doubting thom

I mean, even my car tires get screwed more often than I do. ba da bing.

Apparently, though, it’s all that yummy self-loving and the webcam days of my youth… ok, and the naked gay squaredancing (no, I’m not kidding) and associated hot tubbing didn’t help my score either.

Was taking this, apparently, even as Gene was posting his results; I also came across it today on digital flotsam as well as earlier this week in The Ferrett’s LiveJournal (turns out that the Ferrett, the perpetrator of this version of the Purity Test, is a friend of my friend Sheldon).

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Ok. It’s been a rough week, work-wise, and tonight and the weekend weren’t looking particularly promising either. The planned upgrades to the multimedia labs ran into a number of snags and required a lot more time and effort than we expected. The number of projects I’m being asked to do just keeps mounting, but the constant interruptions by staff wanting answers to questions or decisions made for them–combined with the fact that we’re short two people in the main office and I seem to be the one who most often ends up getting stuck answering the phones and dealing with walk-in clients when the administrative assistant goes to lunch or on errands–leaves me feeling like I’m just spinning my wheels, and accomplishing little.

Normally I wouldn’t have to work evenings or weekends–one nice tradeoff for the relatively poor civil servant’s salary–but because one of my responsibilities is the oversight of the multimedia training labs, it’s almost impossible to be permitted to schedule any necessary maintenance activities during hours that the students are on site. So, in order to move our audio and video servers from within the labs, where we’ve been maintaining and servicing them, to the IT’s central server room, where there will be better security and cleaner power, among other benefits, we had to schedule time over the weekend to do so.

We had planned to start this evening, and brought in the consultant who originally installed and still services the lab equipment. We’ve been planning this for months (it’s been rescheduled multiple times for various reasons). We worked with the IT staff to draw up schematics, to make room for our racks, to add additional power, etc. We asked them for information–and went back several times to clarify–about the connections (and therefore the cables and connectors we would need) in the new server room as opposed to those in the current server location. We got the information in writing.

The consultant arrived, and we took him down to the server room; he discovered right away that the type of connector they’d told us we needed, and that we’d asked him to bring, was not, in fact, what was being used. So we’re paying big bucks to fly this guy in, to pay for the cabling and labor, and our IT department has given us the wrong information.

So the consultant and my lab manager found a place in Gaithersburg that had the cables and that was still open at 5:00 on Friday evening (and they were about to close). We charged the cables to the credit card, and they said they’d leave them in a box outside the store; so the two of them are driving to Gaithersburg, during rush hour, to pick up the cables. There was no point in me sticking around, so I came on home and gave them instructions to call me there when they’re on their way back.

Halfway home I started hearing a sound from outside the car: one of those kind of rhythmic sounds you hear when a tire is flat or going flat or has something hitting it, or when you’re driving on a grooved road, with that telling periodicity of the sound. I pulled the car over, got out and casually examined all the tires, which seemed fine. I got back in the car, and drove home, continuing to hear that sound, but not experiencing any other symptoms.

In the garage at home, I took another look at the tires and they still all seemed fine. Then I noticed a protrusion from the treads of the right rear passenger side tire; it looked less like a nail than like a large nut and bolt, the bottom of the nut being flush with the tire’s surface, with the rest of it extending maybe a quarter of an inch above the tire. The tire still wasn’t visibly going flat, but from the size of the nut it seems pretty clear that there’s a pretty large metallic object penetrating the tire.

I just do not have the energy to deal with a flat tire right now. The rain has stopped for now, but the forecast is for continued rain and thunderstorms tonight and tomorrow. And to add insult to injury, this is the one tire still remaining from the original four when I got the car new five years ago; I’ve already had to replace the other three after two punctures and a blowout. Of course it couldn’t have been one of those three to get punctured; after all, they’re still under warranty from NTB. No, my fucking negative karma requires that the most expensive, least convenient possibility hold sway. I am the avatar of Bad Luck Schleprock, a Bussard collector of antiluck particles, a Charlie Brown clotheslined by Lucy and her football of life–hopefully and stupidly continuing to think that this time she’ll hold that ball steady, and I’ll give it a good kick. Yet here I am, flat on my back again.

And I’d been having a couple of really good weeks. Now, though, I’m starting to see flashes in my inner peripheral vision of a nascent apathetic depression.

Geez…. what a whiner.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better (or is that worse?):

On today’s episode of “Those Wacky Halliburtons,” the AP reports [washingtonpost.com] in the Washington Post that a subsidiary of the company paid $2.4 million in bribes to a Nigerian tax official, in order to get favorable tax treatment.

The company may now owe as much as $5 million in back taxes to the Nigerian government. But I’m sure this will be no problem; they can just pull it from the lucrative contract they recently were given, in a non-competitive process, by the Army Corps of Engineers–not that there was anything improper about just handing over that contract to the vice president’s former company–to manage the Iraqi oil industry.

Another pretty mundane and fairly easily interpreted dream: Alex is definitely on my mind, as he (or some other cat most likely representing him) seems to be appearing nightly, often around the issue of escaping (and one of his habits is to run out into the hallway whenever I open the door). The appearance of the MINI Cooper also is not surprising, given that I’ve done nothing to remedy my current car problems (ref. velleity), yet continue to experience a fair amount of anxiety over it. And Roger and Lee are the two non-work friends with whom I interact most frequently.

I was living in the townhouse in Old Town, Alexandria, that in the waking world my ex–Hal–and I had rented when we first moved to the DC area back in 1987. But my roommates in the dream were Roger and Daniel, who until recently were my avatar’s roommates in The Sims Online. Daniel was offstage in the dream: at one point I knew that he was in the shower and getting ready to leave for work, but I never actually saw him.

Lee was over visiting, and he and I were in the backyard. We went out the back gate and were looking at the trash and junk that all the neighbors on the block had put into the alley. We decided to go back in the house, but we walked the wrong way down the alley, getting about halfway down the alley before realizing. As we turned to come back, we saw a brand-new MINI Cooper (one of the two cars I’m leaning towards, at the moment, to replace my Saab in real life) parked at one of the neighbor’s houses, so we went over to look at it. Lee told me he also was thinking about getting a MINI, but that he didn’t think he could afford it.

We then turned back toward the house, and had to force open the back gate, which now was overgrown with vines. The back door of the townhouse was open, and Roger was preparing to leave for work, and he told me that Daniel was showering in preparation for work himself. Roger told me that he’d let Alex out into the backyard, which then panicked me, because we hadn’t seen him when we’d come in, and I started to worry that he might have gone out through the gate into the alley after we came in.

And then the alarm rang, and I woke up. Alex, realizing I was awake, jumped up and started headbutting me before finally settling down next to me… though when the snooze alarm went off nine minutes later, as it always does, he jumped up as though he were surprised, as he always does, and down to the floor.

One of my very favorite singer-songwriters, Jonatha Brooke, was featured on the “Live in Studio 4A” segment of NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday. Interestingly, I missed this segment yesterday, but was listening to Jonatha’s CDs last night, before I even knew that she had been in town and in the NPR studios.

Jonatha performed a number of her solo works–including “War,” a song about the media circus of the first Gulf War, written in 1991 but recently recorded due to its very timely subject matter (the MP3 is downloadable from Brooke’s site)–as well as songs from her time as part of The Story, a folk duo with Jennifer Kimball. Audio clips and a RealMedia video clip from the segment are available on the site.

Her latest album, Steady Pull, was released in 2001.

A story in today’s Houston Chronicle [HoustonChronicle.com] reports that the Texas House yesterday approved by a vote of 132-4 “a bill that would require [emphasis mine] public school students to pledge allegiance to the American and Texas flags each day and observe a minute of silent reflection.” This replaces a previous law that allowed local school districts the option of offering a period of silence and reciting the pledge. Governor Rick Perry is reported to be supportive of the new stricter measure, and is expected to sign it into law.

The bill was sponsored by Dan Branch (R-Dallas) who said the bill would have a positive impact on schoolchildren by emphasizing patriotism. The sponsor of the Senate version, Jeff Wentworth (R-San Antonio) stated, “I believe it is a citizen’s responsibility, especially in the greatest nation on Earth … that we train our young students to be loyal to our country.”

Required oaths? Mandated daily public restatements of loyalty? This just chills me to the marrow.

Lunchtime now, and details are getting hazier so here’s a broad recollection of the dream I was having when I awoke this morning:

I was reading a book about a series of five murders. At the same time, there seemed to be a copycat crime matching the first murder in the book. For some reason, I was standing in a field–corn, or wheat, or some other grain–next to a dirt road; a sports car, driven by a large Black woman, stopped and picked me up, and drove me to what was at first a deserted old house but which, at some point, became a group of rooms in the basement of the church from my youth–classrooms, social hall, kitchen and toilets.

When I first arrived at the house, I was exploring the rooms, many of which appeared to be small broom closets, but often with hidden doors to even smaller electrical closets.

I came downstairs into what was now the church social hall, where the driver of the sports car that had brought me here tried to kill me; at the same time, she was completely non-chalant and very cordial, almost apologetic. I avoided the attempt, and she said that she would leave me for the final murder of the book and that I’d have to watch the other three (since the first had already occurred) die first.

At that point, the director of my agency–a Foreign Service ambassador–walked into the social hall, and was knifed by the killer. The ambassador’s spirit separated from her body as her body fell to the floor; her spirit didn’t realize that she was dead, though, and came over and began talking to me.

The room now suddenly but unsurprisingly (in that way that things just happen in dreams) was full of people–mostly my family and people I knew from the church–sitting at all the tables, having a potluck supper. The amassador’s spirit was still talking to me, as was another woman I didn’t recognize, but no one else seemed to see or hear either of them. Then there were loud screams coming from one of the classrooms, where some of the attendees had been sitting having their dinner: a cabinet had opened, and a dead body–the third victim and apparently the body belonging to the other woman talking to me–had fallen face forward into a plate of food at the table.

And then I woke up.

Ok… this spam that just arrived in my inbox is actually rather amusing:

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audblog audio post

My trial audblog audio post, which I recorded as a result of having heard Ari Shapiro’s segment on Morning Edition earlier today.

I’m not sure that this is something I would use on a regular basis, though the one-minute vacation project at the quiet american is certainly an intriguing use of audio blogging.

Last night I submitted pictures of myself at four and at forty to the web project When I Was Little, and they were posted there this morning. One of my co-workers came by to tell me that he and his wife–another co-worker–had seen the link to the site from Yahoo! Picks, and saw my pix there this morning as well.

This was an odd experience; given the sheer volume of information on the web, I really didn’t think it likely that someone from work would come across that site, especially not within just a couple of hours of my pictures having been added to it. I’m not bothered by the two of them specifically having come across the site (Tim and Michelle are two of the coolest people at work). After all, I’ve had a presence on the web since 1994. I’ve often used a nickname (elflad), but it was never meant as a shield behind which to hide in anonymity, and I was usually pretty readily identifiable by the other personal data I shared. Lots of information from previous jobs and USENET postings, among other resources, certainly are available by googling me (and I’ve done my share of googling the people who come into my own life). In 1995 this issue even came up during a job interview, when the VP for the department into which I was applying (and I did get the job) asked me why I would be so open about myself (and at the time I assumed he meant specifically the acknowledgement in my site of my sexual orientation) in such a public forum.

I never really thought much about it before, but recently I’ve noticed this and other similar themes being discussed in a number of venues. In one blog I read the other day, the author suggested that nicknames/aliases were a vestige of the past, and that he would begin using his real name; I’ve recently begun doing the same here on my journal, and somewhat less consistently when I comment on others (old habits are hard to break). On a local DC shared blog, as a counter-example, one contributor has asked that his real name be removed and a pseudonym used instead, as he is currently applying for a job and thinks he may be googled.

I’ve always thought myself of the opinion that any employer or prospective employer who would choose to terminate my employment or not hire me because of something I’ve written online, isn’t an organization whose values I share or with whom I’d want to work anyway. But I do find a twinge of something like concern or doubt now that folks at my current workplace–given some of the comments I’ve made about the environment and even some of my co-workers–have come across those pix, which include a link back here to my journal. I know that those pix already have been shared with other co-workers, so it wouldn’t be surprising if some of them ended up reading these entries. It’s certainly possible, then, for these recorded thoughts–all of which I stand behind as truly representing some of my feelings at the time, though they’re obviously purely subjective, rarely tell the full story, and are not always flattering, even to myself, perhaps most especially to myself–to end up in front of my peers or my supervisor.

I would never have worried about this at any of the places I’ve worked in the past–dot-coms, public television, small friendly not-for-profits–but I do find myself thinking that the federal government just isn’t as tolerant a working environment. It’s a sentiment I already find myself wrestling with on a day-to-day basis as I continue to bump up against bureaucracy, regulations, tradition and a degree of social conservatism (or perhaps just privacy) I’d not experienced before. I noted to Sheldon and Lisa last night that I’ve never worked someplace before where I didn’t develop strong social relationships with at least a few of my co-workers; I’ve been here for nine months, and have only developed one friendship (and a couple of acquaintances that could conceivably become friends), and have only been out of the office for lunch with colleagues four times, and three of those were formally organized as going-away luncheons.

I’m still struggling with whether this job is the right fit for me. I’m pretty sure I’m accomplishing things here, but I don’t know if I can be happy here over the long haul… and my bureau and agency often are said to be the best places within the federal government.