Nothing ends, Adrian.  Nothing ever ends.

This made me think back a bit to a link that Neil Gaiman posted on the Twitter, to this story about a man who has a quote from Death: The High Cost of Living tattooed on his arm.  The slant on this quote is a bit different:

It always ends.  That’s what gives it value.

I don’t know why I drew the mental connection between these quotes, other than the arbitrary end of this year by those of us using the Gregorian calendar was rapidly approaching.  Also, I probably spend entirely too much time living in imaginary places.

It’s easy enough in the the hectic holiday season and the ridiculous pressure at work to GET EVERYTHING DONE to turn around and write off the entire year as a complete wash, but honestly I had a good year, and I think I’ve laid the foundations for some better times ahead.  Anyway, I did this silly thing with pictures last year because I was lazy, but I think I liked it enough afterward that I’ll do it again.  Here’s my 2009, in photos:

It’s been an awesome year, and here’s to the next one, and they’re boarding my flight so I guess I better wrap this up omg see you all next year!

People in the IT world usually end up hating either the ‘I’, the ‘T’, or both, or life in general at some point during their career. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘meh’ and 10 being ‘I’m going to set everyone on fire’, where do you stand on working in IT at this point in your life?

Although I may have given you the impression that I work in IT, due to my near-constant lamenting about having to provide hand-holding for the assorted stupids and halfwits that somehow managed to get decent paying corporate jobs (despite their seeming inability to read or perform addition or follow very simple and explicit directions to accomplish trivially easy tasks)… I actually don’t.  That being said I do have a technology background, and am currently working on a sizable project involving IT and security and a number of other things.  The technology aspect of it is fairly interesting, and I love learning new things — a great deal of my frustration (and that of other IT professionals I work with) is that certain higher-ups seem to want miracles delivered on a fairly regular basis, both on the cheap and on very short timescales.  Trying to explain to them why what they want is either impractical or just flat out unnecessary is often like trying to convey to a five year old that the television is not actually full of tiny little people prancing about.

Still.  It beats being unemployed.

My love for the Pacific Northwest is as pure as the breath of a newborn unicorn, but I’ve always wondered: Is there a reason one would rather live on the Oregon coast over Washington’s? In other words, why do you live where you live and what makes it so great?

Which part?  Are you talking about the actual coast?

Further inland?

Or the strange and wonderful city of Portland itself?

Honestly, Portland is just sort of where I wound up after four years of living in the hinterlands and realizing if I wanted to get back to the big city life that I craved it was easier to move up here and go to school than it was to try and go pick up the pieces of my life that I had left scattered all over San Diego.  I don’t think I’ve seen quite as much of Washington as I probably should, although I expect to remedy that this summer when I go camping in the Olympic National Forest.  I hear good things about Wenatchee and suspect I should probably go visit it at some point, especially because there is a super pretty redhead who lives there who I think would give me plenty of scotch to drink.

What made you start blogging and, having met so many bloggers in person over the years, why in God’s name do you continue?

I started blogging because I was bored with what they were teaching me at school, fairly certain that none of it was going to get me a job.  I installed WordPress on my student web account and started fooling around with it, hoping to teach myself a few things about new web technologies so I could earn some money.  That didn’t really end up happening, but I ended up meeting some pretty cool people right from the start via blogging (largely by accident and a last minute invitation, but that’s a whole story on its own).  I showed up at Portland’s TequilaCon knowing very little about blogging or bloggers or even what an RSS feed was all about.  I keep at it because I like the interaction with the bloggers I read and who read my drivel in return.  Also a fair percentage of people I’ve met through the blog seem open to the idea of letting me feel them up.  I don’t think you can get the same kind of experience just playing Counterstrike online.

When you were 10, what did you want to do when you grew up?

At that age I’m pretty sure I wanted to be an X-Man.  I think I empathized with their plight of being disliked by regular people because they were perceived as being “different”.  Also being able to shoot force beams out of my eyes or being able to teleport just seemed really fucking cool.  Although I failed to develop any mutant powers during puberty, that is when my hair started becoming curly, so I guess that’s something.

Where jobs and the making of the money that allows us to eat and drink are concerned, what would you rather be doing and where would you rather be doing it?

It’s funny, not too long ago a friend of mine asked me this.  His answer was that he’d like to jump out of helicopters and shoot bad guys.  Me, I’d like to figure out a way to make a living by traveling around this great big country of ours in trains and planes, carrying my laptop and my camera, shooting off pictures and stories and articles to my hypothetical editor whenever I dropped into a wi-fi enabled coffeeshop.  I’d have a totally sweet drawing pad and illustrate a webcomic in between.  I’ve never been to Europe, so I think I’d like to spend some of that travelling time in Spain and Switzerland and Italy.  Since you paint such a nice picture of England I’d like to travel around there as well.  I would spend Decembers in Australia, avoiding the bothersome holiday season entirely by surfing, and come back to Oregon in January just to let people envy my kickass tan.

***

And that’s my five.  I’m supposed to post the rules and offer to interview other people, but let’s face it, I’m both lazy and incompetent at memes.  If you’ve really got a burning urge to be interviewed I can oblige you, but it’s going to cut into my wine drinking time.

1) I used to play the piano, and for a nine year old I thought I was pretty good.  I stopped practicing not too long after my lessons stopped, which I didn’t regret until some years later.

2) If I seem to shift back and forth a lot it’s not because I’m antsy.  Due to what I’ll call a structural defect it’s extremely uncomfortable for me to stand in one place for very long.  The shifting about is an attempt to juggle my weight from leg to leg.

3) I haven’t seen my dad in five years.  I don’t seem to mind.  I’m not sure if that should bother me or not.

4) Related to the above, I didn’t let anyone in my family know that I was coming to San Diego last summer.  I do miss some of my cousins quite a bit but if you see some of the family you pretty much end up having to see all of them.

5) I am my own biggest critic.

6) Despite appearances I am actually a pretty big introvert.  I have just learned over the years to do what it is you people-persons do.

7) I miss San Diego something fierce, but I think there is too much of the Pacific Northwest in me to ever really go home again.

8 ) I often think that I have no real creativity to speak of, and in fact am just ripping off other people who are better at what I do than I am.

9) I have long wished I was able to sing.

10) All this disclosure made me twitch.

Feel like playing along?  Tag.  You’re it.

One:

I sat as still as I could in what little shade was offered next to my car there in the parking lot, a lifetime of instinct telling me that all I needed to beat the oven-like heat of midsummer was to be still and wait for the breeze from the sea to wash over me. It didn’t work, of course, not here in this tiny Oregon town so far from the ocean and everyone and everything that I’d grown up with. What did you expect? I thought, never one to refrain from kicking myself when I was down. You went through quite a bit of effort to fuck up your own life. Is it any wonder you’re here, working this lousy job, living with these backwards, small-minded people?

I’d come here fleeing the mess I’d gotten myself into in California, banking on spending no more than six months living with my family to get back on my feet before moving back home, or maybe somewhere in the Bay Area or even Palm Springs. I’d had offers from friends to live in either place. Yet nearly a year later here I was, still piecing together my next move, and selling groceries to the residents of a farming town that didn’t know quite what to make of me. Between my dark eyes and brown skin and a name apparently so foreign most couldn’t bring themselves to attempt it and, paradoxically, the ability to speak perfect English, no one here seemed to know what to make of me. I wish I were joking about that last one: on several occasions I was treated to the open-mouthed astonishment of someone who had slowly and carefully asked me a question only to have me interrupt with a well-formed sentence in reply. “My God!” they’d exclaim, “where did you learn to speak our language so well?”

“Well, I think the public school I attended in San Diego was probably better than the one you have here.”

“How did you wind up there?”

“It’s where I was born. And raised. Your turn.”

“Are your parents from America?”

“My mom was born about six blocks from here in Silverton Hospital. My dad is from Mexico City. Hey, maybe we can talk about your family now!”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not surprised. Here’s your receipt! Have a great day!”

I grudgingly stood up and began walking back towards the store, my break over. On the way back in I walked around a truck that had just pulled up; the mud-splattered doors opened to reveal the mud-splattered occupants. Maybe they were staring at me; maybe they weren’t. I decided I didn’t care anymore. In ten years these people will still be here, burning their trash piles and throwing beer cans in the river. I will have moved on, and my time spent here will be no more than a footnote in the story of my life.

Two:

Seeing my distant expression, she asked, “What are you thinking about?”

“My to-do list,” I said, still staring at the horizon. “Not counting work, I had five things I came up with to do today.”

“And what are those?”

“Well. Cut out of work early. Hop on my bike. Eat ice cream with a pretty girl in a sun dress. Watch the sun set over the city.”

She took another lick of her ice cream before saying, “That’s only four.”

“I know,” I said, grinning. “The day’s not over yet!” I stood up and turned back towards the bench, holding my hand out. “There is one more thing. Come on.”

She took my hand and let me pull her to her feet. “What are we doing now?”

“You’ll see.”

Three:

“There is,” I began, and then thought better of speaking with my mouth full of chicken. After chewing and swallowing I started again: “There is nothing better than an all-you-can-eat buffet after spending the whole day in the ocean.”

Niels grunted his agreement while he finished devouring a slice of pizza. “Except for maybe that drive-through barbecue restaurant in Seaside.”

“Oh man, I forgot about that place. If we go surfing next weekend let’s hit Arcadia Beach so we can swing by there afterwards.”

“Sweet,” he said. We stacked our empty plates at the edge of the table before standing up. “Round two!”

Four:

I shooed away my pet kangaroo and picked up another handful of grapes before using the intercom to ring the commander for a status report. On one of the monitors I watched him tense up and sigh before delivering his line: “The shield generators are almost in range, my lord. You’ll be able to begin landing your troops soon.”

I reflected that he was probably getting a little tired of me asking him this question. This was the third time I’d ordered a reenactment of the Battle for Hoth this week, and no doubt he was wishing I would move on to some other form of entertainment soon. Tough, I thought. I didn’t sink millions of dollars of my vast fortune into building full sized working AT-ATs to just have them sit around and NOT blow the bejeezus out of the countryside.

Maybe, I thought, stroking the thin John Waters-esque mustache I’d adopted recently, if the Godzilla and King Kong robots I set my engineers to creating are delivered on schedule, I can march my AT-ATs into New York City for a giant sized Battle Royale. Now THAT would entertaining.

At this moment my manservant entered to refresh the tobacco in my gold-plated hookah. “Standish,” I said, addressing him, “do you know what the only bad part is about being a billionaire?”

He tensed up and sighed before asking, “What is that, sir?”

“Nothing! HA HA HA HA HA!”

Come to think of it, he was probably getting tired of me asking him that question, too.

Five:

As the jet pulled up and away from SFO, I pressed my face against the window, watching not just the ground recede but also watching all the places I’d lived in the last few months receding in my mind’s eye, fluttering away in the wind and falling behind me as we accelerated. I saw houses in San Diego and Palm Springs and San Mateo slipping away into the past. I saw the beach and the local pier as I had seen on so many summer days after school; I saw it at night, when I’d gone there to stand with my bare feet in the sand two days before I left. Staring out at the breakers, I realized that wasn’t reflected moonlight I was seeing: as each wave rose up, luminescent plankton would light up all along its length, each crest glowing blue for a second before the wave broke. It was the first time I had ever seen such a thing.

The plane banked, pointing its nose north towards Oregon, where I’d no doubt add a few more houses to the list of places I had lived.  I finally pulled my eyes away from the cities racing away and, settling back in my seat, looked forward.  I’d avoided doing so for far too long already.