Sep 28, 2004

It Starts... Again
I'm sure I must have mentioned it before, the whole September Syndrome. From the time I was 3 till I was 23, each passing year was marked by September, like the ominous click when all the digits change in your odometer.

There's plenty of other milestones. Birthdays, New Year's, Chinese New Year, all have their requisite celebrations, but it's back to work right after. September brings change. The leaves turn, as does the weather. The summer is over, it's back to school, those institutional walls that have defined progress and success for so many years.

The last two years, I kinda missed the September mark. Working at a tech company, August rolls into October pretty quietly. This year September kicked in with the start of the intern program at my church, PBC. It kicked off with a dessert night at home of one of the elders. I almost skipped out, being somewhat sore since I just got back from the YAF Yosemite trip.

This means starting to try to figure out what I'm going to do for this next year. That is aside from the rather everyday things, what's going to change? I want to start something new.

Sep 4, 2004

Fruit Flies
Way back in July I was hurtling westwards through the air. At the same moment, in precisely the same direction, a small mass of shriveled grapes were also hurtling through the air, just a foot away from me in a little plastic dish sitting on the fold-down airline table in front of me.

At that moment, I was drifting from Nick Hornby's How To Be Good, which I was trying to read. Somehow the relatively slow pace of the book made me wonder how old I was getting, how relatively unhealthy I had been eating as of late, how pathetically sad the airline food (especially the grapes) seemed, and how my ever diminishing memory would erase this moment as it apparently cannot seem to hold onto the myriad of more important things it should hold on to, but never does.

That memory thing is funny. It fails at the most inappropriate times, like mid sentence when the word 'ironic' flees from your lips when you're absolutely certain that you knew the word a minute ago, and all that comes to mind now is 'metallic', and so instead you say "the word that describes this situation", which leads only to confused looks all around, since you're the only one who saw the irony in the first place. Or at other times, the opposite happens. Some pseudo-random place, person, smell, sound, song, knicknack, piece of clothing, movie, tv show, whatever, brings back the wrong memory at the wrong time.

The day before I had left San Jose for Toronto for a week, I tossed an apple core into the kitchen trash and watched a puff of dust float up off the garbage. On closer inspection, it wasn't dust but dozens of tiny fruit flies flying from the garbage can. They had been breeding on the remains of what was a pretty sweet canteloupe sitting in the trash.

They were actually everywhere. By the time I had found the source and tossed the trash, it was already possible to find them buzzing around the fridge and the sink. Once in a while you'd even see one in a bedroom or the bathroom.

A week later, after returning from Toronto, most of them were gone. I didn't see any in the bathroom anymore. But on white floor of the fridge, there were a bunch of dead fruit flies. I cleaned them off with a wet towel.

I don't know when the cantaloupe went rotten. The fruit flies have come and gone. Time to clean up the remains.

Sep 3, 2004

I need to work from home more often
So my apartment complex has these public grills. Not the little crappy charcoal grills, (though we have those too). I'm talking massive brushed stainless steel gas grills that are built into the ground. There aren't many of them, and I'm having guys over for a bbq tonite, so I came home early to camp the grill.

Now I find myself here under the shade of an umbrella, and the sun peeking through behind the palm trees swaying in the breeze. The weather is perfect, and I'm using VPN and Windows Remote Desktop to code on my work machine.

I also have an open Heineken beside my notebook.

I need to work from home more often.