Kitty

Things have been rather busy lately, and I notice that I haven't posted an update of any real significance in some time.

Work has kept me fairly busy during the day. During evenings and weekends I try to justify the gym membership I bought. I've assembled an ad hoc exercise regimen of starting with 2000 meters on the rowing machine and then 30 minutes on the elliptical. Variants up or down on both are fine when making allowances for target areas and time.

My ultimate objective is to look good naked, and I hope to accomplish this by way of reducing my /500m split time to 2:30 or better. At present, it bounces around between 2:50 and 3:00, but over time I am finding that I don't have to stop every few hundred meters to gulp down water and pray for my own death. When I prompted Monk for his advice on an exercise that will reduce the size of my gut, he recommended two sets of twenty reps of a sit-up performed while hanging upside-down on a padded Mengelesque contraption that defies nomenclature. I did two sit-ups, then felt a white hot energy fill me as every molecule in my body exploded at the speed of light simultaneously. I got through 20.5 of them and crawled away to stretch, then sulk in the sauna.

I'm still shaving my head and I'm getting better at using the totally cherry straight razor I picked up from Bellevue Square the week before the wedding. With a smooth pate, my trusty Oakley A-wires, and a goatee, Monk has declared that I look "pretty badass".

I've upgraded two of the drives in my beloved Drobo. Each replacement spawns a roughly twenty-hour rebuilding process, during which time any drive diddling is strongly discouraged. It's scheduled to end tonight at roughly 2:30 AM. Once completed, I will be able to begin my next project: using one of the old Drobo drives to re-install Windows Vista, only this time as a 64-bit setup. (For those of you who may be bad at math, that's twice as many bits as before.)

I invested in a kitty calendar earlier this year while both anxious to resume my normal life routines and completely unaware that the act of actually changing the months would be an emotionally painful experience that triggers unpleasant-to-recall flashbacks of happier (read: more ignorant) times. It's the third week of March, and I only gathered up the courage to flip to the current month yesterday.

It's going to be a long year.

I find that my internal monologue is still very kitty-centric. It's a verb (such as "to kitty"), a noun (as in "who's a good kitty?"), and in general a safe substitute for any part of speech found (usually) in song lyrics. This does not traumatize me until I realize that I'm doing it, at which point in time I usually stop, become awkwardly silent for awhile, and sink into a very introverted shell until the nauseous feelings go away. This may or may not be compounded by my conclusion that Spaz has a lisp and would excel at telling the "Knock knock/Who's there?/Panther/Panther who?" joke. So far, he has decided to not participate in any of my attempts to solicit the correct response.

I've decided that I will at some point go to the liquor store to buy a bottle of vodka and then visit the grocery store to buy some vanilla beans to infuse my own booze. Monk has asked I try the same thing with coffee beans and tequila, and produce a clone of the Melt 41 he tasted in Lakewood last month. I feel I am up to the challenge. It will be difficult to convince people that I need to take a trip to Portland just to get more of the Stumptown Kilimanjaro, though. It's a critical step in the process.

Most importantly, I will go to the liquor store on a Sunday and pay with a credit card, just because I fucking can.

This is a great period of change for me. I'm wrapping up my work in the old building before I get carted off to brand-spanking-new digs where I will get to decorate my own office in a style of my choosing. I am strongly debating taking my 24" x 36" Jackie poster into work. Pro: it's my 24" x 36" Jackie poster; it will go well with the Jackie Kennedy bobble-head doll I picked up at Big Fun. Con: it wouldn't be in my room anymore; it really ties my room together. Solution: get two.

As much as it may seem that I've gotten my life together, I'm certain that I haven't. This is an incredible simulation, but I cannot shake the sense that I am missing something, that throughout all of this I feel incomplete. I know that the incompleteness is what is driving me; the question I ask myself is if it is driving me towards some goal of completion, or if the fear of it simply keeps me perpetually running away from it.