The First Rain

To make up for the complete lack of content in my last entry, I will remark upon the phenomenon unfolding before the eyes of Oregonians around the state: The First Rain.

And, as is the case with so many natural phenomena, people are behaving in an extraordinarily stupid manner. I would have been totally oblivious to this, were not my father to call me in order to obtain directions to sidetrack a traffic accident on I-5 on his way home from work. See, the other day, I was driving to Eugene, and I was stopped in traffic in Salem. I called him to see if he could use the internet to determine th nature of the stoppage, and, in true Milan form, he's taken the idea and ran with it. So, now, he calls me to see if I can find him an alternate route home cause of the wreck.

Well, as it happens, he decides to re-route himself towards 99W and head up that way through Newberg. So guess what? There's another wreck on 99, both sides, and son of a gun, he can't go that way either. So he takes a detour to a side route, Wilsonville Road, which, my oh my, has a wreck too. So now he's plodding through traffic on a side road on his way home, and my mother and brother have decided, upon dad's recommendation, to go home early. All of our plans have been affected by this.

Which, to bring this entry back about, I just want to say, that as a result of the first rain, as is the case will all odd acts of nature, people just flip out and do stupid shit. What's up with that? Why are people such fucking morons? What about it raining heavily for the first time in months upon months makes people think that it's ok for them to continue to drive in the same manner as they had before? It's like everyone on the road somehow forgot that we spend 9 months out of the year driving in the rain, and that three months without it might, MIGHT, cause the oil and filth that normally is washed away by semi-constant rain to build up and before reconstitued by the rain. I mean, this is Oregon folks. This isn't a new thing. It's not like snow in L.A. I can inderstand those people not knowing what to do in a sudden loss of traction, but here?

I think these people think their S.U.V.s can handle anything on the fly. They figure their high center of gravity and low performance tires can handle whipping around corners and that their brakes can handle stopping 8 tons of steel while floating.

Fucking morons. I hate stupid people.

Blah blah blah

Well, in my ongoing attempt to get used to this new laptop, I'm just sitting around in various places throughout the house. Right now I'm watching Star Trek, TNG in the recliner. Good episode too, by the way. Something about time distortion, and reliving the past, blah blah blah.

So, seeing as I AM blogging, and should wax philosophic or something, I'll say this, or more accurately, pose this question: If you could relive the past, would you? What would you relive?

To clarify, I really mean relive. Not, do over, or, travel back in time, just relive. Be in your body, in your consciousness, and just do some portion of your life over again, exactly as it happened. The first thing that comes to mind is probably sex, I dunno, really really good sex. That would be ok. I mean, if you could relive something over and over, you would really only have to do any one thing once. It might really do wonders for risky behaviors, like skydiving, things like that. I mean, all you'd have to do is do it once perfectly, and then after that, it wouldn't matter anymore that you could never do it that way again, cause you could just relive that one time whenever you wanted.

So, let's work on finding some way to read the memory input in our minds and feed them back to us, so we can use mental imagery to stimulate visual, aural, etc. input. One day when I'm a brilliant neural scientist, I'll figure that out. Until then, I'll just have to work on being a scientist...or brilliant. Either works.

A New Station

So, as evidenced by this file photo, I'm writing this from my new iBook G4. My father and I went to get it yesterday from the Apple Store at the new Bridgeport mall. I think my favorite part was the explanation of how to get the Airport Extreme wireless card to work. The explanation was as follows:

"So, what you're gonna wanna do is go up to the Airport Icon up at the top of the screen. Kinda looks like a slice of pizza."

"K, got it."
"K, so then you're gonna click on it, and select "Turn on Airport" from the pull down menu, followed by which network to which you'd like to connect."
"Sure thing. Then what?"
"Then the iBook performs some Black Magic and voila! Internet."
"Ahhhh so THAT'S how it works. I always wondered what set Macs apart."

In other news, I sold my trumpet yesterday for about a grand. After fees of course, and shipping, I'm going to wind up with about $900 in my pocket. Which is good, because that remedies the monetary bind I've found myself in. On the other hand, it puts me in something of a nostalgic, ethical/moral debate about selling off something which was at the heart of so many memories for me. My parents brought up the idea of selling it a couple months ago, along with my electric guitar, both of which I have/had serious reservations about letting go of. I mean, seriously, I played trumpet forever and ever. So, letting go of them is akin to accepting that part of my life is gone. I guess I kinda wanted to hold on to those things forever, I have visions of opening a case in my attic when I'm 60 and finding my old horn, or having my grandkids pick it up and start playing, that sorta sappy thing.

But hey, think of it this way. I sold my childhood memories for a plane ticket to the rest of my life. Fair trade...I think.

Wake Up

What to say...

I have no idea any more.
Things get tossed and turned so much, so quickly. Things go from good to bad and without warning, and the nights where days were so bright turn so dark, the warmth that was turns cold so abruptly, that one must wonder if sadness such as this is the price which must be paid for the elation we seek.

I hate hearing from her. I hate that she calls me, however infrequently. I hate it because, for however much I beat myself up over the mistakes that pushed us apart forever, it's one thing for me to do it, and another entirely to come from her. Every word she speaks to me, howoever innocent, is a stab in a wound I've spent years trying to let heal, tried to stop licking. Finally, at at time when I'm prepared to leave this past behind, I'm called forth once again to stand before my tainted past and be called to judgement for sins long past, but not forgotten.
I wish Cole would have just called me tomorrow, told me about it in retrospect, rather than now. The last thing I need echoing in my head as I try to put the events of today together is her voice, haunting me.

I spent last night, and most of today, with a girl who amazes me. A girl over whom I'm pretty much head over heels. I can't recall feeling this happy around someone in a long, long time. I went today to watch her skydive, since I couldn't afford to do it myself, and it was awesome. We drove around in perfect weather with the top to her Cabriolet down smoking cigarettes and listening to DIsturbed, and System of a Down, and all I could do was smile. Seeing her that happy could have only that effect.

I went to see Corpse Bride tonight, with Brigitte, and the whole time all I could think of was that I wished it were her. We came back to my house, and she said she needed a place to stay because she lives in Hillsboro, and has an appointment here in the morning. But, when she asked me to cuddle with her a while, I told her that I really feel strongly about this girl, and that it wouldn't be right. She told that if she had known that I felt that way she wouldn't have asked either to cuddle or to stay the night, and left. I probably would have handled that a little better if I weren't in the middle of listening to Liesl's drunken anctics on the phone. I didn't think she was making a pass at me, though that's how she took my reaction. Actually, to be completely accurate, I was trying to have a civil conversation with her friend who apparently thinks very, very poor of me, after having met me at a particularly low point in a part of my past which is long dead in me. I resent deeply that I was called essentially for the sole purpose of making me feel like shit, and reminding me that there are those who will never allow my past to be seperate from my present.

It does, however, amuse me that when she, in the background while I spoke to Cole, figured out that I was with someone, immediately wasn't so eager to speak to me anymore. I asked to talk to her when Cole and I were done talking, and she was pretty quiet, and suddently needed to get off the phone. I will assume, for the sake of humility, that it was because they had arrived home and needed to tend to her boyfriend, but, I will nonetheless speculate that her interest in whether her call was interrupting something private between Brigitte and I was reflected in her interest in getting off the phone with me as well.

But, alas, it's not for me to speculate, and my interpretation is merely a reflection of my desire to think that somewhere, in her new life and her happiness that the pain which pours from tender, puckered, freshly re-opned scars is not entirely foreign to her either.

Should I feel happy that nights like these are once in 6 months, rather than a daily thing? Should I be thankful she is in my past? I mean, for all the pain and introspection my...conversations...with her bring about, shouldn't I be happy that I've managed to put such a distance between us? I don't call her and try to make her feel bad. I don't ever, ever talk to her about my love life, because I know the kind of hurt it causes to hear about it from her. I try to pay her that respect. But clearly, it's one she's not willing to pay in return. Is she trying to get me to say something? To stab back? I won't do it. I've grown too much to do that. I can't be so beaten by my past that I'd be reduced to cheapshots like that. I want to think I'm more mature than that.

I'm going to ride this plane out of your life again.
I wish that I could've stayed but you argued.
More than this I wish you could've seen my face
In the backseat staring out the window.

I'll do anything for you,
Kill anyone for you.

So leave yourself intact
'Cause I will be coming back.
In a phrase to cut these lips,
I love you.

The morning will come
In the press of every kiss
With your head upon my chest
Where I will annoy you
With every waking breath
Until you decide to wake up.

I earned through hope and faith
The curves around your face
That I'm the one you'll hold forever.
If morning never comes for either one of us,
Then this I pray to you wherever.

I'll do anything for you.
This story is for you.
('Cause I'd do anything you want me to... for you.)
I'll do anything for you,
Kill anyone for you.

So leave yourself intact
'Cause I won't be coming back.
In a phrase to cut these lips,
I loved you.

The morning will come
In the press of every kiss
With your head upon my chest
Where I will annoy you
With every waking breath
Until you decide to wake up.

The morning will come
In the press of every kiss
With your head upon my chest
Where I will annoy you
With every waking breath
'Til you decide to wake up.
-"Wake up", Coheed and Cambria

Confronting Demons

So to follow up on my previous entry, I went and met my friend's fiancé the other night. It's really hard when you meet someone to let go of who you thought they were in your head.

Well, as much as I hate to admit it, he turns out to be a really chill guy. He's been in anger management classes ever since the incident, and from hanging out with him that night, one could never tell that he had an ounce of anger in him. It took me a long time that night, and quite a few shots of tequila, before I was willing to let sink in what I knew from the moment I set foot in his apartment: that he's a decent guy, that the two of them really are in genuine love with each other, and to top it all off, he and I get along really well.

This doesn't mean I'm going to take back my aforementioned concern for her safety. And it doesn't mean I'm happy about the whole situation either. It's going to cause an inordinate amount of turmoil in both of their families, not to mention it's seriously disrupted a good many of her friendships, including mine.

All the same...I have to default to this: She is deeply important to me, and her happiness is paramount in my life. So, if she is happy, and this is what she truly wants, then she has my blessing. I have to assume that both of them are operating of their own free will, and of their desire both as a couple and as individuals, and that they are smart enough to know if the decisions they are making are poor or too dangerous. I wish you the best.

Pushed to the Brink

I've said this before, I'll re-state this for the record:

I fucking HATE stupid people.

Got it? K. I'll leave names out of this, since I've been asked to do so, but let me bounce this off y'all just to make sure I'm not overstepping my bounds being just flabbergasted as appalled.

So, I have a friend, with whom I have spent nearly day this summer. She is a wonderful person, to whom I had opened myself up genuinely. She and I were the two people around whom we could really be ourselves, no holds barred. We've been friends for years, since my junior year of college.
Well, ok, she's got two minor flaws which seem to be the cause of several recurring issues in her life, and mine too I guess because I care about her so deeply and hate seeing her hurt.
1) She has a thing for men that do bad, bad things.
2) She has a thing for dating drug dealers, or people who are very very close to hard drugs.

So, a couple three weeks ago she stays the night at my house after a long night partying with some friends. The next morning, I asked her if she wanted to date until I take off for Japan, cause after all, we spend every day together, we might as well. That day was the last I saw or heard of her for a week.
Well, just prior to that, she had finally gotten a hold of the number for her ex-dating partner's coke dealer. He was not ok with giving her the number cause he was afraid that as soon as he did, she would disappear forever from his life. We both joked about this, because their friendship was independent of doing coke.

Man, turns out I was wrong on a number of things there. So a week later, I get a call from her, and she explains to me that she has been locked up in the bedroom with none other than the dealer, and that they're a thing now, and sorta had been even before I had asked her what I did. Oh, and her ex hates her now, and they don't talk anymore. So basically, he was right about why he didn't want to give her his number.

Well wait, this gets better. Her ex from like a year ago, see, they broke up because she had him thrown in jail for shoving her into a wall, and then again when he violated his parole and/or restraining order. There was a lot, a LOT of animosity between them. I was around when she finally told him that she never wanted to speak to him ever again. I watched her cry night after night dealing with his verbal abuse, and the way he made her feel about herself. And I watched her time and time again slip, and either hang out, or fool around with, or talk to this guy and re-start all the crap she was trying to leave behind.

Oh, on an aside, what two things can you tell me about this guy?

So, she diappears for a couple weeks for this new guy, and then I get a call from her yesterday with some news. Her ex from a year ago showed up at her door the night before. Dropped to one knee, and proposed to her.

And she said yes.

What in the Holy name of Christ were you thinking?! What in the FUCK gave you the brilliant idea that MARRYING this guy would be a GOOD idea?!

Now, I have a degree in psychology. I know why she thinks this is a good idea. I understand the nature of abuse, I know what it does to people, I know about the learned helplessness people come to have, I know about the need to be needed so desperately as to go to extremes like abuse to keep someone. I know that people feel like they can help someone, or that they don't deserve better than that, or even that they like the abuse.

But what I don't understand I guess, or what hurts me the most, is that she's committed herself to a life which can never get better. I care about her deeply, I've been there for her through some crazy shit, as has she for me, there have been so many nights sitting there listening to her tell me how she has to clean up her life and make better choices and how we're here for each other. And to see all that thrown out the window, ignored, and for what?

How am I supposed to feel about that? How can I be there for someone who dives headfirst into not only a life of potential misery, but stabs me in the back to do it? Should I be happy I dodged a bullet and write it off? I mean, I'm leaving pretty soon, and theoretically, that could be it. I could walk away from it all and never think about it twice....but how can I just abondon someone who is doing something so clearly self destructive?

I guess it's not my life, and not my set of decisions to make, but how do you be there for someone like this?

40 days and 40 nights

I got an email from Nova today. They're sending me a packet and all so I know what's going on and all, but I have been informed that Wednesday, October 26th is my departure date, and as such I have made my flight arrangements through their travel agency.

40 days. That's all I have left in this country. Suddenly the immediacy of my affairs here are coming into perspective. I suppose I could go off on a touching tangent about how fleeting our time is, and how we never know what we have until we're forced to say goodbye, and all that crap, but...I won't.

My philosophy on life has always been, to learn everything you can, and then move on. Clearly, it's coming to be my time to move on. I've been telling myself it's been time to move on with my life for years, years now, and now I'm finally here. It's odd though, the disparity between what I've always assumed and the way it's turned out. When you're at a point when you've learned what you're meant to, and open yourself up to the Universe, and allow it to bring new things into your life, you figure it's something of a passive process. People here often put that in terms of giving yourself up to Christ, and allowing Him to do His work, without your interference. I don't necessarily subscribe to that partfcular interpretation of things, but I do certainly agree that there comes a point where you have to allow things to change, to accept that there are better things out there and to let them happen.

This process though was anything but passive. I mean, I had to work my ass off to get where I am, but, in a life characterized by passivity and a failure to act, I suppose it was only appropriate that it worked out how it did. In opening myself up to change, I did the one thing which oreviously I had found myself incapable: long term dedication and constant unrelenting vigilance. And I bet you that when I'm on the plane going out there, thinking about everything that's happened and changed about me getting to that point, I'll realize that the changes I wanted most in my life came inadvertently as a result of my conscious efforts. The changes in my life I needed most probably have happened without my ever knowing, and I'm going to have one of those epiphanies where, in textbook cliché style, I'll see that everything I thought I lacked I, in fact, had the entire time. How quaint. It really makes me sick sometimes how predictable life can be. You'd think that being aware of the inner workings of the Universe would allow you some sort of leeway from having to go through it.

Ugh, but, on the same note, I guess the knowledge is what makes it all the more important that it actually happens . Cause otherwise it remains entirely theoretical, which is, as I always say, my fundamental objection to intellectualism and philosophy. Knowing something is completely different than living or experiencing it. Being aware only allows you to be potentially more efficient in accomplishing things. It doesn't mean that you don't have to go through it, or even get to skip steps. Damn our tendency to commit intellectual suicide.

So anyway. 40 days. Yeehaw.

Checking In

So I thought I would take this opportunity to check in with my goals for the summer, and see how I'm doing...Let's take a look:

1) Create some kind of sculpture. The parts used may consist only of things found at the side of the road. Each part must be signed and dated all those present at their discovery. The sculpture is commissioned in the back yard at the end of the summer.
Well, so far I have a golfball and a pillow. I need to step it up a notch.

2) Visit the Zoo.
I'll get there....anyone wanna go to the zoo with me?

3) Have at least 3 parties. 2 of which must be here at my house. This will require much persuasion of my father.
Mwahahaha. And there are more coming.

4) Have my picture taken with nearly everyone I hang out with. Exceptions being people I barely know, don't like, or people with whom I hang out under duress or unavoidable circumstance.
I really oughta get on this....shouldn't be tooooo terribly hard...

5) Hang out at the Witchita Pub on random weeknights, and see how many townies I can run into I went to high school with. See how many names I can remember, and see who remembers mine. Ran into Ryan Fisk tonight, he called me Zach. One down, many to go.
Haha nice running into you Josh, Ryan, Tim...

6) Get laid. Lord, it's been too long. And by a hot girl. None of this, lower my standards to get laid, then raise them again crap. Resist David, resist. It's not worth it.
Mwahaha...

7) Construct a small craft that uses canned air to propel itself down the sidewalk, and videotape it.
Lol...this is gonna be hillarious, I just know it

8) Come up with better goals.
Yea, nope. I got nothin.

3.5 out of 8 isn't tooooo bad. But I still need work. I think I got the most important ones out of the way....

Put that shit in my viens, Doc.

Shoot me up. Do it. Stick that shit right in my arm. Oooooooooooh....yea.....

I feel so....so invincible....nothing can get me now. But I know I'm gonna need more. I got 6 or 7 hits in today...I'll be back in a week, and two weeks after that. Today cost me $430, each of my next two will only cost $150. But damn....whatever the cost.

Nothing in Japan or Southeast Asia can get me now. Polio? I don't think so. Typhoid? Nuhuh.
Tetanus? Dyptheria? Mumps, Measles, Rubella? Not a prayer. And in a few short weeks, not even the dynamic duo, Hepatitis A or B will be able to touch me. Hell, not even the Flu is gonna get me down. I've got a prescription for Ciprofloxacin too, just in case. I'll let you look that up to see what it does. It'll be amusing for you to pick out which of its many uses for which it was actually prescribed.

That's right folks, expose me to the worst of it. I've been immunized. For the next however long, I'll have dead or dying samples of like 7 different horrible diseases in my body, as it does an autopsy on each one and my immune system gives itself the 411 on killing it. Is anyone else creeped out a little bit that the whole concept behind immunization is that you introduce a weakened version of the actual virus into your body so you can develop antibodies? Basically, right now, I have each of the aforementioned viruses, but there's almost no chance of actually contracting it in any full blown or harmful form. Only, as my doctor put it, "You're gonna feel like total crap tomorrow."

Where did all these wonderful shots go? Much to my shegrin, they didn't shoot me in the ass. Rather, I got the much more mundane shots in the arm, one right after the other during the course of casual conversation about Rennie's bar, bacon fries, the Country Fair and that nasty case of Throat Gonnorrhea going around Japan right now, which, depending on my orientation, may or may not be an issue. (May not).

I should mention though, that I really do like getting shots. Most people hate injections, but I like them. A lot. Like, almost too much. I love feeling whatever it is dissipating into my arm. It's really perverse. I know for a fact that I should never, ever do intravenous drugs. I would shoot up just for the feeling of shooting up, forget the drug itself.

Having blood drawn on the other hand, is not so cool. I hate the thought of having blood drawn. I want it back when they're done with it. Maybe it's just my imagination running wild, but I don't like the thought of someone having a repository of my DNA somewhere, frozen, waiting to clone an army of me and unleash an unstoppable tidal wave of badass onto the world. I mean think about it. It's a scary, almost paralysing thought. Bone chilling. So much cool in one place. Chilling.

So yea. One step closer to leaving the country. Go me.

Oh, and we went out to a hooka bar last night with Cole, Whitney, Mikali, Cam, and T-Bone. Yea, yea. Whitney's really cute, for the record, with the exception that I'm always reluctant to like redheads since my mother is one. But other than that she's great. And she can be a real bitch, lol. Which is a very, very good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Sitting and Waiting...

These are the two things I have left to do, as far as I know, until I get my letter from NOVA regarding my placement and ticket acquisition information.

Which, all things considered, is about 5,000x better than everything else up until this point.
I'm now past the point where any work of mine will contribute to the situation, there is nothing on my end holding this back. Nova has informed me that the Visa application process has started, and that once they're a little further along, they'll send me a letter with further instructions.

They actually emailed me the other day, asking me to resubmit to them an updated résumé, with my middle name, and explaining my trip to Japan for study abroad. So, I did so, and sent with them the explanation for the marks on my transcript for the program, and a scan of the certificate of completion I received from Senshu back in 2003. They haven't emailed me back yet saying I'm a retard, so as far as I know I'm good to go. But then again they only would have received it today, so, there's always room for something to go wrong.

I've learned that there's an inverse relationship between the amount of leeway allotted for catastrophe and the likelihood of it occurring. As a result I've all but given up thinking that everything has been taken care of, and certainly ever thinking that nothing could go wrong.

Having said that, it would be normal, and altogether expected for someone as concerned with smooth sailing as I am to hate the thought of it being entirely out of my hands at this point, and I wouldn't blame anyone for feeling that way, but, good God am I glad to be free of this. See, whereas most people would want to be in control, or at least have a hand in the process because they have an innate distrust of other people or a narcissistic lack of faith in the abilities of others, I, knowing myself, and the events which created this situation in the first place, even in light of my admitted narcissism, want nothing to do with this process any more than I have to.

I mean, this whole mess, despite all the crap I had to wade through to get here being other people putting up barriers and obstacles, are ones that existed as a result of me, even though unwittingly, fucking up. I dropped the class that, had I been able to tolerate the rather predatory and annoying man-haters in my Psych of Gender class winter term senior year, would have put my diploma in my lap back in summer of 2004 and I would have been in Japan long ago. And it was my fault it took me a year to get around to writing that paper...and then having to scramble and blah blah blah every other entry in this blog...so yea.

So, now all I get to do is sit around and wait. Thank God. Cross my fingers that everything gets done quickly enough to make the late October/early November departure. Now, see, here's where a little statistical analysis makes me worried. Forigve me please for abandoning you know, traditional, logical statistical analysis, suspend your disbelief and follow me for a second.

When you first start in on something, and you've got a lot to do, there are lots and lots of things going on, and you expect something to go wrong. And if it does, it's not a big deal, cause you're not that far into it, and generally speaking no single part of what you're doing is so important that its failure would comprimise the success of the greater goal. And if there were something like that, odds are you would go to great lengths to assure that one thing would be fine, even though some would say that on a quantum level paying so much attention to that one important thing would change the odds in some way of something happening. But anyway. . .

So piece by piece you take care of all these things, and options are exhausted. By the time you reach the end, say, of this application process, there are only a few things left, and each thing left is increasingly important. Vital, actually, to the success of the endeavor. Well, assuming that there's a constant rate of random events, and, over time, a stable rate of good and bad and neutral random things happening, this last part is particularly nerve wracking.

Because, as we define a good and a neutral event in this instance, we learn that we can essentially discard them as anything worth caring about. Because it's not like my application is really, really going to go through, like, excessively go through. Seeing that being accepted or denied is what's important, I can't really put 'accepted at the pay scale of someone with a teaching certificate' in the category of potential good random events, because the pay scale thing is dependent on already having been accepted. Good in this case is, say, Accepted, leaves Oct. 26. Neutral events don't really affect te decision either way, they're things like, I dunno, one copy of your résumé caught on fire, but we just printed another. Bad is delayed or denied, or, your visa got lost in the mail, so we can't send you out until it reappears.

Neutral events we don't really care about. Good events, well, they're what we want, so I have nothing to worry about if something good happens. So, in keeping with our psychological predisposition to only focus on the Bad, the chance of something going wrong is the only set of probabilities I'm concerned with.
People feel more comfortable with the odds when they're behind the wheel. Most of the time, unless they feel they're grossly underqualified for what's going on, like piloting a crashing plane. But when it comes to things like setting the table or putting that résumé together and emailing it to Nova, mose people want their hands to touch it so that they know for fact it went the way they wanted. People associate other people with random chance, or known risk. Makes sense, esepcially to narcissistic or controlling assholes like I'm sure we all know plenty of.

So, anyway, to go back to w hat I was explaining, given that I only care about the random chance that something bad will happen, which, given an even distribution would be 33.3%, I've got a 1 in 3 chance of something happening which would just completely suck. Now clearly the odds can't possibly be that likely for something to go wrong. But whatever, I like easy math, so we're gonna go with it, and really it doesn't matter anyway.
What I was saying in the paragraph before last comes into play here because when something goes wrong, you have to work fast to correct it to make sure it gets back on track. That's why people want to have their hands on it. Well, the ominousness of this situation is being exascerbated by the fact that at this point it's out of my hands, and were something to go wrong, there's essentially nothing I can do to correct it. So that 33% seems a lot more risky than it might have before.

See even if something goes wrong, you can turn that situation around with a little careful and expedient effort. Like that whole bit about sending in the wrong visa form, or finding out my religion class grade didn't even count towards my degree, because I could just turn around and resubmit the right form, or petition to the academic requirements committee, etc. So the actual overall risk of something bad happening is lessenned by one's ability to act and correct bad situations. So that 33% is really whatever percentage of that subset cannot be corrected, which generally is pretty small, maybe 10% of the time. So out of all the possible random events, only 3.33% are actually catastrophic. 3.33 in 100 things. Not bad odds, if you can cover your bases.

Ok, so, I have to try to bring this all together now.
So:
There are an incredibly small and narrow subset of things which can happen at this point in the application process, or go wrong, so each possibility's relative probability has increased. Additionally, the only bad things which could go wrong are catastrophic.

Despite my being so close to departure potentially that the rest is out of my hands, and should as such relax, if something were to go wrong there would be nothing I could do about it, destroying the saving grace of being able to reduce overall risk through corrective action.

So, in a perfect distribution of good, neutral, and bad events, I have a 33% chance of something bad happening. And given where I'm at in the process, and given that I have no corrective action available, those odds stay at 33%. I have a 1 in 3, instead of a 3 in 100 chance now of something happening which could completely ruin my efforts. That, in rather verbose terms, is why I'm still worried.

But I'm still relieved to have it out of my hands. This close to success, if there's only room for one thing to happen randomly, odds are well in my favor that it works out just fine. And if something does, I don't want that weight on my head. That's why it's so good that it's out of my hands. I couldn't possibly fuck this up. And knowing me, that's a very, very good position to be in.

The Bittersweet Taste of Finality

Today was truly a historic one. I went to Eugene today and picked up my completed transcripts, and sent them off to NOVA to begin my Visa application. I was the first person for summer term to be awarded their degree. I am now officially a graduate, and alumnus of the University of Oregon, after much hard work and drinking.

So there it is. The sweet, succulent taste of finality.

I know, don't remind me. The bitter. Always with the bitter. This Yin and Yang business is beginning to be an all to constant presence in my life. I knock down one barrier only to have another of a different kind present itself.

I'm getting ready to go home from work today, and Mike, the boss, gets off the phone so he can ask me if I want to come in tomorrow. I say yes, of course, since I didn't come in for Labor Day. Then he adds that next week, Rindy will be starting back up there full time since she quit her job at JC Penney cause she didn't like it. "So either tomorrow, or maybe Friday then, will be your last day."

Thanks, Fuck-o. Way to fire me so you can pay your slack ass daughter to quit her jobs and not aspire to anything. Way to leave me completely high and dry with an afternoon's notice and two months until I leave for Japan. Way to give me no way to save up for my plane ticket, or my beginning expenses.

The worst part about it, is that he's really fucking himself over. Rindy's a phenomenally shitty worker, and even at her best, she's nowhere near as good as me, and my father's going to tell Mike he's only going to come in 4 days a week now, because gas prices are making him lose money rather than earn it. So now he's losing all of his computer support, his efficiency and his knowledge base, because he just doesn't know how to run a business.

But the worst part is, no matter how much he's shooting himself in the foot, no matter how fucked he is now cause of it, I'm still out of a job.

Time to go stop in at Haggen's. Maybe Wild Oats. Maybe check Craig's list. Maybe shoot Mike in the nutsack. Whatever.

There's always SOMETHING

Cause, really, how else could it be?

It's getting to be yet another crunch time in the ongoing saga of my departure for Japan. I received the following email from Takako Makino, secretary at NOVA group, SF:

Dear David,
Blah blah blah, blah blah blah,

The above documents, completed to the standards required for submission to Japanese Immigration, need to be in our San Francisco office no later than the close of business on Monday, September 5, 2005.

Failure to submit this documentation will result in a delay of your departure.

This, of course, is not so good news. I figured that the date was arbitrary, not really based on looking at a calendar and picking something which is feasible, because, well, the 5th is Labor Day, and there's not only no mail that day, but they're probably closed that day as well. But, Having said that, it makes Friday essentially the last day to have it in, since they're closed Saturday, and long weekend, nothing would arrive in the mail till Tuesday.

I emailed the school, the registrar, the head of graduation affairs, and so on, in an effort to obtain my transcript as soon as possible, and informed NOVA of the situation.

The registrar says the fastest they can get my transcript out there is Tuesday, and, thankfully, Takiko says that should be fine.

This is a race against time, which I am getting tired of running. But that by no means means I'm going to falter in my efforts.

Just give me a plane ticket and an arrival city already!!!!!!!!!!!