Alternate Entries

Alternate Entries

Saturday, July 19, 2003

What can happen if you're the only shade for miles.

posted by jeev | 8:17 PM |

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

My Dad isn't doing so well. He's old, by any standard, and he hasn't taken the best care of himself. I worry, but there isn't much I can do except offer whatever help he will take, and be a sympathetic ear. The interesting thing, though, is how being old has somehow made him more of who he has always been: the good about him and the not-so-good, stripped down, clarified, purely, now, itself. Those characteristics that seemed to me, growing up, accidental, mutable, are now revealed to be as essential to him as his very bones. As much as I want to believe in change and growth and transformation, I now see that's there's also this in human life, a baseline of obdurate us.

posted by jeev | 1:06 PM |

There were layoffs at my company today. Fifty people. They say it's not that many: less than 10% of the division (although it's unclear how they made that calculation). But a lot of the folks laid off had been with the company for 7, 8 years: a lifetime in Silicon Valley. I work at home on Tuesdays, so I found out because of at first a trickle and then a stream of emails coming in with subjects like Bye or See you later. Most were names I had seen over and over in the two years I've been there; a lot of them were people I worked with and respected. To a one, the notes celebrated the time the writers had spent with the company - the people they had worked with and the projects they had worked on - with a brief graciousness. It was all immensely sad.

It's not as if this was a surprise, exactly: the handwriting, as they say, had been on the wall for a long time. And I've no doubt there are all sorts of sound business reasons for doing what was done. But that doesn't change the shock of it. It's odd: when I worked in the movies, everybody got laid off at the end of every project, and it just seemed normal, part of the deal. Turns out it's part of the deal here, too.

posted by jeev | 12:27 AM |

Monday, July 14, 2003

Oh, yeah.
Happy Bastille Day.

posted by jeev | 10:41 PM |

By this time, we were quite settled down in Buckingham Street, where Mr. Dick continued his copying in a state of absolute felicity. My aunt had obtained a signal victory over Mrs. Crupp, by paying her off, throwing the first pitcher she planted on the stairs out of window, and protecting in person, up and down the staircase, a supernumerary whom she engaged from the outer world. These vigorous measures struck such terror to the breast of Mrs. Crupp, that she subsided into her own kitchen, under the impression that my aunt was mad. My aunt being supremely indifferent to Mrs. Crupp's opinion and everybody else's, and rather favouring than discouraging the idea, Mrs. Crupp, of late the bold, became within a few days so faint-hearted, that rather than encounter my aunt upon the staircase, she would endeavour to hide her portly form behind doors--leaving visible, however, a wide margin of flannel petticoat--or would shrink into dark corners. This gave my aunt such unspeakable satisfaction, that I believe she took a delight in prowling up and down, with her bonnet insanely perched on the top of her head, at times when Mrs. Crupp was likely to be in the way.

--Chapter XXXVII,
A Little Cold Water
David Copperfield

I want to be Betsy Trotwood when I grow up.

posted by jeev | 10:35 PM |

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