Productination

The bill for our meal was $16.70.

I was completely satiated by my “hobo breakfast” and was particularly pleased with the pancakes which were perfectly crisp and fluffy. My date seemed happy with her California scramble. It was a good, solid meal, aside from the corned beef hash that tasted of fish (I suspect they were using the same oil for everything).

I love eating breakfast and breakfast foods. I feel incredibly fortunate to have lived near an abundance of such cheap and greasy, and the occasionally fancy, restaurants in Berkeley. I will eat breakfast foods at any time of the day. Today, we enjoyed sleeping in and didn’t eat until about two in the afternoon.

Before leaving my apartment, I had casually counted the cash in my money clip and commented that we were “rollin’ with nineteen dollars” today. She laughed and said sarcastically, “wow, what a baller.”

Now that the bill had arrived, it was clear that I was about a dollar short. Certainly, a dollar meant almost nothing to me, but in this case it was the difference between a nice tip and a lousy one. As someone who has worked in the service industry in the past, I knew that a tip could sweeten or sour someone’s entire day.

I had some more cash in my car, my emergency parking fund.

“You don’t have any cash on you?” I asked.

“Well, I have some nickels,” she said.

“I can’t leave nickels, hon,” I said, “I’ll be right back.”

“You know, you can always come visit me sometime… ;)” she wrote.

It was nice dating a girl who lived only two miles away.

San Francisco spoiled me; being only seven miles on each side, the city of San Francisco packs an entire city into much smaller space than Los Angeles. LA has a way of warping distance. Often times, I find myself driving 15 or 20 miles out to a night club or concert hall, then driving the distance back at the end of the night.

Living two miles apart practically made us next-door neighbors.

I had already told her earlier in the night that I was just taking it easy, and that I’d be getting some gelato later, and that she could come if she was in a good mood.

I love gelato; it’s like some sort of Italian super ice cream. Good gelato is dense, flavorful, and has a nice chewy texture. I’ve been to a bunch of places in LA, but the best I’ve found so far is at Al Gelato in Beverly Hills, about 12 miles away from my house.

We were way past the point of pretending not to be interested in each other. She made no effort to hide her affection for me, nor did I her. Didn’t she get that I was inviting her? Did she really have to send me such a cute, but frankly unsubtle, message?

Of course, I’m never one to discourage.

“K, I’ll pick you up at 9:30” I wrote.

Most people don’t know the myth of Sisyphus and have heard only of his punishment.

When Sisyphus heard that Esopus’s daughter was kidnapped by Jupiter, he offered to give Esopus this information, in exchange for a gift of water to his Citadel. He knew that withholding this information for a ransom would earn him grief in the underworld, but willingly traded punishment in the afterlife for earthly pleasures.

He managed to trick Thanatos, the god of death, to chain himself up, thus preventing any human from dying. When Thanatos was eventually released, his first victim was Sisyphus, but before dying, Sisyphus had told his wife to pitch his body into the town square. Once in the underworld, he pleaded to Persephone that he was not afforded proper burial rites, begging for a chance to correct this. Persephone kindly sent him back to the realm of the living.

It was not until he had reached a ripe old age that he was dragged back to the underworld and sentenced to serve his eternal penance.

According to some, Sisyphus was an evil, cunning, trickster and troublemaker. According to Camus, though, he was an absurdist hero, punished because he scorned the gods and cherished life. In his interpretation, Sisyphus is conscious of the futility of his eternal toil, and upon fully accepting it, actually appreciates it.

He imagines Sisyphus happy.

I had spent the entire day working furiously, but making no progress. Every time I put out one fire, newer, more interesting fires sprang up all around me.

It had been weeks since I saw the bottom of my inbox; the mountain on top seemingly pullulating. I knew it was possible to conquer the pile and get ahead, I had done it in the past, but I inevitably let myself slip.

It didn’t take much slippage before I found myself plummeting down the spiral of nega-productivity.

Alas, such is the curse of the eternally urgent. When constantly tasked with putting out fires instead of working on secondary goals or structural changes that make life easier in the long run, those things never get done, and I set myself up for more disasters down the line.

Even so, at the moment there were fires to put out, so I accepted my fate and zestfully charged forward.

When I heard that Jonathan Coulton was performing tonight at The Echoplex, I didn’t think much of it. Jonathan Coulton is the Ben Folds of geek rock. It is my opinion that he tries a little too hard to be clever. Certainly, I am in the minority of my friends when I voice this opinion.

When I realized Wil Wheaton would be in the audience, my interest in the event suddenly skyrocketed. Apparently, this was a combination JoCo concert and John Hodgeman book tour type hybrid event?

After much internal debate, I fell back on my guiding principle of living a storyworthy life. If nothing else, I’d get a blog post out of this.

Plus, you know, nerd chicks.

Upon my arrival, I noticed that there was no one sitting at the ticket desk to take my money. I pushed open the door and just walked in. Amazing! I immediately took the $15 I would have spent on my ticket and bought $18 worth of beer.

Dang beer, why you gotta be so expensive in venue?

The first time I was at the Echoplex, an experimental “noise rock” band was playing, and everyone was numbly lumbering around the dance floor. The sight of everyone seated, while a chubby man in a suit and an unusually sharply dressed JoCo bantered on stage, was quite a strange scene to behold.

Beers in hand, I settled by a spot near stage left. I was feeling pretty good, and found myself actually enjoying both Coulton and Hodgeman. It was when Wil Wheaton took the mic that I lost it, though. Of course, he was just another audience member, asking Hodgeman a question during the Q&A, but even so, I got giddy knowing he was sitting a few, scant feet in front of me.

Being an alcoholic lightweight, I was afraid that I’d say something really stupid to him. Perhaps against better judgment, I wrote him a fan letter on a page from my moleskine. In it, I gushed, fanboy like, but I also wrote sincerely about how he played a big part in my desire to pursue a writing career, and how I really appreciated his positive outlook on life.

“We are all the products of our choices,” and “Don’t be afraid to suck,” are two gems that, while I’ve heard them elsewhere, stuck with me when Wil uttered them because of their simple elegance.

After singing along with “Re: Your Brains,” I caught Wil checking his Blackberry. Already, another fan had lined up next to me. I gently put my hand on Wil’s shoulder. Completely solid in himself, he would not be interrupted (presumably tweeting), and he turned around when he was good and ready.

Slightly tipsy, I said, “Wil, I’m a huge fan.” “Thank you!” he said. “I wrote this for you,” I said, handing him the letter and running away.

“Ok? Thanks!” he said, slightly surprised and laughing.

I was so happy and nervous I completely forgot about the nerd chicks.

I was feeling a mixture of cold, loneliness, hunger, and sadness.

I was in the perfect mindset to enjoy the bowl of ramen in front of me.

Don’t let the skinny façade fool you, I am an emotional eater, and one of the foods that provides the most comfort for me is noodles in soup. There is just something very satisfying in the act of eating a hearty bowl of noodles in flavorful broth. I dunno if it’s science or nothin’, but it helps me clear my mind.

When I was younger, I had much greater access to good noodles of many different cultures. They were readily available to me, and I took advantage. When I moved to Los Angeles, I had to start the search anew; finding good food was a challenging and exciting adventure again.

I began my search for noodles by looking into Vietnamese restaurants in the area. According to the internet, there were no good Vietnamese restaurants near where I lived. My taste buds verified that indeed, one had to go as far as the valley, or that other valley, to get anything decent.

I then leveled the barrel of my sawed-off culinary shotgun at the ramen shops. Certainly, with Los Angeles’s successful Japanese population, there had to be some good ramen in this town. I eventually found a couple gems, including one place that I’d be ready to give the crown of best ramen in LA.

Sure, it was a little expensive for comfort food ($11 for essentially noodles, broth, pork, rice, and salmon roe) but it is alwaysworth it. From the moment I sat down and first inhaled the steam from my broth, to the time I looked at the bottom of my empty bowls, I didn’t look up.

I left transformed, feeling enriched and uplifted.

I was flying home down the 10W, doing a carefully calculated 84 miles per hour, when I saw the familiar red glow of brakelights materialize in the distance. People were slowing down up ahead, but fortunately, there was still plenty of room between the cars. Without decelerating, I simply wove in and out of traffic, like a fish swimming through razor blades, until only open road remained in front of me again.

Whenever I work on a project, no matter the scale, there are always barriers of some kind. At some point in the project, I will be stopped by external forces or circumstance, waiting on something from someone else, or simply lacking creativity. When these events inevitably occur, I do not let them slow me down. I work on some other projects for a while, or another aspect of the project, and leave the blocked issues to my subconscious.

And so, when I broke two cameras last week, I took the opportunity to focus on a few other projects as I waited for repairs and my new camera in the mail. It is unfortunate that I fell behind a few days, but I continued writing, and I grew in other directions while I waited.

However, seeing as this is supposed to be a daily project, I forced myself today to go back through my archives of unused pictures, pick a few to edit, and throw them up. I do want to keep up the pace, even though I am blocked in this particular area, because it’s important to me to stay consistent as much as possible.

N was a kindly old man with a Scandinavian accent.

“Oh you brought your collection!” he joked, as I pulled out my second broken camera. After he wrote it up for me, I grabbed my skateboard and turned to leave, when he started his story.

He started out as a camera repairman in 1969, freelancing for a bunch of shops in the area. Every week, he’d drive by, pick up a box of broken cameras, and return the box of fixed ones the next week to get paid. It was an ideal situation as he loved working with cameras, not customers.

At the peak of his career, he was servicing 21 different shops.

The mileage started to wear on him, and he decided to open his own. He was successful for many years, until the digital revolution struck. He had been unable to keep up with the technology; it just moved too fast.

Now, he was the shop owner, renting his hole-in-the-wall storefront for $1200 a month, outsourcing all his work to contractors and getting only a cut of the profits. He told me he had to sometimes dig into his credit cards to stay afloat, but that he wasn’t ready to give in yet.

I had found his camera repair shop on Yelp, he had gotten good reviews and was one of the few camera repair shops in my area. The other one was one of a chain, and the salesman there tried to hard sell me on a camera I didn’t want, and was about to charge me $35 for an estimate.

I wanted to help N out; I hate seeing small businesses get squeezed out. I also knew I wasn’t responsible for keeping him out of the red.

I left and waited for the estimate.

Coldplay wafted through my Klipsch ProMedia 2.1’s, and she fell silent. I looked over and noticed that she was tearing up. I gave her a hug and she started crying. She must have had some sort of previous significance tied to this song, or she just really connected to Chris Martin’s soft words and piano. I gripped her tighter and told her it was ok, encouraging her to let it out.

A few hours earlier, she had sent me a message.

“Hey, what are you up to?” she wrote.

It was a typical 10:07, Saturday night in LA. I was considering going out. Even so, I knew that my friend J was feeling kinda sad about a breakup lately and wanted to make sure she was OK.

“Not much, what’s up?” I wrote back.

“depressed as fuck,” she wrote.

“I’ll pick you up in 20 minutes,” I fired back.

I took a quick cold shower, threw on some clothes, and jumped in my car.

Thoughts of her hurting herself flashed through my mind. Was this a cry for help?

I made it to her place with two minutes to spare. She came outside, gave me a long hug.

“You’re amazing,” she said.

“What? You know I care about you. Any good friend would have done the same,” I said.

“You’ve always been there for me,” she said.

I wondered if she was sober. She usually wasn’t so forward with her affection for me.

We made smalltalk as I drove back to my place. Whatever was bothering her, she didn’t yet want to talk about. If and when she wanted to, I knew she would, there was no need for me to force it.

We spent the rest of the night, chatting, giggling, watching movies, and listening to music.

It feels good to make a difference.

It was days like this that made me not want to get out of bed.

It wasn’t because I was anticipating a bad day or anything, just that I felt so warm and secure in my bed.

I love autumn and winter.

People sometimes ask me why I have a sleeping bag on my bed. The truth is, we always used sleeping bags when I was at home, in case we ever wanted to go camping. There was no reason to buy extra comforters and leave our sleeping bags in the closet.

My parents were very pragmatic in that respect.

Certainly now, as an adult, I can see the appeal of having actual matching comforters, but that’s not really a high priority for me. My sheets feel awesome against my skin, my comforter and sleeping bag definitely keep me warm. Perhaps the sleeping bag looks a little strange, but who am I trying to impress? Anyone coming back to my room wouldn’t care about such trivialities.

I have only seen snow a few times in my life. It never really snowed in the areas in which I’ve lived. In San Francisco we used to get hail.

Hail is like snow, except meaner.

Even so, I love the cold weather much more so than the hot weather we’re accustomed to here in Southern California.

I felt extremely comfortable as the cold air blew into my room, hitting my face, The molecules on the surface of my body excited the air around it, hitting the insulating comforter and sleeping bag, and bouncing back to me, keeping me warm. My phone read 7:00. I smiled, pulled the sheets tight around me, and drifted back to sleep.

I was gripped by defeat as I walked down the hall. I felt crushed, resigned to my fate. I looked over the papers for the third time, making sure I hadn’t left anything out.

I didn’t want to have to do this again.

“Any graduate student who withdraws, cancels his/her registration or does not register in any term must apply for readmission to the Graduate Division,” said the form. It was perfectly clear; withdrawing now meant I’d have to apply all over again if I wanted to come back. My poor grades and spotty enrollment record would make it much more difficult for me to get in a second time. Realistically, this was goodbye, the final nail in the coffin and the official stamp on a decision that had been yearlong in the making.

My mind flashed back to Wednesday night, when I was lying in bed with A. She could tell something was on my mind. I said that I had something to tell her. I looked her in the eye, hesitated, and said, “I’m going to drop out.”

As ridiculous as it seems, I had no idea she’d react the way she did. I was certain that she’d leap out of bed, run away, and never want to see me again. When we first met, I thought she’d be impressed when I told her I was in grad school; I thought it was one of my major selling points, something that differentiated me from other creeps and made me a lot more attractive in her eyes. Taking that away would mean she’d have no further reason to like me, obviously.

Have I mentioned I’m a little crazy?

Her actual reaction was infinitely kinder. She just held me tighter and kissed me. I shivered. I asked her what she was thinking. She could tell that I felt very vulnerable, and that I had just revealed something that was very tough for me to say.

She said, “I just don’t want you to feel sad about your decision.”

“I don’t,” I said, “not any more.”

Last weekend, I told my parents the good news. My mom was completely shocked. She had no idea that it had come to this, and that I might be forced out. We discussed at length all the options and what had lead up to this. By the end, she had expressed her undying support for me, no matter what happened, and I was grateful. In fact, she was fully convinced that my past year in LA had been an extremely positive experience. She cited things as me caring for myself far from home and being a better driver as indicators.

I wish I shared her conviction.

My dad could not hide the disappointment from his voice. I knew he was sad for me and expected better. I had let him down. My dad has a way of sometimes putting words in other people’s mouths, or shaping what they say. I felt like he wanted me to admit that grad school was too hard for me. I made a distinction between it being too hard and me lacking drive. Finding motivation was the hard part, the rest was cake.

If only someone could wave a magic wand and motivate me to do all the things I know are good for me…

My dad called again later that weekend to express his love and support for me. I was still a bit disappointed in myself, but I took solace in knowing that both my parents would always be behind me, unconditionally. I often felt like I lived in my parents’ shadows.

And so, I thought about it all week. I mapped every detail out, every contingency. I brainstormed and tried to attack it from every possible angle, and then, I had an epiphany.

I didn’t want to fight with myself any more.

I knew what was going to happen, it was perfectly clear to me as I looked back over the past two years. Finally, I was ready to embrace it and let it go.

I picked up the forms the next day.

The administrator for my department did not try to stop me, or convince me to stay in any way. She simply asked me if I was sure, then gave me the forms. There was to be no exit interview, no debriefing to get my feedback, no pep talk nor pat on the back. It was just another routine filing of papers, just another day at the office of Computer Science Graduate Student affairs.

I gave myself one last chance to change my mind and took the forms home.

The office for my department has somewhat strange hours. The administrator seems to be there only from 1:30 to 4 or 5 in the afternoon. Seeing as how I was already working 8 hour days, I could not wait around from 12:30 to 1:30 for her to arrive. I stuffed the completed forms in an envelope, wrote her name on it, and left a note telling her to please call me if she required any further action. I did not want to come back.

Perhaps in a year or two, I would revisit the idea of school, but for now, I had made peace with my decision and was looking towards the future. The company I worked for was excited about taking me on full time, we just had to work out the numbers. I had a few books lined up that I wanted to read, and a few online courses in which to enroll. This was going to be another period of tremendous personal growth.

And yet, the feeling of loss was palpable.

I took one last look around the engineering building, tracing my fingers along its walls. I wanted something to keep with me, some sort of memory I could hold onto.

I slowly descended the stairs, pushed open the heavy metal doors to the bright midday sunlight, and skated away.