Diary of a Network Geek

I don’t know what I was thinking.

Sunday, after having gotten in from the airport and while I was doing laundry, alone in my big, empty house with not even my codependant dog to keep me company, I did something foolish.  I posted on Craigslist.com.  I blame Amber, a fellow blogger, for posting about her “social experiment”.   It got me thinking, you see.  I used to read Craigslist, on occasion, for laughs, and I always found myself pouring over the “Missed Connections” postings.  Not that I ever really thought anyone would talk about me, per se, but I enjoyed the…  Well, the romance of the idea that two people might connect this way.  And, too, there was the thought that maybe I’d be able to help someone who was looking for a long-lost sibling or something.

That was what got me.  The searching for those who we’ve lost.  I shudder to think how long the idea of this had been running around inside my head, but Sunday afternoon, it finally came out.  I posted looking for a long, lost college sweetheart.  The One Who Got Away.  Last I’d heard, she was in San Francisco working as a counsellor of some kind, so I posted there.  I did it as a lark, really.  I mean, in a city that large, even with a name as unusual as hers, I never thought I’d find her.
But, I did.

Now, suddenly, I find myself at a loss for words.  It’s been nearly 20 years since I saw her and almost as long since I’ve spoken to her or written her.  What do I say?  Do I even follow through at all?  Will she think I’m some kind of crazy stalker guy?  Hell, will she even remember me?  After all, it was only a couple of months back in college. It can’t possibly mean that much to her.  It shouldn’t mean so much to me any more.
But, the truth is, I never stopped thinking about her.  After every failed relationship since then, I’ve thought of her.  After every bad date, I thought of her.  Every time my failing marriage coughed a little more blood, I thought of her.   But, will she remember me the same way?  Will she remember me at all?

My hands sweat at the thought of it.
Oh, God, I have no idea what to do with this now…

Oh, yeah, before I forget, my mother knows about this blog now.  I’m not sure that she’s actually read it, yet, but she knows where it is.  She looked and sounded so hurt when I told her that my brother read it, but that I hadn’t given her the link that I just had to give in.  So, let’s keep the language clean, ladies! 😉

I finished A Dirty Job : A Novel by Christopther Moore the other day.

Now, if you’ve never read anything by Christopher Moore, you simply must. I reccomend starting with Practical Demon Keeping. It was his earliest work, if I recall correctly, and what I started reading. I do not reccomend this lightly. There are tonnes of “in jokes” that refer back to his earlier writing that yo won’t get if you start with A Dirty Job. Other than that, though, I cannot say enough about how wonderful this book is. Truly, as he gets older, Moore’s writing gets better and better.

The book opens with the birth of Sophie Asher, an event that sends her father, Charlie, into quite a state. This emotional whirlwind is not improved by his wife’s death or the mysterious stranger in the lime-green suit that only Charlie can see hovering over his wife’s death bed. What’s more, having a somewhat self-involved, slightly closeted lesbian sister who meddles a bit too much probably didn’t improve things much for poor Charlie, either. Certainly, getting his copy of the Great Big Book of Death redirected out of his mail by an employee didn’t help one bit, either. Turns out, old Charlie is a Death Merchant and, according to Minty Fresh, the man in the lime-green suit, his “job” is to collect soul containers from the recently deceased and pass them on to their new homes, thus aiding the transmigration of souls and holding back the forces of darkness.
Believe it or not, this book is a relatively light-hearted comedic romp through a strange and dark San Francisco that touches on the topics of death, life and everything inbetween along the way. As in one of his earlier books, Lamb, Moore handles some delicate ideas surrounding spirituality with grace and skill and wit.  In spite of being about a rather heavy and potentially “dark” subject (eg. Death), Moore manages to spin a fun yarn filled with magic, mystery and delight.

In short, as with all of his work that I’ve read, I highly reccomend A Dirty Job : A Novel by Christopther Moore.  It’s brilliant work and a fun, breezy read that will have you looking for ways to make more time to read.  One warning, though, once you start reading Moore, you’ll want to read more.

Oh, I also read the inspirational book  A Better Way to Live : Og Mandino’s Own Personal Story of Success Featuring 17 Rules to Live By, which was a fairly good, if short read.  Given a choice, go with the Moore books.

Currently, I’m reading Angels & Demons because, well, because I have it, and it was reccomended to me by several people.  Besides, all this nice weather demands fiction that’s fun, not non-fiction that’s going to teach me something.

This is not what I intended to write.
Really, it’s not, though I’d imagine my ex-wife will think I planned it just for her. I didn’t, but, then, she always was a paranoid narcissist. And, I know I’ve been writing about her a lot lately, all I can say is that I hope it’s because I feel detached enough from her that I can let that part of my past go and out. Anyway, a recent post on another blog sort of hit me where I live, though not for the reasons one might think. You see, my ex-wife left me twice. The last time, thankfully, for good, but the first time was years ago, before she was my wife.
I was living in Chicago at the time, in a suburb named Mount Prospect. She and I had been involved, in the Bibilcal sense, for a little over a year. She’d left her second husband, though not divorced him, and was lonely. I had obligations to my Masonic Lodge that predated her by several years. In fact, I was in position for a fairly rare opportunity to lead the Lodge, as Master, for a year at a very young age. She, however, wanted me to drop everything and move down to Texas for her. Obviously, being who I am, I told her I couldn’t do that and, if what we had meant anything, she could wait another year. After all, I figured it would be for a lifetime once I got there. What happened next should have been a red flag to me.
She started getting extra friendly with a guy from work. She and her daughter went to the beach with him and his daughter. They ate lunch together and more. It didn’t take long for the bells and whistles to go off for me. I asked her to stop seeing him and she gave me the old line about needing to get out and have friends. Friends, sure, but this guy was after a whole lot more than that and I told her so. She told me that I was just being controlling and jealous. That escalated until, finally, I was given the boot because I just was holding on “too tightly” and being “too controlling and jealous”. Before we were done, I told her exactly what he was after and how he’d get it. I knew because, in college, I’d seen or tried to do the same thing.
Fast forward about six weeks. I’ve become the Master of my Lodge and I’m already swamped with work. Pile on all the changes that were going on at my job, which made me the head network and support “go to” guy and I hardly had time to eat, much less check phone messages or e-mail. One Saturday night, I go over to my parents to eat and do laundry, as I often did. Since I was single and had nothing better to do, I stayed later than I intended and was too tired to check e-mail when I got home. So, I let it go until the morning. I don’t know how many e-mails I had from my ex-wife, but, let’s just say, more than one. And, since this was back in the days when everyone still used modems, when I got done checking e-mail, I had phone messages waiting for me. Again, more than one. More than one tear-soaked, blubbering, snot-bubble-blowing, barely coherent phone message, begging me to take her back. Oh, the litany of how I’d been right and how she’d been wrong was long and flowery and moving. And, like the fool I was, I took her back.
Later, I found out she’d left this “prize” because he’d been with prostitutes, was a self-confessed pedophile and had allegedly forced himself on her sexually. I often wonder if she’d have come back to me if he’d been less messed up. Would it have been such a mistake on her part? Or, would I have been, as I am to her now, Satan incarnate. See, the irony is, not long after she was promising to love me forever and do anything to make the relationship work, she was also telling me that she wasn’t comfortable with seeing me right away, either. She was wrong, she claimed, but she had to put limits and restrictions on our relationship so that it was “safe” for her. Yeah, that was red flag number two.
But, no, I still turned a blind eye to that and we met in San Francisco during the Folsom Street Fair to “make up”. And, so we did. Now, flash forward to this time last year, when that all played out again, the only way it could have. Only this time, if she comes back, I’m calling the police to have her removed from my property.

I try not to think too much about what my life would be like if I’d only held firm back in the Summer of ’97 . But, I do still wonder sometimes. Would I be happier than I am? Would I be better off? Well, maybe I would and maybe not. I’d like to say that I’m older and wiser now, but, mainly, I’m just older and not wise at all. I get like that at this time of year. The new year is approaching and so is my birthday. I find myself looking at where I am and how I got here. It’s never where I thought I’d be and the path is never the one I would have chosen, but I keep plodding on.
What else is there to do?

Recent events have inspired a new category.
For those few of you who are loyal readers, you may notice that I have added a new category today: Calamity, Cataclysm, and Catastrophe. This is primarily a response to Hurrican Rita, of course, but I wanted a more general category than that. It is possible, after all, that I might move to some similarly endangered area, like, say San Francisco, and have to deal with earthquakes instead of hurricanes. Or, nuclear fallout. Or, invading aliens. Whatever. Something very, very bad, in any case. So, I wanted a general category for large scale bad things beyond my control. Not the occasional bump in the road, like a flat tire or crashed PC, but something of a grander scale, like hurricanes, earthquakes, crashed servers, and other such really big, very bad things.
We’ll see how long I hold to that level of destruction for this category, though. I do get so dramatic.

There’s a frightening, new people search engine in beta.
It’s called ZabaSearch, which is Greek for something. Frankly, I don’t care what it’s Greek for, but this thing rocks! I don’t know how long it will be free or in beta, but it’s frighteningly good. I always use certain people to search on as a test of the people searcher. Myself, of course, and a few old friends. And, yes, I have to admit it, an old girlfriend from college or two. But, here’s the thing. None of the other people finders have ever actually found some of these people. Until now.
So, now I’ve found an old flame. Someone that I would think about when relationships would get rocky. When I’d be sad and lonely, I’d find myself wondering what she was doing and who she was with. Now, I’ve found her. And, yes, I’m pretty sure it’s her because she has an unusual name and the address is in the general area where I heard from her last. How many “Gaylenes” can there be? Even in San Francisco?
So, I’ve found the girl I always thought of as “the one that got away”. Do I call her or not?

Here’s one I’ve never heard of before.

According to this article on Wired News, there’s a government program designed to “retrain” people to be competitive with H1B visa holders. The idea being to give US Citizens skills that make them competitive with imported skilled workers. Great idea, right? Yeah, only I’ve never heard of it before and now they’re trying to get rid of it!
The article is a little confusing, frankly, about who benefits from the program, H1B holders or people training to compete with them, but the end result seemed to be more US Citizens with viable skills and careers. Frankly, I’m in favor of any program that helps retrain American workers and keep them viable in the workforce. And, based on this quote:

“It would kill a program that mitigates the need for foreign workers by training U.S. citizens,” said Mike Wilson, chief executive of the Bay Area Technology Education Collaborative, which runs training programs in the greater San Francisco area. “That’s a hard one to swallow.”

It sounds like that’s just what this program is designed to do. Might be something to talk to your Congressman about, eh?