doubting thom

Today (ok, really, Friday… with my current sleep and waking schedule I tend to think of days as running from noon to noon rather than from midnight to midnight) I had to place an order for a new computer monitor.
A couple of weeks ago my current monitor, which has performed nearly perfectly for several years, just suddenly shut itself off while I was in the middle of working on something — in fact, I’d been continually working at the computer nonstop for many, many hours (so it wasn’t a result of the power settings option to turn the monitor off during non-use). The power switch was operational; if you’d press it, the little green LED would light, but there’d be no solenoid-like click or degaussing sparking hum. If you’d depress it, the green light would fade to amber, as normal, then off.
After a few hours, I tried it again, and the monitor clicked, sparked, hummed and the screen lit back up. And all was good with the world.
A few weeks go by with no problems. Then two nights ago, zap… it happens again. Same symptoms, same solution: wait a while, then turn it back on. But this time, it doesn’t stay on very long before doing it again. It’s been doing this off and on, now, for the past two days. It does seem to be related to the temperature of the monitor; the room where the computer is located tends to be the warmest in the house anyway; even though its a very large room, it only has one a/c duct (and while I haven’t been running the a/c yet this year, that room doesn’t cool as well as the rest of the house), one window (so there’s little to no cross-ventilation), and it houses the computer, peripherals, 19″ monitor, stereo system, and large-screen TV, so there’s more heat generated there as well. I discovered that if I turned the light next to the computer to its lowest setting, the monitor would become ready again more quickly, but extended use would eventually cause it to shut itself down regardless.
A search online uncovered some postings from other owners of this model noting the same problem, though in some cases this was happening to them well within the warranty period and even with the replacements sent to them by the manufacturer. So this seems to be a documented problem for this model; I’ve just been lucky that I’ve been using it for at least three to four years with no previous symptoms.
Since the prognosis seemed to be that the symptoms would only worsen in frequency and length, I decided to go ahead and order another monitor; not my top choice for how to spend my dwindling resources, but the computer is essential to the job hunt as well as to my own emotional well-being, and even 19″ monitors now are reasonably priced and affordable. But now I have to wait several days for the new monitor to arrive. So tonight, after multiple occasions of having to turn the monitor off, wait an hour or so, try it again, work a bit, rinse and repeat, I decided to try an experiment. I brought out my small electric fan, set it up on the desk pointed at the top and back of the monitor where I could feel the heat most intensely, and turned it on. Since then I’ve been working longer without a cessation of monitor activity longer than I’ve managed all day, so this may be a reasonable temporary assist, knock on wood.

Wednesday night I had a mostly very frustrating meeting at church, though with some positive outcomes. The Rainbow Cabinet, a group of six gay men and lesbians appointed by one of the ministers to help her better understand and address our issues, was scheduled to meet from 7 to 8, and then at 8 facilitate an open meeting of the broader GLBT community from the church to plan social and worship activities for June, which is Pride Month.
I arrived at 7 sharp to find only the minister in the meeting room. We waited… and finally at 7:30 one of the other members showed up. Another arrived at 7:45, and another right before 8:00. Two of the members — both of whom had told me less than a week earlier that they’d be there, and including the group’s convener — never showed at all, and hadn’t contacted anyone to say as much. And only one additional person showed up at 8 for the planning meeting.
So the evening was largely a bust. We didn’t have the critical mass needed, or specific information that the two absentee cabinet members had gathered, to plan any social activities, or any Pride weekend events or group presence at the Pride Festival. Those of us present did manage to do some brainstorming about the Pride Month worship service, though, including generating some potential themes, activities and readings, and eliciting some volunteers to participate in the chorus and in the service itself.
But the wider issue of non-participation has been bothering me over the past few months. We only reinvented the church’s GLBT group (formerly called the Gay Alliance, now called the Rainbow Ministry) over the end of last year, with our first official events and activities in January of this year. We did so on the basis of some well-attended town meetings, and the expression of a lot of interest and support. Yet since then, it’s been the same two or three of us organizing every event, setting up and cleaning up; staffing the information table every week; participating in service activities; and honoring our commitments to other groups. This frustrates me, because I have other responsibilities and interests within the church, and my interests even within the GLBT community are more toward informing the worship service and educating the membership about sexual orientation issues than in organizing social activities. Granted, these events are well-attended, so there is some interest among the membership in socializing, as long as someone else is doing the work to make it possible.
OK, this rant has gone on long enough. There are certainly always extenuating circumstances, and as summer approaches it’s always more difficult to find people to take on responsibilities. So I just need to learn how better to let go; I’ll put my energy into the issues more important to me, and either someone will pick up the things I choose to let go, or we’ll live without them.

Last Thursday I posted my thoughts about my dad’s kidney disease, his decision to consider a donation of a kidney from a family member, the rush to proceed once this decision was made, and my own concerns about the timing particularly as it relates to the uncertainty in my own life.

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I had my last dinner in a while with one of my best friends tonight. He and I first met a few years back when he came on-board as a project manager at the trade association where I was managing web services. Our initial relationship was a rocky one; I found him a little insufferably arrogant and seemingly unconcerned about anything that didn’t specifically benefit his projects. I believe he was frustrated that I couldn’t always get to his needs as quickly as he’d like. Before long, though, we became very fast friends, despite our sometimes very different styles and political affiliations (though not necessarily differing political beliefs), and ten-year difference in our ages.
After I left the association and he followed a year later, we eventually ended up working together again. Interestingly, he was largely responsible for my landing my CTO position, and I in turn threw a lot of our outsourcing to his company, and eventually ended up hiring him full-time as director of business technology. In the end, he made out better than I did; when the CEO and board elected to lay off staff, they decided to keep experienced sales people. The tech and marketing departments were eliminated, but due to my friend’s background in sales, he was kept on. This did cause a short-term strain in our relationship, but we got past it.
He and his family had relocated to Georgia last summer, and he’s been telecommuting up here a few days every few weeks, so we’ve been able to continue to get together socially. A couple of weeks ago he treated me to a very nice dinner at a local restaurant (using a gift certificate he’d been given for some consulting he’d done), where we spent three hours discussing the nature, existence and qualities of free will and destiny, and how they interrelate (assisted, oddly, by only a single bottle of wine); sharing our lives and some pretty awesome desserts; and talking about a friend of his, living in Maine, he was trying to match up with me. Our time together is often cathartic for both of us: more than anyone else, I can sympathize with the conditions on his job and his relationship with his boss; I understand his professional aspirations and drive; he understands my feelings about my dad, having lost his to cancer just recently; etc.
A few days ago, though, he sent email asking if we could get together for our “last” supper. It turns out that the CEO has decided to cut costs even more by having my friend fly up and back on the same day every week, so that he’ll no longer have to purchase a hotel room (but rather have to put up with a 10-hour commute every Monday!). So we commisserated about the job over some great sushi. There’ll still be lunches, I suppose, on occasional Mondays. And it’s more of an incentive to make plans to get down to Georgia; I should anyway, since I’ve never yet seen the newest addition to his family — his first, born after they moved last year — in person.
But I’m still really going to miss our boys’ nights out.

Only a few days into this project, and I’ve already let an entire day — yesterday, Saturday — go by with nothing put to screen but a short-lived annoyance about being awakened by the telephone. I have no convenient excuse: I wasn’t out of town; I wasn’t off doing something else; heck, I didn’t even leave the house until 6:30pm. The truth is that I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at other blogs, reading articles about blogs, catching up on web design theory, finally coming to the realization that I didn’t go into this with any particularly clear goals.
Mainly, I guess I started doing this because:
1. I hadn’t challenged myself creatively in much too long a time, and felt like I was losing a sense of myself as a web designer.
2. I want to continue to be part of the web culture in a way that might make me feel like I had at the beginning.
3. I’ve been bored.
As far as items 1 and 2, back in 1994-96 when I started working online, just building web sites at all meant you were doing something new and creative. But eventually that pretty much came to an end for me professionally as I became a technical web manager, then a senior manager, and finally a CTO. Much of the fun, excitement, creativity and pure joy got lost along the way. At the beginning I was so caught up in those aspects of it that I couldn’t wait to come home and spend four or five hours a night working on my personal site even after having spent ten or twelve hours at work building professional sites. Later, though, after spending sixteen to eighteen hours at work managing budgets and people, approving other people’s code and design, but mostly just attending meeting after meeting after meeting, I no longer had the energy or even the faintest desire to play around on my own at home; I often just wanted to take my Prevacid, fall asleep and forget.
I’m no longer sure that I can even accurately call myself a “web designer”; while I’ve kept up to date as possible, at the very least through my reading, the state of the art has changed in ways that I haven’t had the luxury of time — or the endorsement or encouragement of the institution — to indulge or explore when working. And I’m definitely no longer a pioneer. One of my fears, in fact, about trying to start [a] blog[s] now is that I’m not sure there’s any topic I can cover, anything I can say, any structure I can provide, that hasn’t already been done, said or offered a dozen, a hundred, or a thousand times. So I no longer have a portfolio that demonstrates my native talent, creativity or intellectual independence. I can point to my many successes as a director and CTO at managing budgets, cutting costs, raising productivity, and managing projects, but none of those things make my pulse quicken or my intuitions flash.
So, I’ve boldly and mostly unknowingly managed somewhat paradoxically to over-qualify while simultaneously under-preparing myself for employment doing the things that have excited and thrilled me the most, and for which I am temperamentally probably most suited.
So this may turn out to be nothing more than a personal journal, and maybe it was begun and will be sustained — as and if it’s sustained — out of boredom. But perhaps that’s enough.

9:00 am. On a SATURDAY. I only went to bed three hours ago.

Stephen Lynch is a wickedly clever, musically talented, very adorably cute — oh, and absolutely demented — comedic musician based in New York. His songs poke fun at such topics as stalking, gerbiling (should that have one or two Ls?), hermaphrodism, gay friendships, the Special Olympics, mental illness, necrophilia and more! It’s the quite politically incorrect sort of thing that I should probably feel guilty about liking. Color me lowbrow for a cute guy with a sweet singing voice.
OK, so his web site sucks, and I mean like really, *really* sucks (yeah, yeah, look who’s talking and all that… but his is supposed to be a commercial web site, after all; mine’s just a more expensive version of a vanity plate). And he’s apparently straight. Maybe the two are related? Anyway, I forgive him both sins.
So… I caught just the last few minutes of his Comedy Central special months ago, and immediately went looking for his stuff. His mailing list announcements about his upcoming performances and the like sound and feel more like email from a real friend than from someone you saw on TV to whom you’re really just an address in a database. But I eat it up anyway.
So this evening he sends an email about a last-minute gig he got on NBC’s Late Friday show at 1:35am. I managed to catch it, but they only gave him five minutes, and he didn’t get to sing the complete versions of either of the two songs he performed (including one of my faves, “If I Were Gay…”). I was really bummed, because the opening act of the co-hosts and the comic following him were both really +boring +dumb -funny.
In his email he also reported that the half-hour Comedy Central special will be rebroadcast Friday, May 24 at 10:30pm Eastern and Pacific time. This time I’ve got to remember to tape it. He’s also got some northeast appearances the rest of this month, but nothing nearer DC than NYC, unfortunately.
[ADDENDUM 2003-04-23 09:26: I had read/heard that Stephen doesn’t want his lyrics published online, so I emailed to ask him about this. He emailed me back yesterday that he appreciated me asking, and that he would like to ask to have them removed. The lyrics are published in the CD notes, so it’s easy enough to get them by getting his CDs… which I highly recommend, as they’re very funny. So I’ve deleted the two comments that included lyrics, and will delete any future ones that include lyrics as well.]

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Angry Outburst Costs Rider (washingtonpost.com)
A wheelchair-bound rider of the DC Metro, after calling ahead of time to find out which elevators were out of service, got stuck in the underground system after two other elevators not reported as out of service also failed to work. In his frustration at failing to get assistance from the Metro employees, he twice shouted an obscenity. He got their attention… and a $25 fine from a Metro police officer.
Today’s paper follows up that the Metro Police Chief will dismiss the case, void the ticket, and refund the fine, after an outcry from the public and a chastisement from a Metro Board member.

Well, hard to believe I’ve nearly reached the ripe old age of 40, yet tonight was the first time I heard Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood performed; and me a Hahvahd-edumacated intelleckshual and all.
Really, though, what a beautiful, lyrical, funny, moving piece. And how often do you get to go to church to see such lovingly and cheerfully voiced lives filled with necrophilia, bigamy, pederasty, and adultery, just to start?
Our amateur theatre group did a really great job: 15 people playing 50+ roles, and they made every one of them unique, believable and memorable (though the accents were *all* over the map, and not just the maps around Greenwich Mean, either; I’m sure I heard an Aussie accent, and the gypsy, though voiced by a dear friend of mine, sounded Jamaican). And considering it took place in a church fellowship hall, the sound and lighting were quite good; the lighting especially really evoked the passing of night to dawn through day to dusk and back to night, as well as demarking the events inside the Sailor’s Arms and out.
So I’ll be seeing it again tomorrow night. And it’s just $5 for the play, dessert, and beverage, which I wouldn’t even have to pay since I’m helping out with it, but even an out-of-work dotcommer like me can afford that much.
Before the show, I asked what the next Chalice Theatre production will be, this coming fall, and was told that one of the members is pushing for Into the Woods, a particular favorite of mine. Then, after the show, I was struck by the similarity in the way both Thomas and Sondheim play with sound, language and rhythm…
Thomas: “… limping invisible down to the sloe black, slow, black, crow black fishing boat-bobbing sea.”
Sondheim: “Rooting through my rutabagas, raiding my arugula, ripping up my rampion, my champion, my favorite.” (ok, so it’s not the deepest of sentiments, but it was at hand, since I’ve got Into the Woods on my mind)

My body temperature is about 96.8°, almost two full degrees below the common wisdom of what human body temperature is, and one degree below the low end of the more typical range of 97.5° to 98.9°. I used to be secretly quite proud of this; I think that there were so many ways I knew I didn’t fit the idea of “normal” (smarter, shorter, thinner, gayer, etc. than the mythical average male) that even as a young child I began unusually to revel in my differences, in being unique.
I found out last month that my dad’s body temperature is around 97.6°, just at the lower end of the range. And I just read an article this morning noting that up to 5% of the population falls outside the typical range. So body temperature-wise, I’m no more special than those other millions of human beings. I was at least hoping for a percentile with a bunch of nines in it.