing that’s been pounded into me since I was a child with asthma has been the importance of relaxing when you’re in the midst of an asthma attack. Becoming tense or nervous will actually make the asthma attack worse. So while sitting in a doctor’s office or in an emergency room, the doctor will always tell me, "Just keep yourself calm. Stressing about it will only make it worse."

Easy for them to say, I’ve always though in response to that. They’re not the ones who can’t breathe at all! It’s awfully easy to panic when your air is cut short, when you can’t draw a breath (a really bad asthma attack will prevent you from inhaling as well as exhaling), when you’re light-headed from lack of oxygen, and the only thing you can think of is where your next inhalation is going to come from. Still, it’s true; if you can relax, then you will start to feel better, and it actually does become easier to breathe.

Generally, deep breathing is a good way to relax, calm down, and get a grip on things. When you’re in the middle of an asthma attack, of course, it’s impossible to take some deep breaths and calm down that way. But at other times…

Breathe in deeply…

Exhale.

Patience is also key when you’re suffering an asthma attack. Asthma is a temporary condition and when you have an attack, it will go away, assuming proper treatment. But when you’re desperate for air, it’s hard to be patient.

So you’d think that after struggling with asthma for nearly thirty years, I’d be a pro at being patient, right?

Yeah, right.

I wrote in an earlier journal entry that I could learn about patience and determination from the adult literacy students that I was working with. I did learn some of those lessons; but I seem to have forgotten some of them.

So here I am, five months later, in my new job, far away from the administrative assistant position I used to hold at the University, and still frustrated by the direction my career is taking. It’s not, of course, what I want; but is it realistic to really expect to have reached my ultimate career goal at this point?

So, here goes. Inhale deeply. Exhale.

My first non-administrative job started on July 10. My new job started about a month after that. In four months, I’ve gone from an administrative assistant position in the Human Resources division of a large University to being part of an enterprise-level web development team. I used to work with the front end of an ancient FoxPro application; now I’m answering questions about PL/SQL and Oracle8i, as well as Unix development and some basic functions in Perl.

Still, it’s not what I ultimately want, which is to take leadership roles in the development of large enterprise-scale web-based database applications and in their deployment. I consider myself an expert HTML/JavaScript developer at this point (even though I’ve pushed my HTML skills as far as I want to, and no longer feel challenged by HTML development), and a decent SQL programmer, and a beginner at Oracle. So is it even likely that I’d get my dream career at this point, with only four months of experience?

Then again, there is also a part of me which worries that I’ve moved too slowly. I got a late start in this career, after all; I’m 32 years old now, and most of the people I’m working with are younger than I am, and more advanced in their own fields than I. Our Senior Oracle Programmer is just a bit older than I am, but has been programming for years. I suspect that as long as I’m in this field, I’m going to be playing a hectic game of catch up.

As you can probably tell, I’m dithering over my job again. When the new job you’re in isn’t where you’d hoped to be, it’s easy to forget that between where you start and where you want to end up, there is a road that you must travel; just as there is a period of less-than-perfect breathing between a severe asthma attack and a pair of well-functioning lungs.

Your lungs will clear. You will get that dream job.

I’ve only been with this company for four months, and I’ve started poking around to see what else might be out there for other jobs. A couple of weeks ago, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to be receiving training in Oracle or programming and that I might be stuck doing nothing but HTML in this job, it seemed like a good idea. But now that I’m able to converse intelligently with the corporate programmers about the Oracle database and even help out our local Unix guru with some Perl and Korn shell scripting, I’m starting to feel a bit better about where I’m going with this job. I’ve told my boss that I’m no longer interested in doing straight design and UI, and that I’d like to work on more back-end projects, including reporting and database development. We are working now on hiring a webmaster/developer who can focus on the UI and graphic design; but I personally had no idea how hard it would be to find qualified applicants for that sort of position.

I’m still not sure whether taking this job was the best move for my career, but perhaps it’s simply that slightly congested part of breathing that comes between a severe asthma attack and clear breathing… between a dead end job in administration and the job that I’m really looking for.

Because

Because she makes me laugh.

Because her smile lights up her entire face.

Because she laughs hysterically at little things.

Because she remains calm under pressure.

Because when she does lose her cool, she doesn’t take it out on me.

Because when she gets frustrated, she says things like, "Foodle".

Because I have fun watching her play with her cats.

Because she took me to the hospital when I got sick and stayed with me the whole time, smiling at me and making me laugh.

Because she’s comfortable sleeping on my shoulder while I read a book.

Because she encourages me when I’m feeling down.

Because she tells me I’m full of shit when I need to hear it.

Because she loves my family.

Because her family loves me, and I love them.

Because she puts up with me when I gripe about my job.

Because she convinced me of how important it is to have a red plastic monkey ride in my car with me (not that I needed convincing, of course).

Because I would trust her with my heart, my life, and my soul.

Because she knows that just because we have a good relationship, we should never stop working on making it better.

Because she’s one of the most generous and giving people I know, but she still knows how important it is receive gifts graciously, too.

Because the fact that the engagement ring I gave her is a family heirloom is much more important to her than how valuable it might be.

Because she knows she’s not perfect, but she likes herself anyway.

Because she thinks my friends are cool.

Because she likes classic horror movies.

Because she likes movies like Pay It Forward, too.

Because she jokes with me on AOL Instant Messenger.

Because she’s goofy and silly and serious and mature.

Because when I proposed to her, she asked me if I really liked the plans she had chosen for the house, or if I wanted to choose out a new set of plans with her.

Because she’s intelligent and opinionated, and isn’t afraid to show it.

Because she’s my best friend.

Because I could never imagine being happy with anyone else.

Because she tells me she’s the luckiest woman in the world.

Because I know that I’m the luckiest man in the world.

Because she brings out the very best in me, and inspires me to be a better person.

Because the first time I ever saw her, I knew that she was the woman I wanted to marry.

Because the feeling that I had the first time I kissed her has yet to fade away.

Just because.