Strange things are afoot in these quietly carpeted halls, a chipper young woman racing up stairs two at a time with a digital camera suspiciously suspended from her narrow shoulders.
"Hey Gila, I have two questions"Fire away, just let me duck for cover, k?
"What is "persistence" in Java? Marie-Jo said you were Java woman."
Actually, I'm anti-Java-girl, but know your enemy, right? I think it's referring to data storage, and
how a data object persists past the lifespan of the application that spawned it... Ie - it gets stored
and it's life cycle extends beyond the life cycle of the application...
"Cool, and can I take a picture of us outside together?"
Hunh?
"I need a new desktop, I've had a picture of me with my dog up there all year, and Jo's sick of it so we
were thinking, and thought - GILA!!!"
Uhm, I think I'm flattered...
So we grabbed my coat (brave woman ran out into subzero weather and gorgeous crunching snow in a sweater) and raced outside, giggling down the steps and skipping over ice patches over to the sunny side of the street.
Tia watched us from the windows, laughing...
And if our venerable Marquis is willing to spare me a touch more space, you'll see the pic that ended up on the communal techwriters desktop.
Hrmmm.
Only I haven't actually *seen* it on the desktop, so I'm thinking...
I'm thinkin' they're up to something, what with all the threats about next Thursday's birthday hazing, floating around on bottled airwaves.
But I'm too hazy myself to figure it out, pushing my little brain hard as I could to publish publish publish a handful of pathetic little demos that have the boss all excited...
...and there's something cathartic in leaving the office when there aren't any cars left in the lot, and there's something beautiful in the way it all drains from my nerves as I collapse into the hammock chair and pick up on Simon's latest adventures in such-and-such-castle-on-the-moor.
(Someone left a bunch of fantasy books at the party, so I'm taking advantage)
And so this morning was our first team-breakfast and Fabrice and I got along swimmingly amidst espressos... I sat down
across from him intentionally and so we talked about the weather for an hour and a bit, still...
We didn't snub each other once (I even gave him a lift back to work), and Philipe was beaming but I dunno if it was because Phase One of the Monstre Winter Hair has been implemented, or because Fabrice and I were getting along, and so were Peter and Daniel.
Too good too true too good too true...
Ahh, feck it, as the venerable cf would say.
As for the hair, chatting with the clerk at the dye store about my choice of cotton-candy pink (so that I can be Maria's happy girl again) with an off-white fringe, and watching her amazement at how miscalculated the geek industry still is...
Or maybe I'm just lucky. Really, really lucky.
How lucky?
When I begged my boss for a Debian distrib (anything's better than RedHat, except maybe, well, you-know-who), and managed to throw in the slight aside of canIdyemyhairpinkcuzit'swinterandI'mafraidtoturn24andIneedthecheermeupcolour all in one terrified breath, he said
On one condition. So long as you get Peter to dye his blue.
And now I'm back to scribbles on the neighbouring office's whiteboards about SSH servers and tunneling through random gateways...
...from a key stored on your card and utterly inaccessible.
Utterly.
As for the rest of it, it's been a stressful week, a week of accomplishments, of worry, of cheering for Flatline who has no idea just how much help and bolstering he's been... Of anticipating a certain secret visitor's visit coming up, of begging to attend conferences, and finally of wondering where my heart has run off to again.
No, that's not right.
Not my heart.
My flesh. My burning desire. My anything. Masturbation games are all well and good but I don't think this sudden distate for contact started with the over-abuse of my nipples at the party.
It's strange somehow, of finding myself suddenly capable of fairly impressive (to me) levels of affection for friends once again, but being utterly cold on the outside.
Not horny, not even flirty. The bitch act has turned from flirtatious challenge to "just don't fucking touch me", and it's not a work related thing either.
I just really don't feel pretty anymore. And with every new muscle, I look at myself an extra time, and wonder if there really was a time when I believed that I was beautiful, and if there really was a time when I was, to steal Dave's term, "a good catch".
And it shouldn't fucking matter. Maybe I'm just tired that the two or three men or women who've impressed me to the point of tears are so utterly out of reach.
I don't know. But if I've snubbed you this week, or if my hug has felt empty, or my smile a little on the just-scraping-the-surface side...
I'm sorry. I'm just feeling a little lost right now.
I'm trying to decide which balance I want again.