I'm a twenty-two year old sysadmin currently living in Los Angeles. I will soon be living in Mountain View (in the SF Bay Area) again, where I spent almost three years prior to the LA move. I'm not sure if I'll still be a sysadmin or if I will instead be a programmer.

To live with Earl Hubbell, my boyfriend of 20 months. He used to live in Mountain View too, but moved to LA for grad school in January of 1997.

Well, that's a good question, isn't it? We care about each other deeply, but it's not clear how a return to long distance will effect our relationship. Much discussion has occured, and will doubtless continue to do so.

A friend I'm now dating. We met about a year ago, became good friends far too quickly, and then realised we were romantically interested in each other. There was a lot of angst over how to handle this honourably, only a little of which surfaced in this journal. Not long ago we started dating, which although difficult is making us both very happy.

Yes.

You really ought to look at my people page, but then again that might not be very helpful, since it only includes entries for people with homepages. Czr is Jim's housemate and effectively Earl's best friend. Czr and I are also friends, although our friendship is often fraught with tension. He's moving to the City, which is why Jim's house suddenly has an empty room in it which I'm moving into.

Rachel is Short Deadly Rachel. She quilts, takes martial arts, has a lot of knives, and is teaching me Java. She's married to Jeremy; he's an impossibly sweet-natured graduate student in biophysics. Rachel is very dear to me, although we've only been close for a relatively short time. She and Czr have been best friends forever.

Yes, I'm dating Jim. But I want a bedroom that's mine, where I can go be alone whenever I want to be without inconveniencing someone else. Virginia Woolf was right on target about that Room of Her Own thing.

Can I write about liking someone I don't know without sounding psycho? Let's see.

I'm not sure why I talk about Ceej a lot. Mostly it's simple; she's an incredibly cool person with a journal I really enjoy reading -- and, almost miraculously, we had a ton to say to one another when we met for coffee. Plus I can sort of identify with her entries from 1996, when she'd just switched to being a programmer after being a technical writer for a while. Reading about her career change makes me more hopeful that mine will work.

There's more to it than that, though. I like reading Ceej's journal because her life is something like mine. We (did and will again) live in the same general area. We're both geeks. Our friends tend to play the same games, though drinking seems more common in her social circle than it does in mine. This makes reading about her life intriguing in a way which many journals are not. I am not quite certain why.

I couldn't figure out a graceful way to mention that Jim (who starts showing up in my journal off-handedly in July, and more seriously in November -- except entries after August aren't available yet due to needing reformatting) and I are dating, and I know some people who used to read the journal would remember some of the angst. Plus I started thinking a lot about 'Why do I write about Ceej so much?'.

Email me. I like getting email from people who read my journal. It's ego-boo. It makes the time I spend doing this more worthwhile. It inspires me to write more.