Originally written Saturday 06.23.2001<\/i><\/p>\n
I’ve been in Austin, TX for exactly one week. After rolling around town with Dana and Josh
\nit seems like I’ve done everything already. We saw the largest colony of mexican free
\ntailed bats last night and today we hit the crazy antique and vintage clothing stores on
\nsouth congress street. I’ve been to Emo’s to a show already and I’ve been to the giant
\nmovie theatre that charges too much for tickets. I’ve gotten ice cream at the fun little
\njoint where we always went last summer. The bad part about being itinerant, living
\nsomewhere, but, at the same time, not really living somewhere, is that one appreciates a
\ngiven local in and of itself and not really as a backdrop for life. Austin is a great town,
\nI like it very much. The music, the crazy, pretty eclectic culture, the laid back warmth,
\nits all great, but I still feel like a tourist. The only locals I ever come in contact with
\nare the ones who are taking my money from across a counter.<\/p>\n
Work seems like it will be pretty cool. I think its better suited for me than last summer,
\nas its more software based. Still, I find that there is a great deal of information that I
\ndon’t know. In school, we worked primarily with the SPARC architecture rather than intel
\narchitecture, and though the assembly languages have similarities, there is a wealth of
\ninformation that I don’t entirely grasp. So, I’ve spent my first 3 days of real work
\nreading spec after spec and stepping through source file after source file. SMBIOS,
\nPCIBIOS, Intel System Programmer’s guide. These massive tomes would be impossible to read
\nin a summer, but I try to process as much relevent information as I can from them. The
\nproblem is, I’m not entirely sure what is relevant. The hardest part about being a co-op is
\nthe ambgiuties from my employers. When my job isn’t really strictly defined, I find it far
\ntoo easy to become overwhelmed by all the information that could be potentially pertainant. <\/p>\n
I feel as if I should try to bring myself up to the same level as the veterans in a few
\nweeks. I need to get past my anxiety and talk to my manager and figure out exactly what I
\nshould be learning right now rather than pawing about aimlessly.<\/p>\n
One problem with the company where I work is that it seems relatively old, at least with
\nrespect to the tech sector. I work around older people, in their 30s and 40s or foreign
\nnationals, neither of which shares much in common with me in terms of interests. I know,
\nsomeome somewhere is preparing a lesson in diversity for me, but sometimes what one realy
\nneeds is just some common, comfortable, familiar ground when it comes to people. The
\nenvironment is just so different from the raucus, juvenile quality of the ISP where I spent
\nmy freshman summer, or even the startup in Boston where I interviewed. We passed the Excite
\nbuilding when we were hopping about the antique stores today. Its chic location, even if
\ncontrived, seemed to still have worlds more soul than the sterile campus of my employer.
\n“It’s about the knowledge and the experience stupid”, I keep telling myself.<\/p>\n
One week has made me realize how much of a liar I was in my last relationship. Well, not a
\nliar really I guess because I didn’t have anything to guage it against, but now I find
\nmyself willing, no, not willing, but overwhelmingly eager to do all the things that I
\ndismissed before. No longer am I “crunched for time” or “without anything intersting to
\nwrite about”. Now I find myself scrawling letter after letter to my new girlfriend
\nrealizing that there is nothing I would rather be doing than penning words that would
\nprobably have made my old self nauseous with their dripping sentiment. Dripping sentiment.
\nThat’s the hardest part. I like this girl a lot. More than any other girl I’ve ever known,
\nbut I find that I am increasingly fearful that my words are inadequate in expressing how I
\nfeel towards her. I certainly hope that my feelings are completely reciprocated, which I
\nthink they are, and indeed that equality is what makes the relationship seem so comfortable. <\/p>\n
But at the same time it is incredibly frightening. I know that words are so often just the
\nfacade of those who do not truly live life or feel an emotion, but I always find myself
\ntrying to communicate the way I feel about dating this girl with words. And, I never feel
\nas though I’ve said enough. I feel as if I’m being cliched. Or, I feel as though I come
\noff as too detached, too icy, too unconcerned. So, I find myself constantly reaching for
\nthe right words and instead finding the sappiest most cliched sentiment that my person can
\nmuster. It pains me to utter it. Its all true, every sappy word I say, but I’ve heard
\nthose words uttered so much, buzzing about my like radio static. I’ve heard them uttered
\nwith such insincerity that the very semblance of my words seems to cheapen them. What lies
\nbelow those words though, is a knowledge whose expression words fail. Some day I hope that
\nI can just be comfortable in that knowledge and not feel as though everything that is
\nbeautiful to me must be continually fought for.<\/p>\n
She doesn’t make it easy though. She sent me a package that I received midweek that had the
\nabsolute coolest contents ever. First there was a nice letter, adorned in crazy stickers
\nthat was so sweet, so innocent, that if you had been the recipient you also would have been
\nvery glad that whoever wrote it was alive in this world. I received, also a pen adorned
\nwith a sound clip spouting C3PO head. That would have been cool by itself, but the best was
\nstill to come. We have this little semi-private joke. Its this two beaked bird that she
\ndrew for me one time when we were studying together before we were dating. Well, she
\nconstructed, by hand no less, a stuffed version of the bird. It was overwhelmingly clever
\nand adds a touch of her excitement and originality to the sterility of my room. It was
\neasily one of the coolest things that anyone has every given me. This summer should be full
\nof surprise gifts, but it presents an interesting challenge for me to be eqaully clever and
\ncreative. I shall be the better for it, I’m sure. <\/p>\n
It has also been one week since I last saw my friend D. who is also working in Texas at a
\ncomputer company. She’s quite interesting in that she possesses a unique flexibility to
\nslide effortlessly between different people or groups of people. She’s oddly tolerent and
\ndiplomatic in a way that seems completely foreign to me. She’s quite intelligent and to my
\nchagrin posesses far more natural aptitude and talent for all things computer science than
\nI. She also listens to some of the same music that I enjoy, but talks of the bands she
\nlikes with no arrogance. The thing that I find odd about her is her overwhelming sexuality.
\nIt seems to come up incessently in conversation and it seems for her a frequent torment.
\nIt is a world that I surely don’t understand, but with her it seems more idiosyncratic than
\nbase. There are times when I can converse with her as I do to those people whose
\nconversations I most enjoy, but there are other times when I feel like an outsider to her
\nwildness. She reminds me, in some respects of a girl I knew in high school who was also
\ndisplayed the same wild brilliance. Also, they seem to both share some festering scars,
\njust below the surface, that I will never be able to comprehend. Nevertheless, D. seems to
\nbe the least tormented of many that I know. She is content with her talents and bright
\nfuture and resolute in the path she will take. In some ways I am quite jealous of the fact
\nthat she is so very good at her chosen field that her career decisiosn are made trivial. In
\nthe end though, I was happy to see her as her company offers a distinct counterpoint to that
\nof my perpetual companion, J. (as I’m sure it does to him as well). Perhaps semi-frequent
\nvisits will quell the rage of familiarity, lonliness, and boredom that so troubled me last
\nsummer. <\/p>\n
Its been one week since I hit Austin, and it seems that not all that much has happened. More
\ndisturbing still though, is the increasing proximity to July 4th on the calendar. Ever
\nsince childhood, dispite the frivolity of the fireworks and picnics, July 4th has always
\nbeen a harbinger of the coming autumn, a reminder of the tenuous nature of summer freedom.
\nSo, in the weeks to come I plan to continue with my summer projects of reading, writing,
\ncoding and guitarplaying with a new found urgency so that I will have more to report when
\ntwo weeks have passed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… Continue reading 4260983<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4wnIz-4260983","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}