The defeaning silence that you may have noticed suddenly appearing in the last entry is due to my machine suddenly forgetting something vital about being on the network. You see, when I leave my telnet connection to this machine idle for long enough, it times out, and I have to reconnect -- a more complex process than it should be because since my company moved we've changed all sorts of identifying information, so flick.com (the machine hosting requiem, for those of you coming into the story late) doesn't recognise me as a friendly person unless I go through another account first. So anyway, my journal window idled out, and meanwhile my machine lost track of itself, and when I tried to telnet back over it opened up blank windows for me which never managed to connect. When I got in this morning I rebooted, and suddenly everything was all better. I think I blame NFS, for all the good that does me. Really, I'm light-hearted about it all, but it is frustrating, to have a dozen things to write about and suddenly to be unable to.

And what are the dozen things, you ask? We will get to those soon, gentle reader. First, however, the music dictates something else.

More Suzanne Vega, today; this album (the self-titled one) reminds me of Diony & Arawn even more than Solitude Standing, which I was listening to yesterday. And not just them, but of many other Amber-related things as well. It's bewildering how a virtual community filled with people pretending to be other people could have such a palpable history, like a real life. But it does, somehow. It really does. And this album... Rand made me a copy of it early in 1994, when I complained online that I had so little music to listen to that I was willingly listening to Air Supply. He sent me other music as well, Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan and The Story, but this was the first of the tapes I fell in love with. I remember listening to Cracking over and over and over, identifying with it so much even though I couldn't really see why (I do now). Small Blue Thing reminds me of Cadence, and Some Journey much later on became associated with a friend with whom there were definite sparks that we quietly agreed not to explore. The Queen and the Soldier became the quintessential Diony song, and Knight Moves was all about Constantine and his problematic relationships with women. An entire tapestry of memories, locked up in one album. It feels both wonderful and a bit scary to touch it.

Diony didn't prefer solitude, really; it was just all she had. Eventually she figured out how to connect with people, which had its own set of problems but was preferable in the long run.

Can I ever take all of this meaning and symbol and character and emotion and turn it into something that the rest of the world can read and understand, if they choose? I do have a plethora of logs from that time, but the logs only convey so much, and of course there were dozens of other people involved, who might not want their roleplay posted for the world to see -- although at seven years remove that seems like less of an issue. And what if I decide to turn the tapestry of that time into one story, my version of the story? Would it be ethical, when dozens of people contributed to the tapestry? I really don't know the answer to that.

Music has switched to an album of covers of Richard Thompson songs (Beat the Retreat), so I think I can now write about the dozens of things which have been going on. To begin with, I am still with my poor company, although I've sent out two copies of my resume to friends, and am contemplating sending out a few more. I'm deeply confused about what I want to do; on the one hand, I am ethically opposed to aiding in the success of the people who bought us. On the other hand, the people I work with locally are outstanding, and I think that if I can stick with it for a few months I might learn a hell of a lot about software engineering, which is not a subject I have a lot of familiarity with. Programming, yes, that I can do, but software engineering is something else again. What to do? Meanwhile, we've moved to a new space in Sunnyvale, which is about ten minutes further from my house, twenty minutes further from Norm, twenty minutes further from my conversion tutor... but twenty minutes closer to my massage therapist, and an unknown amount of time closer to my Japanese class. The space itself is small and overly flourescent and too open (and thus too noisy), but it's about right size for the number of people we have, and is a short walk from all sorts of food, which is a big advantage over the previous space. If I thought I was going to be here long-term I think I'd be more concerned about some of the layout problems, but for a month or even six weeks it's certainly livable.

Jim and I went to IKEA this past weekend, with Chris* (Chrisber & Christy), and returned home with much furniture. Our haul included a beautiful round dining room table of finished pine, a small square table of unfinished pine for the kitchen (with drawers in the sides), five wooden shelving units (two for kitchen pantries, the rest for the garage), some wooden endtables, a cute plastic endtable that one could float candles (or cool soft drinks) in, an office chair for me, some wooden chairs to go with the kitchen table, and a basketful of stuff I am not going to enumerate. Worth noting, however, are the adorable mini-teasets they had in the children's department; I bought two, since they're the perfect size to do tastings with, and come with cups and a tiny little bamboo box that just cries out to have sushi placed inside of it. Jim has already built everything for the dining room and kitchen, so now it is my task to organise the kitchen using all the new storage space.

Ah, but first it is my task to go to Japanese! More tomorrow, I hope.