The Winter of My Discontent
Loss
The past three months have flown by and not in a good way. Leslie Morin, wife of my long-time friend Jay, mother of two boys, Russell and Nathaniel, lost her fight to cancer in March. The news struck us pretty hard. We hadn’t seen or heard from them in quite a while and didn’t realize that things had taken such a turn. With my wife’s mystery illness, which has since passed, we didn’t want to visit lest we somehow transmit some complication to her. It turned out to be a false consideration.
And so, another friend leaves this world without so much as a goodbye from me and I’m heartsick over it. I’m blessed in that I don’t have a lot of regrets over life. Even with tough decisions that I get wrong, I can find solace in the difficulty itself. However, losing people I love without a goodbye is almost more than I can bear.
The Writing Contest
A few weeks ago, I decided to enter a short story writing contest. The deadline is fast approaching and I’ve only written 300 or so words. The subject is very difficult in that it deals with my friend Gary’s suicide some 13 years ago. Dredging up all those memories has been pretty painful; I still haven’t quite gotten over it. My sleep has been filled with various disturbing dreams and one episode when, half asleep, I felt his presence in the room with me. The kicker, though, is that I probably won’t make the deadline due to work and other considerations.
The Barscape Blues
Barscape is a forum that I inherited almost a year ago in an attempt to provide a safe haven away from the somewhat draconian environment of the ProBoards forum hosting site. In the 11 or so months of operation, it had been a place of peace and civil discourse. Then, two long-time members returned from a self-imposed exile and all hell broke loose, prompting me to play the role of referee and peacemaker. An environment that could have prided itself on self-policing found itself in need of a FAQ in order to define proper and/or acceptable rules of etiquette. Still, we lost one other long-time member in the shuffle, a person I consider a good friend in spite of the strictly electronic nature of our relationship, the person who had posted the most and who had, arguably, given and received the most from the forum. In my opinion, it does not speak well of us all that such…. snippishness came to light. People are people, though, and I’m hardly the one who can cast the first stone, so the best thing to do is to accept where the chips fall and move on.
One side effect of all of this, however, is to give me cause to ponder my role in Barscape and to decide where it fits in the scheme of my life. I still believe in Barscape the community. The people there are top shelf. However, Barscape the forum does not “do it for me”. What this means, I do not know. I do know that I don’t have the same fire that I used to, though that could just be residue from the drama. We’ll see.
Requiem
I resurrected the Requiem project. After listening to Sarah Maclachlan’s “Hold On” from her “Freedom Sessions” CD some five or so years ago, I decided to construct a musical play list that would tell the story of my death and its aftermath in music. Why such an arguably morbid idea would occur to me is beyond me.
Anyway, after fiddling around with some music some years ago, I had let the project lay fallow until Cadfael (screen name) over at the Wondrous Stories forum set up a pseudo radio station and posted some MP3s. After playing around with this idea myself with some unsatisfactory results, I downloaded the Audacity audio editor and built a single MP3 which contains over 2 hours of music, the Requiem play list. I’m listening to it now trying to determine if the 64-bit recording quality is good enough. The file is 66MB or so, so broadband users can just download it whole if they want to.
I will say this as a note to the RIAA. The illegal posting of MP3s prompted me to buy more music in the past year than I’d bought in the past 15 years. Note that this is not an admission of piracy. I didn’t buy new music and I didn’t listen to new music unless it was on the radio, or received the odd CD for Christmas. The fact is that I spent my entertainment money on other things. It was only this project and the ability to rip CDs onto my notebook computer that has sparked a renewed interest in purchasing music. Now that I can take all of my music with me to work, I am a happy consumer and will continue to purchase CDs.
That said, the next step is to finalize the play list, edit the segues between songs and post the MP3 and lyrics to a web site so people can listen to and read the story.
The Family
My autistic son continues to make progress, though his behaviors are still a bit out of control. We modified his diet and we’ve seen some results, but while the wild mood swings and tantrums have all but gone, the inappropriate behavior continues. His behavioral therapist isn’t making much progress.
By way of illustration, I surprised my son by coming home in the middle of one of his rare episodes. These episodes consist of lots of crying and contrary statements and what sets them off is usually a mystery. Anyway, I surprised him. His reaction was to come over to me with the intent of hitting me, as is his usual reaction. I was in a closed in spot, so I backed up and sat on the floor to better defend myself. As I’d done this before and fended him off quite successfully, he stopped in front of me and, instead of hitting me, said this, “I wish you would die. I want a new daddy.”
Earlier that morning, we had seen the news of the passing of Tiger Woods’ dad and my son had noted my reaction to the news and had asked me some questions about why I felt that way and if Tiger Woods would be lonely now. So, that concept of sadness and dying was in his mind. When he’s in those moods, you have to ignore what he says, sometimes it is just pure gibberish. Still, it hurt me to the quick to hear those words even if the emotion behind them was not genuine in a rational sense.
The Work
Zoran’s stock went up $6 in one day this week. That was almost 1/3 of its previous worth. Of course, everyone at work was thrilled. Still, the workload continues to be quite intense. After an engineering meeting where my name came up in four different projects, someone commented, “Does anyone else work here?”
Miscellany
The Linux project to load Linux on my Compaq hit a stone wall named ATi. It seems that their Linux display drivers suck loudly. I’m stuck using Windows XP Pro. C’est la vie.
My 500Gb Mvix drive got a work out as I collect digital photos, graphics, software and other project files from three different hard drives and stored them on the beast. Thank God for the Ruby language. I’ll go into more detail at another time.
The Secret Project
I got together with some friends of mine to work on a software project, the details of which will remain under wraps. It should be fun. The group I put together is quite varied.
SpedPAC Stuff
The Tewksbury SpedPAC web site is in a holding pattern until I get some real data from Lisa, our co-chair. In the meantime, I was also on the Scholarship Committee and interviewed three candidates. Seeing such dedicated young people (I can’t believe I said “young people”) gives me a new lease on life. After hearing nothing but bad news day in and day out, it’s refreshing to see such motivation.
The Pledge
I got into a bad habit of thinking of this site as something more than just a journal. In effect, it caused me to judge everything I was going to write and made it more of a chore than it needed to be. So, instead of adding pressure on myself, I’m going to post more and think less. I think that’s a good thing.