1 April 2004 Thursday ... Yea OfficeTeam! I’ve got a job! Second step: accomplished. ... Fortunately, I’ll be paid weekly at a higher rate, so by my figures, I will be able to pay back Step One, the rental loans. ... I’m really jazzed about this A+ class I just found out about! I walked up there last night and it’s an even better deal than I thought. The registration is paltry. They have a full lab there w/ PC carcasses ready to go. They even do Network + prep, at least a li...

Job search. I’m getting a late start on the Mission To Reseda; hopefully a good showing here will assuage my guilt over getting out late. :> Actually, I knew I should not have played Empire late last night. Or at least walked away from the game I began. Though I began it just to chill out. I’d just finished, what - not quite a third of “Loosely Coupled.” I’m enjoying that book immensely! I love it! I’m jazzed by the possibilities in it.

Is there life after 30? Is there life before it? *** ... The baboon upstairs is moving around much earlier than his typical appointment with consciousness. I can tell, of course, because I’m hearing the very muted depth-charge impressions of his stamping meat-pads from the ceiling. It’s as if he’s acting out his typical incontinent hysterics but just can’t put his heart into it. .... Give me anything - but time. Who can give that? Its chosen. Mr. Pellet tried to teach u...

I read yesterday a promo piece in my email about a couple of IT guys who specialize in computer operations outsourcing. Incredible breadth of services they provide: web hosting, database creation... lotsa buzzwords for business... I’ve got fantastic hours at this job, I’ll say that much about it, I LOVE having the time to myself to write before the day begins. I.T. is a biz where I’d have to move with the customer. If I’m willing to put with this present nonsense for its fantastic hours, t...

[For the collected journal entries for this period read, “this job is worse than I thought, here are reasons n, n+1, n+2 ... for any positive integer n as to why it can’t be as bad as it seems, I’m now going to talk about my exit strategies and various other emotionally leavening topics.”] [There, that was much quicker!]

Highlights: First day of work today. Bill feels pangs of unease, deals with it. Although I’d set the alarm clock for 6:30 am, I was awake at 5:17. Pretty refreshed, too. Dreamt a lot last night, but unusually, I can’t recall anything specific. Yesterday opened kind of dark and overcast but rapidly got warmer and brighter. Your typical hazy-milk blue overhead by the time I got to wander in the ritzy-clapboard construction of the neighborhoods bordering the uncaring expressway by th...

Orientation today at this telefundraising outfit. I’m too keyed up to be tired, even though the baboon upstairs had some sort of parasite infection and was bouncing around. All freaking night long. What is that monkey’s problem? ... I’m a bit out of it this morning. Cold outside & overcast. A little dark, and there is a lot of moisture in the cold air. Rain later? Gack. But I found out (writing this in the lounge of the outfit I’ll be working at) there is a back rack in the ga...

Good dreams. Lots of agreeable people, palatial settings. Enjoyed a nice long walk around an estate which sported a couple of percolation ponds... I’m dimly recollecting something about driving a car. I much more clearly remember lounging about a really cracking estate with lots of smart, interesting people. We were all there for some purpose... This (waking) continuum’s morning is overcast. Cool outside. Really messy in here, in my room, I’m going to have to spend some time getting this roo...

Interview today. ... Pardon me, I’m enjoying the silence of the zoo, for sure, its not even 6:30 am. But I’m listening to El Dorado (ELO) ... you guessed it... “Boy Blue.” Okay, back to writing. ... Right now I’ve got the water running in the bathtub because it is a pleasant mask for the elephantine groaning of the guy next door. I mean, he yawns these great theatrical yawns. I take them to be sarcastic / passive aggressive / whatever -c’mon no one really yawns that loudly. ......

I now have $337 in the bank. $308 of that has got to go to rent for the next two weeks. Hopefully... I’ll get hired ASAP tomorrow & get moving. I may well end up a caller for non-profit orgs. Today I wrote a promising opening section for an Amy:Zerodancer story. She’s got a theatrical flair about her, part, just a sliver, of the prima donna. Queen of her own dance. I think from now on, I will turn in as early as I can. I really value waking up to create, rather than commute. I need ...

I just located a couple of Rumpole Of The Bailey audiotapes at the LA Main Library. John Mortimer yer my god. Some episodes I don’t think I’ve read or seen before; one of the tapes is read by *Robert Hardy*! ...but a note attached to it says the tapes are “corrupted.” That can’t mean anything good. Also have located a Bruce Sterling Shaper/Mechanist collection, all he’s ever written about that hypershocked future. Cool, sharp and alienated, like my mood. ... just now assayed the “corrup...

***************** Quick blopic: the American space program is not, and is not intended to be, an American space presence. ***************** That’s it. That’s enough spaceflight retrospectives for me. No more film-grainy beauty shots of Saturn Vs riding that drawn-out columnar cataclysm out of the atmosphere we’re all born in. No more narration of milestones met before my time, or of the names of the men who risked life and career to achieve them. The feeling is the kind of indigna...

**************************** Quick Blopic: There is no point in spending the $$ on public-access information, if there’s no commitment to using it for timely information. **************************** So we had this transit strike over October – November 2003 here in LA (The MTA bus system). Wouldn’t you know it, I’d moved to downtown L.A. just a few months earlier. “Your mission, should you decide you need to pay the rent, is to get to your temp assignment, through alternate means. Tha...

Blog! Marketers must be gnashing their teeth. It’s like a wildly popular SUV named the “Treacle” or maybe the “Cytoblast”. It’s actually kind of curious when you think about it: how can such a homely collision of an oral plosive with an interrupted cry of pain come to represent such a wildly popular Internet development? Grind them pearlies, Ms. Marketer. Dr. Suzuki, in his commentaries on Zen, instructs that the path to enlightenment is one of creative destruction. For corroboration, h...

Hmm. Smart tags This could be just the thing I’m looking for. These beasts are a benefit of the autocorrect capabilities of Microsoft Office. When the program recognizes certain words, such as names which match your contact list in Outlook, it will pop up a discrete little button which will permit you to, say, schedule a meeting with that person, or take other actions. Right now they are of interest because I have to reconcile a lot of information at my job. Specifically, I work at a...