Title: Hopeful in spite of myself
Hearing: Mini-Me kicking the shit out of Austin - Austin Powers 2: The Spy
Who Shagged Me
Feeling: Tired and shagged out, but I can't sleep. Hungry -- supper is imminent.
Nice and coolish today.
Reading: The Cuckoo's Egg, Clifford Stoll (just finished)
Drinking: 2% milk from the Longmont Diary. Oh, yummy.
Eating: Curly pasta with tomato sauce
Whatever and Ever, Amen::
Slacking, my children, is an art I am honing to perfection. Due to one thing and another, I skipped out this afternoon and sneaked away to spod and nap at the boys' house. I'm taking my Solaris class this week, which has been fun, but the need to hide from the world still catches me at the oddest times these days. I had vague notions of kicking it on the hammock for a while, but the afternoon rainshower kept me inside. At least it is raining now.
The class, what I've seen of it, is yummy. Our teacher guy has a pretty Zen approach to system tuning. I like that; it's important to know how everything ties together when you're trying to tweak your system into running better. A well-tuned computer system is like an Olympic athlete at the top of her physical condition. Everything interacts smoothly and efficiently with a minimum of wasted power. It's damned erotic. But that's probably because I'm a geek.
In Which Marcie Has A Revelation:
So one of the guys in my class is from Burlington, MA, which is Sun's major East coast campus near Boston. He tells me that the job market is staggering around the Boston area, almost as much as it is in Denver. We chatted for a while about that. It seems that while the cost of living is high (insanely so -- it's comparable to Silly Valley), so are the wages; a geek like me (three years Solaris admin experience with a smattering of shell and Perl scripting) could move there and find well-paying work very quickly.
Not that I'm in a particular hurry to move East, you understand; it was mostly idle curiosity, fueled by Cynthia's proclamation a year or so ago that Boston is her ultimate city of choice in which to live. I'm not sure if it's the seafood or what. But any place that isn't the South will never be home to me, so what the hell. Understand, I am a Southern magnolia. Well, not a magnolia, more of a shit-kicking Southern dyke. Anything north of Memphis is Yankee country. I am rather leery of moving North, having encountered one too many rude Yankee children during my life (yes, I know it's a generalization; send hate mail here).
However, I am also in love with a very cute girl who seems to like New England, or at least wants to maybe give it a shot at some point. Halfway through my conversation with Yankee boy today, I realized that's why I was even interested. I almost laughed in the middle of a sentence at this realization: "Damn, I must be in love if I'm considering moving to Boston."
Sigh. Go figure.
Yes, okay. The truth is -- and I realized this the other day -- I really would move anywhere to be with her. Even California, although there's not much chance of that, seeing as how she dislikes it as intensely as I do (more flames can be directed here). I've said it before, and it's not like I didn't mean it; but I'm a practical girl these days. I know love doesn't conquer all, having lived through a couple of failed relationships. I know sometimes you have to make very hard choices whether you want to or not. I know that sometimes, you have to decide what's important and take care of yourself first, not sacrifice your own happiness for someone else's plans.
But, dammit. Even if she got sent to Outer Mongolia to be a glamorous HR assistant (unlikely, but you never know in the wild and crazy world of the dotcom economy), I'd follow her. Even though there's no way we can be legally joined as a couple, unless we move to Vermont for our separate-but-almost-equal "civil union", even though we have no piece of paper to tell the world we're together, even though my family will likely never recognize our union, I'd follow her. Yeah, I would. Dammit.
It's not angst this time, not really. It's just our reality.
-- marcie.