One week
Originally written Saturday 06.23.2001
I’ve been in Austin, TX for exactly one week. After rolling around town with Dana and Josh
it seems like I’ve done everything already. We saw the largest colony of mexican free
tailed bats last night and today we hit the crazy antique and vintage clothing stores on
south congress street. I’ve been to Emo’s to a show already and I’ve been to the giant
movie theatre that charges too much for tickets. I’ve gotten ice cream at the fun little
joint where we always went last summer. The bad part about being itinerant, living
somewhere, but, at the same time, not really living somewhere, is that one appreciates a
given local in and of itself and not really as a backdrop for life. Austin is a great town,
I like it very much. The music, the crazy, pretty eclectic culture, the laid back warmth,
its all great, but I still feel like a tourist. The only locals I ever come in contact with
are the ones who are taking my money from across a counter.
Work seems like it will be pretty cool. I think its better suited for me than last summer,
as its more software based. Still, I find that there is a great deal of information that I
don’t know. In school, we worked primarily with the SPARC architecture rather than intel
architecture, and though the assembly languages have similarities, there is a wealth of
information that I don’t entirely grasp. So, I’ve spent my first 3 days of real work
reading spec after spec and stepping through source file after source file. SMBIOS,
PCIBIOS, Intel System Programmer’s guide. These massive tomes would be impossible to read
in a summer, but I try to process as much relevent information as I can from them. The
problem is, I’m not entirely sure what is relevant. The hardest part about being a co-op is
the ambgiuties from my employers. When my job isn’t really strictly defined, I find it far
too easy to become overwhelmed by all the information that could be potentially pertainant.
I feel as if I should try to bring myself up to the same level as the veterans in a few
weeks. I need to get past my anxiety and talk to my manager and figure out exactly what I
should be learning right now rather than pawing about aimlessly.
One problem with the company where I work is that it seems relatively old, at least with
respect to the tech sector. I work around older people, in their 30s and 40s or foreign
nationals, neither of which shares much in common with me in terms of interests. I know,
someome somewhere is preparing a lesson in diversity for me, but sometimes what one realy
needs is just some common, comfortable, familiar ground when it comes to people. The
environment is just so different from the raucus, juvenile quality of the ISP where I spent
my freshman summer, or even the startup in Boston where I interviewed. We passed the Excite
building when we were hopping about the antique stores today. Its chic location, even if
contrived, seemed to still have worlds more soul than the sterile campus of my employer.
“It’s about the knowledge and the experience stupid”, I keep telling myself.
One week has made me realize how much of a liar I was in my last relationship. Well, not a
liar really I guess because I didn’t have anything to guage it against, but now I find
myself willing, no, not willing, but overwhelmingly eager to do all the things that I
dismissed before. No longer am I “crunched for time” or “without anything intersting to
write about”. Now I find myself scrawling letter after letter to my new girlfriend
realizing that there is nothing I would rather be doing than penning words that would
probably have made my old self nauseous with their dripping sentiment. Dripping sentiment.
That’s the hardest part. I like this girl a lot. More than any other girl I’ve ever known,
but I find that I am increasingly fearful that my words are inadequate in expressing how I
feel towards her. I certainly hope that my feelings are completely reciprocated, which I
think they are, and indeed that equality is what makes the relationship seem so comfortable.
But at the same time it is incredibly frightening. I know that words are so often just the
facade of those who do not truly live life or feel an emotion, but I always find myself
trying to communicate the way I feel about dating this girl with words. And, I never feel
as though I’ve said enough. I feel as if I’m being cliched. Or, I feel as though I come
off as too detached, too icy, too unconcerned. So, I find myself constantly reaching for
the right words and instead finding the sappiest most cliched sentiment that my person can
muster. It pains me to utter it. Its all true, every sappy word I say, but I’ve heard
those words uttered so much, buzzing about my like radio static. I’ve heard them uttered
with such insincerity that the very semblance of my words seems to cheapen them. What lies
below those words though, is a knowledge whose expression words fail. Some day I hope that
I can just be comfortable in that knowledge and not feel as though everything that is
beautiful to me must be continually fought for.
She doesn’t make it easy though. She sent me a package that I received midweek that had the
absolute coolest contents ever. First there was a nice letter, adorned in crazy stickers
that was so sweet, so innocent, that if you had been the recipient you also would have been
very glad that whoever wrote it was alive in this world. I received, also a pen adorned
with a sound clip spouting C3PO head. That would have been cool by itself, but the best was
still to come. We have this little semi-private joke. Its this two beaked bird that she
drew for me one time when we were studying together before we were dating. Well, she
constructed, by hand no less, a stuffed version of the bird. It was overwhelmingly clever
and adds a touch of her excitement and originality to the sterility of my room. It was
easily one of the coolest things that anyone has every given me. This summer should be full
of surprise gifts, but it presents an interesting challenge for me to be eqaully clever and
creative. I shall be the better for it, I’m sure.
It has also been one week since I last saw my friend D. who is also working in Texas at a
computer company. She’s quite interesting in that she possesses a unique flexibility to
slide effortlessly between different people or groups of people. She’s oddly tolerent and
diplomatic in a way that seems completely foreign to me. She’s quite intelligent and to my
chagrin posesses far more natural aptitude and talent for all things computer science than
I. She also listens to some of the same music that I enjoy, but talks of the bands she
likes with no arrogance. The thing that I find odd about her is her overwhelming sexuality.
It seems to come up incessently in conversation and it seems for her a frequent torment.
It is a world that I surely don’t understand, but with her it seems more idiosyncratic than
base. There are times when I can converse with her as I do to those people whose
conversations I most enjoy, but there are other times when I feel like an outsider to her
wildness. She reminds me, in some respects of a girl I knew in high school who was also
displayed the same wild brilliance. Also, they seem to both share some festering scars,
just below the surface, that I will never be able to comprehend. Nevertheless, D. seems to
be the least tormented of many that I know. She is content with her talents and bright
future and resolute in the path she will take. In some ways I am quite jealous of the fact
that she is so very good at her chosen field that her career decisiosn are made trivial. In
the end though, I was happy to see her as her company offers a distinct counterpoint to that
of my perpetual companion, J. (as I’m sure it does to him as well). Perhaps semi-frequent
visits will quell the rage of familiarity, lonliness, and boredom that so troubled me last
summer.
Its been one week since I hit Austin, and it seems that not all that much has happened. More
disturbing still though, is the increasing proximity to July 4th on the calendar. Ever
since childhood, dispite the frivolity of the fireworks and picnics, July 4th has always
been a harbinger of the coming autumn, a reminder of the tenuous nature of summer freedom.
So, in the weeks to come I plan to continue with my summer projects of reading, writing,
coding and guitarplaying with a new found urgency so that I will have more to report when
two weeks have passed.