Mood:
Music: T-Pain - Bartender


Almost every techie I know makes fun of Apple Geniuses, if only by saying Genius in an incredulous tone when mentioning them, but as a geek and unabashed Apple fanboy I think it's such a cool title, and one I wish I had gotten to put on my resume earlier in my career. In full disclosure, I was actually offered the position years ago, when I had all but given up on a social-life and was looking for a weekend gig, but found out that it was full-time only, and thus impossible for me to take on with my commitment at Mozilla.

I actually remember the group interview, where we went around the room saying what we did, and when I said who I worked for the other candidates looked at me like, "Cooool! But then what are you doing here?" After they'd excused the others, the Apple folks asked me to stay and chat. "So, am I Genius material then?" I asked them. They told me that I already was a Genius, that I do what Geniuses do, and that, if I wanted to be one, I would make an exceptional Mac Genius. And so, being exceptional and all, I asked for an exception to be able to work weekends only, but was told that, unfortunately, every location that needed a Genius needed one full-time. Ah well, their loss of course! Still, it's nice to know that, if for some reason I should ever want to, I can always tend bar at Apple.

Mood:
Music: Pomplamoose - Expiration Date


I realized tonight that it's not that I have a bad life, it's that I am too far away from the things that make it good.

Growing up with siblings, and then having super-close friends all throughout school, I became accustomed to having people I'd see and do stuff with all the time and I miss that a lot. Back then I mean. Now, I feel so cut-off from everyone. Other than my co-workers, actually, it's tough to see how I make any difference whatsoever in anyone's life anymore really. Isn't that depressing?

Having had to commute so far, for so long, the idea of living right next to Mozilla was enticing enough that I think I might have overlooked the fact that in moving closer to work I would also be further from friends and family. Not that Fremont was any better, really, but as far as Fremont was from everyone, Mountain View is just that little bit further. That probably should have been more of a factor. It wouldn't be so bad I suppose if I just saw any of them more often, but that distance, man, I'm telling you, it's a silent killer.

On nights like tonight though, when I can get everyone to come out and see me, it just reminds me how much I miss them all and how much I enjoy being around them. I hate that there are some people I only ever see on special occasions -- it should never be like that. I am a better friend than that. And I've tried to make more local friends, but it's tough because I'm wary of getting too attached to co-workers and even the friends I have in San Jose, for instance, have their own friends and families and activities and stuff that I'm not a part of. That's also a lot of the reason why, when someone like Winnie or jlau comes into my life, I embrace them with such fervor when clearly those situations could have benefited from some moderation.

Still, I know I shouldn't complain. Every time I give someone a tour of Mozilla I'm reminded how spoiled I am, my apartment is ridonk, I have lots of nice things and going out with pretty girls never gets old. Really. It's everything I thought I wanted back when I thought I had nothing. Except of course now that I've got all this, and am missing all that, I want what I had before.


I guess the grass is always greener.

Mood:
Music: Warren Zevon - Keep Me in Your Heart


I wrote once that I've never had a best friend that didn't up and leave me. With Nicole's coming departure from Mozilla, that grievous record remains untarnished. I don't know quite why it is that I'm repeatedly drawn to these free-spirit types, what with their restlessness and rootlessness, knowing full well that we'll eventually part ways, but I'm starting to wonder now if that allure isn't at least a little bit masochistic. I consider myself to be this stabilizing, steadfast, anchor of a person and so perhaps it's just one of those opposites attract sort of things, but I'm so sick and tired of constantly having to say goodbye.

I didn't write about her much, but Nic really meant a lot to me. And I say meant not because she no longer does, but because she's leaving and I know I'll soon have to treat all of this as past-tense. She won't mean to lose touch, and I won't mean to lose touch, but as Hank Moody said it's a big world out there, and people have a tendency to lose one another. How right he is.

The most frustrating part about this, and the reason I feel strongly enough to write about it even though I seem hardly ever to write about anything of substance anymore, is because I'm not saying goodbye to one person but three. And I don't mean that in the metaphorical way that I meant with Aubrey, where she counted as two people, but I literally mean three people who I really care about will be departing from my life to parts unknown in extremely short order. The other two of which I can't even write about!

How did I get into this mess of secret relationships, anyway? My life was so much easier when it was an open book and you all got to read along, know the characters, love them, hate them, and leave feedback. Now the people I care about are hidden away, not out of fear but out of love. Because I love them enough to respect their wishes, my own thoughts on the matter be damned. Let me say that again:


Do you know how hard it is for someone as self-righteous as I am to act in such a way? True story: I told my boss's boss the other day that I don't do what my manager tells me to do, I do what I think is best. That's how strongly I feel about my inner sense of right. Yet, here I've let these two, in a way, dictate what I can say to all of you. It's not right I tell you! I hate not being able to write about this the way that I want. Hate hate hate. Because then not only will they forget about me (like they always, always do), but without the ability to write about it all (like I always, always do), I'll forget about me, too.

In middle school, like most everyone else at the time, I wore L.
In high school, I discovered that M fit me better.
About 4 years ago, I switched to S; It fit better still.
Now, I wear XS. Which means I am shopping almost exclusively online, since XS doesn't seem to exist for men in real life.

I've weighed about the same for the past 15 years, but if all you had to go by were my clothes you'd think I were shrinking.

"The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.

The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.

The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we’re pretty much on our own.

These are all things with a provable relationship to human happiness. Instead, society is busy preparing us for all the decisions that have a marginal effect on human happiness. There are guidance offices to help people in the monumental task of selecting a college. There are business schools offering lavish career placement services. There is a vast media apparatus offering minute advice on how to furnish your home or expand your deck."

Mood: <3
Music: Landon Pigg - Falling In Love At A Coffee Shop

"To tell u the truth its hard to come across a guy like u. Ur honest, funny, intelligent, independent, and ur good looking and u have a killer smile.  To add to all that ur sweet, caring, and u have a great personality. I'd have to say its pretty hard to find a guy who tops u."

I don't know how happy I should be that maybe the most flattering statement ever made about me was done via text, but that's the world I'm living in right now and I can't say it bothers me too much just what medium something that nice was delivered in. None of it's true, of course, but the fact that I've been able to dupe this poor girl into thinking all these things about me is still pretty damn gratifying!

I kid, I kid.

The truth of course is that I don't know how to deal with praise (something very Scorpio of me bt-dub) and so I deflect and I joke, but really I am touched. Not just because of what was written, but because the girl that wrote it is herself just oh so very impressive. And I didn't want to turn it into this back and forth thing where we try and out-compliment one another, because that just takes away from the sincerity of what's said, but I did feel the need, at the very least, to respond in kind.

(And, maybe, to highlight just what it is about this girl that has me jumping through all these hoops, when, to be perfectly honest, I am making every other girl do all the hoop jumping.)

Now, some of this is going to already be familiar to her, since I said a lot of what I'm about to write on the phone to her that night, but anyone that knows me knows that, because of the way that I blog, I sort of live life twice.

Anyway.

The other night she asked me why it was that what I said felt different than what I wrote, and my answer came in two parts:

• I have more time to think about exactly the message I want to come across when I write.
• I think she was misunderstanding the gravity of what it was that I was saying to her.

The first one's easy enough to understand I think, without any context whatsoever, but for the sake of completeness what I said about that was that I'm extremely careful to write what I do, the way that I do, because I know that there's an audience, and that with them comes some consequence. Where-as when I say things directly to her, I have only her reactions to think about.

Part numero dos, however, is harder to talk about without context. Basically what I said though was that while I don't believe that anyone is perfect, that I did believe that she happened to be perfect for me. The way I worded it actually was "ideal." I thought she was ideal for me. And I can understand how that doesn't initially come off as all that romantic a thing to say to someone, but when I went on to further explain what I meant by that, I think she understood for the first time just how completely I'd fallen for her.

What I'd done was made an analogy to a list. A list that everyone makes, consciously or subconsciously, about what they want in another person. And I'd written about this before, how when you fall in love whatever list you had you kind of throw out the window and the person you love becomes the list. And that's what she was to me, only not in any way I'd ever known before her. She wasn't just smart, or just beautiful, or just kind, or just funny, or just... anything. She wasn't even some long combination of these things. She was everything. She was the entire list, and I didn't need to change it or throw it out. She was it. Plain and simple. The ultimate compliment I could give, really. And when I said that, and when she got that, I could just feel the smile on the other end of the phone. I swear to God, I could feel it. And I live for that feeling, you know? That butterflies in your stomach, can't talk without smiling, can't laugh without squealing, can't walk without skipping, want to shout it from the rooftops you're so happy, want to brag about it to your friends you're so lucky kind of feeling. The feeling of being hopelessly in love.

Mood:
Music: Eminem - Insane


Angella: hi sir
Sean: hi there
Angella: how are you sir
Sean: not great
Angella: what's wrong?
Sean: just too much going on
Angella: are you feeling overwhelmed because of the move?
Sean: a little
Sean: it's not just me, i'm moving mozilla as well
Sean: but that's not even what i'm really bothered by
Sean: i have a personal dilemma
Angella: well i'm not going to pressure you to share if you don't want to
Angella: but you know i'm here to talk if you need to vent
Angella: i know you're very private
Sean: do you think that?
Angella: yes
Sean: even with all that i blog?
Sean: and all that i facebook?
Angella: i think you reveal what you want to reveal
Angella: but things that really bother you you keep to yourself
Angella: like as much as you share with people i think you only consider a handful of people your close intimate friends
Angella: does that make sense?
Sean: yes
Sean: and that's very insightful of you

When I was in high school, I knew this girl, Jenelle, and the relationship I forged with with her would affect how I viewed and dealt with all future relationships from that point on. It was, even to this day, the most complicated relationship I'd ever maneuvered, and the lessons I learned from it were both numerous, and invaluable. She was the first of her kind, really, and the archetype for what I now commonly refer to as a best friend.

The thing that made Jenelle, and so my relationship with her, so very complex were her dualities. She was famously bad to other people, but, for reasons I still don't quite understand, endlessly good to me. She used people, she lied to them, and what's worse seemed to be able to turn it all around and make herself seem like the victim through it all. Crazy manipulative. She drove one of my other friends almost to the point of suicide for Christ's sake!

But, she wasn't like that to me. She didn't use me. She couldn't, I was completely without assets at the time. No car, no job, nothing. She didn't lie to me, either. There was no point, because I never repeated what she told me to others. And she never even tried to enlist me on her side of anything, or get me to see things her way. She, and her family really, just took me in and accepted me. No strings attached. She'd cry to me about all the problems that teenage girls endure, have me regularly stay the night, and just generally treat me really, really well.

So what was I to do, then, when her and some of my other friends (who were victims of the aforementioned using and lying) ended up getting into a big enough argument that sides needed to be chosen? To this day, I can still clearly remember how brilliantly I handled the situation, but the price I paid was dear, and the steps I took to try and broker a peace were downright Machiavellian.

Now, even though I'm not going to divulge what happened back then, the reason I bothered to tell this story, without actually telling this story, is because I feel like it's happening all over again.

Mood:
Music: Billy Preston - Nothing From Nothing



You know, this probably won't be your favorite birthday gift, but I'm almost sure it will be the one with the most thought put into it.

I remember this one time I said, "I feel like I'm renting your life." And you shot back that I wasn't renting it, I was part of it. And just that single sliver of interaction gave away so much about us I think. How different not only our perspectives were, but our experiences. Differences that I'm thankful for, because you, more so than anyone else, have caused me to re-examine life -- or at least the way I live it. And it wasn't through suggestion, but invitation. You put new options on the table and had me asking myself, "Well, why the Hell not?"

For your birthday, I wanted to write about how, against all odds really, you became my best friend. You might not think much of it, but if you knew just how thoroughly you've broken the mold for that position you'd realize how special you must be to me to have done so. To do that though, I had to figure out how it happened. How you went from co-worker -- a category shared with a bunch of awesome people -- to one which has only ever been occupied by a singular person at any given time. The most storied category in my life. To do that though, I had to go back in time. So I did. Back to the beginning. Back to our very first conversations.

And I read.

And I watched as jokes turned to talks, and talks turned to walks, and walks turned to secrets, and secrets turned to promises. I read every single conversation we'd ever had, from the day you started all the way up until today. I read about camping, and my birthday, and your drama, and sharks, and my drama, and Skins, and bum gloves, and GG, and Whistler, and all the good days and bad days where we'd vented to or leaned on one another just over IM. And then put all that into the context of how little you and I, in particular, actually say and do and share over IM. And it was so... unbelievable. I mean, to have that much record say so little, in the grand scheme of things. If you look back at my blog, I feel like most of my relationships were captured here relatively successfully. Not so with you, though. There's hardly a mention of you, and if our IMs hold so little weight, and the blog hasn't got much anything about you, then how did you do it?

And what I found out through all of this, through this trip down my digital memory lane, is that I didn't know. I didn't know how a little white girl from New Jersey, as you once said, got to where you did with me when every other person before you was so completely different. But what I did know, and now knew for sure, was that you had, indeed, gotten there.

Happy Birthday Nicole.