Meanderings: February 15, 2000

Tuesday,
February 15, 2000

Yet another late night -- only eleven hours. I should be grateful, right?

Bah! I wave my paw.

Here I am, a freshly minted product manager (yes, our proprietary web-based educational package is all mine now, and I'm going back to the original name, WINE -- When I Need Education -- because I like the idea of a logo that looks like a wine bottle label, so there. And yes, I KNOW it's simplistic, but I do have to work within corporate guidelines -- if it was me, I'd fill the letters with grapes, but it has to be something easily replicated by TSB), and I'm slaving away like a braindead slacker the night before a final exam. By the time I get home, I have just enough time to trawl through the kitchen and clean it, grab something fast to eat for dinner since Lyndon's been home for yonks and has already eaten, and wait for Tina or him to get off the bloody phone so that I can grab my mail. Our phone bills are the size of emerging countries, all thanks to the miracle of IRC. In a way, I can't wait to get back to the States because there will be things to do there, so Lyndon won't be spending the entire night on IRC out of sheer boredom.

In the meantime, however, I have to wait until one of them decides to give the keyboard a rest before I can hop on and grab my mail and news. I timed it once -- with 2 mail/news runs and an FTP upload of these pages to io.com, I spend about 35-45 minutes a night on-line. As opposed to my beloved and my beloved's sister, neither of whom have a problem with the idea of staying on for 3-4 hours at a time. I mean, shit. I used to IRC occasionally when we were in Holland, basically because I was lonely as hell and it was a way to get in touch with some of the folks from sff.net or my family real-time. Because of the time difference, however, this took place around 3:00 AM EST, for a couple of hours (in the end, IRC is just too damn slow and fiddly to keep my interest) and I did it maybe twice a month. I know perfectly well that Tina's doing it during the day, and Lyndon takes over from about 9:00 PM onwards. If our next quarterly phone bill is below 10,000 SEK, I'll be shocked out of my boots.

Okay, I know I'm grumping. I think I'm just tired -- last weekend was supposed to be spent relaxing and recovering from a week in London, not spent in the office feverishly slapping together HTML layouts. And I still have four days before the weekend and ten days before we get paid again, and the Materials Data layouts and draft WINE presentation have to be ready by Friday, and I think I'm developing RSI in my right hand because the heel of it feels like someone's been whacking it with a ballpeen hammer, and I still don't have the faintest idea where we're going or what we're doing this summer.

I also really, REALLY shouldn't read anything by Harlan Ellison during times like these. Personality quirks aside, he's a brilliant writer, knows how to slice for the gut, but. . .well, I bought the compendium DREAMS WITH SHARP TEETH back at NASFic, and I've been reading it before I go to bed.

Not a good idea. Like I said, Ellison's brilliant, just too good for words. He's also misanthropic, extremely cynical, confident that the human race is too stupid and screwed up to survive, and I come away from his stories feeling like someone's beaten me over the head with a pillowcase stuffed with serotonin inhibitors. I know he writes with the avowed purpose to grab the reader by the short hairs and make them think, to affect them like they've never been affected before. All well and good. But Harlan's a curmudgeon's curmudgeon, and there's only so much saturnine, cynical prose this girl can be affected with in a single sitting without turning into Sylvia Plath.

Time for something mindless and perky. I wonder if Prickly Heat is on Sky One tonight. . .

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