1999

1999 friday, 1 january daily thought crime: holidays are an expensive trial of strength. the only satsfaction comes from survival. --jonathan miller * * * * * * it's actually here and i really did live to see it. i never would'a believed it. new year's in honolulu can truly be compared to breakfast in beirut during a terrorist attack, or midnight in iraq during a cruise missile crisis. the building i live in is sandwiched between chinatown and honolulu harbor. it's a beautiful place with a nice view. but it gets really wacky during holidays. the inhabitants here are fireworks junkies. a few hours before midnight things start popping and it doesn't stop until they run out of ammo. by the time midnite rolls around the air is already full of black powder smoke from the local kids in the street popping their thousands of rounds of various calamitous noisemakers. the noise is deafening at times--and if you don't close your windows your apartment fills with smoke. it's amazing. even with most of my windows closed the smell of black powder explosions gave me a sore throat. my throat still is itchy & scratchy this morning. and speaking of itchy and scratchy, my poor kitty almost died of fright during the attack/celebration. the kids don't just pop one firecracker at a time. they pop hundreds or thousands at a time. it sounds like dozens of machine-gun attacks. my poor kitty almost died of fright. every time she would begin to calm down from one blast, another would start and she would run for cover again. and then at midnight the real fireworks out in the harbor begin. they are beautiful but they add to the mayhem and last for nearly half an hour, non-stop. i live very near-by. i can watch it from my bedroom window. the explosions flash and light up my house like daytime. and as the big fireworks increase in intensity, the kids really pour it on. they ignite the remainder of their cache. i live on the sixth floor, relatively low in my 30 story building, about as tall as a roman candle goes up after it's been launched. how do i know this? last night at midnite during the mayhem my bedroom lit up bright green and red. i looked outside and saw repeated colorful explosions about twenty feet away. someone was in the street lighting their candles and it was coming up next to my window and exploding. it was amazing. it was exciting. but now i know what it's like to be on the receiving end of incoming fire, and i don't wanna be there if the rounds are packing lead. this morning the streets are filled with tiny bits of red fireworks paper. it's like new york city after a tickertape parade and it smells like gunpowder. it was fun but i'm glad it only happens a few times a year. i guess next time will be chinese new year. maybe my kitty will recover by then. saturday 30 january 1999 daily thought crime: put it off till later. * * * * * * this month went by way too fast. i don't know what happened but whatever it was i didn't write much of it down. i guess i've been playing too much chess. saturday february 27, 1999 this has been a very eventful february. i'm not quite sure if i should feel lucky or unlucky. one good thing is that everytime something bad happened to me it wasn't long before another thing happened which took my mind temporarily from the preceding bad thing to the current circumstance i'd been thrown into. i honestly tried to make the effort to write it down as it happened, but i must have been so traumatized that wasn't able to do it before something else happened. at least that's my current excuse for not writing it down. maybe i'll come up with some better excuse later.... the first thing i remember happening to me this feb. was my adventures on wall street. my investments took a big hit due to a mixture of technical problems, bad luck and my stupidity. i'm not sure which order i should list those three things. but it all worked out in the end to cost me about one-third of my holdings. however i am still considering myself lucky. it could have been much worse. the second big thing to happen was my job. my manager called me in and the first thing she said was, "do you like your job here?" i knew that was an ominous question. i told her of course i did and she followed up with a statement which basically meant that if i didn't improve my onthejob performance i could be fired within the next 3 months. this was not good because in my opinion i am doing fine in my job performance and improvement would just take more effort than what i care to put out. but before i could get too upset about thatevent i found that an opportunity was becoming available for me to transfer to the department at work that i wanted to go to in the first place but there were no positions available at the time i was hired. so i applied for that position and was accepted. however, this new position is a downward move as far as pay. so my hourly wage will go down by 40 percent. this is not a good thing. i was wrestling with these events and trying to live my life with what little good attitde i had left another unexpected circumstance poked itself into my life and reared its ugly self. my main wheelchair, the device i depend on for 99.9 percent of my independence, had a stroke. i was at the store buying groceries and noticed its operation was becoming less and less responsive to its joystick-controlled movements. by the time i got home the chair was hardly operating at all. it was a miracle i made it home at all. upon entering my apartment the chair completely stopped. i was forced to get out and crawl to my bed where i could get into my manual chair and use that to get around the house. my manual chair is only really effective enough for me to use in the bathroom because it is so short i can't really reach anything from it. things like the kitchen sink were inaccessible to me, not to mention food or cooking. and this happened on a sunday, so i was forced to just survive till monday morning. i did have a spare power chair but the batteries were dead and unchargeable. on monday i was able to reach the repair people and to make a very long and painful story short, i survived. by thursday i was back in my regular chair. miraculously i only missed one day of work. this weekend i am just trying to recover from the month of february. hopefully march will be better. i just feel lucky to be continuing this game of life. sunday february 28, 1999 two days in a row? oh my goodness. can i keep this up? it must be a record. my poor journal. it is succombing to the game of chess. it seems all my time is taken up now playing chess. but i cant help it. i've not been able to find anyone to play with for so many years. now that i found a treasuretrove of unlimited opponents and unlimited games to play at my leisure, i'm not sure if i will ever be able to find enough time to do both the journal and the chess games. hopefully this addiction will wear off and i will get back to normal. time will tell i suppose. today is my day off from work. tomrrow is also my day off. yesterday was my day off as was the day before. what does that mean? that means i have four off days in a row. what have i done with all this free time? not much. but lucky for me the chess site is down for technical problems and i have time to update things here. yesterday's entry was not meant to bellyache about my problems. i just wanted to write it down before i forgot it. those were eventful times. but i do feel very lucky to have survived them with as little damage as i did. it could have been much worse. i'm trying to see the glass as half full instead of half empty. sunday 7 march 1999 daily thought crime: trust your oracle. * * * * * tarot has always been there for me when i needed a psychiatrist and couldn't afford it. last week was another reason for me to keep that faith. february was not a good month for me in the finance/career and basic survival segment of my life. it seems i found the bottom of that cycle and continued to go in the down direction. i didn't know how much more i could take before suicidal tendencies took over. it is during these times that i consult tarot for solace and maybe a clue of what to do next. my first big question was whether i should move to a different department at work. i really wanted to in the most extreme sense because i was growing tired with my current position in customer service. however i would have to take a big cut in wages because it was a downward move in pay for me. so my decision was 1) take the job and be happier but more poor, or 2) don't take the new position (operator services) and stay dissatisfied but be able to pay rent. i couldn't decide because my financial position was getting worse but i wanted to take the operator job because that's the opening i've been waiting for since i got rehired over a year ago here in honolulu after my layoff and move from seattle where i was an operator with higher wages to begin with. for the past year i've just been in cstmr service waiting for the operator job to come available. so i consulted tarot. i picked one card from the deck. the card was 13--death. this is all i needed. i knew in an instant that i should take the new position. death is one of the best cards in the deck for me. whenever i draw that card i know good things will happen. the death card signifies transitions. death/rebirth. it's also my astrological card, death=scorpio. so i took the job. and i just resigned myself to the fact that i would have to live on much less of a weekly wage and follow my destiny. since i confronted that problem and felt relatively good about my decision i decided to consult tarot again and try to uncover the mystery of what the near future held for me moneywise at work and on wall street. at the time the stock market was correcting and i was losing lots of my money--possibly all of it. i didn't know whether to just cash in and keep what was left of my profits or sell more of my securities to cover my losses and try and stay in the game. so i drew 3 cards. they were 1) the magician: always a good card for me. a good omen. it basically means i'm using all the resources i have to manipulate things in my favor and i'm doing it in a skillful yet unusual and seemingly impossible manner. 2) the knight of swords: another good card that means i'm striving towards a goal and it could be a difficult journey to attain that goal but i will eventually get there. and 3) the 9 of pentacles--gain. this card basically means i will eventually benefit monetarily and materially in my efforts. these three cards gave me a light at the end of the tunnel. so i held on and hoped for better luck in the future. the next day the market rebounded and started going back up. this brought me back into the black on wall street and helped me keep going with some hope about my future. upon arriving at work later that day i immediately learned that my appeal not to lower my wages had been heard and instead of going down when i moved to the new position i would be receiving an increase in my wages and not a decrease upon moving back into my previous preferred position as operator. this was a big relief. i felt my luck was indeed changing as tarot had predicted. so yesterday when i went to work i felt much better about my future than the past several weeks. yesterday was actually one of the best days i have had at work. when i logged in to my terminal for what was to be the last time as a customer service rep (i'm going to operator services next week), i was prompted to select a new password which happens about once a month. when i went thru my normal selection of a new password, which is drawing a card from the tarot deck and using the card as my password, i drew 13-death. this was the best card i could've been given. this completed the circle. this affirmed for me that everything was going as it should. my transition from one job to the next was going smoothly and even being approved by tarot. i spent most of yesterday cleaning out my desk and shredding over a year of old paperwork. i effectively buried my old problems and shredded them into tiny strips. so tomorrow i go back to work and into two weeks of training for my old/new position as operator. if things go as they should i will be making almost twice as much money per week instead of half as much and will be back at my job of preference. and then after the two weeks of training i have a week of vacation which i picked last year before any of this recent stuff ever happened. after vacation (paid at the new higher level) i should come back to my job and salary which i have not enjoyed since i left seattle in 1996. it was a long and eventful move from seattle to honolulu but it looks like i may just have survived. plus i had a good time making it from one point to the next. it was a roller coaster ride and many things have occurred over the past three years, but roller coaster rides are usually the most thrilling. the key in riding a roller coaster is to just keep remembering when you are going down the hill and grinding in the low spots the track must somewhere go back in the up direction. just stay in the seat and don't jump out. i'm surprised i didn't jump out. i came very close to it several times. and i'm sure there are more valleys in the future. but i'm looking forward to them. saturday 13 march, 1999 today is my day off. i've survived my first week of training at work in my new position. two more weeks and then it will be back to a routine job. so far so good. today i'm not feeling well. it's a good time to go back to the asylum and continue the story of my adventures there. i feel like i could use a little escape right now. saturday 20 march 1999 survived one more week of training at work for operator services. next week i take calls and hope these previous two weeks of training taught me enough to actually perform the job well enough to keep it. i'm not too worried. so far it seems to be much easier and a lot less stressful than my previous position in customer service. not much is going on in my world at this time. i'm just trying to stay awake from day to day since i'm having to work during hours that i usually sleep. training hours are pre-set so i'm not able to go during my usual schedule. so i'm kinda of a zombie. i have one more week of this to get thru and then i will be able to work my normal hours again. i guess after i wake up i need to worry about taxes. april 14 will be here soon. my vacation got moved to april 11 so maybe by that date i will be awake enough to concentrate on paying the irs. maybe. its not very high on my list of concerns right now. why not put it off till the last minute? everybody else does. saturday 28 march 1999 still in cleopatra mode. being queen of de nile. am putting off everthing i need to take care of till the bitter end. why? i just don't wanna think about it. learned thursday that work hours won't change for another few weeks, so i guess i get to remain a zombie a little longer. i woke up today, my day off, ill again. it seems every day off i have i'm so exhausted from the previous days that all i can do is nothing. so today i've done nothing. tomorrow i go back to work and i think my body is subconsciously rebelling and saying no. no movement. not today. so i've just been lounging around watching pictures of WWIII on tv. misery loves company? easter sunday 4 april 1999 today's thought crime: jesus died for somebody's sins--but not mine. --- patti smith (goddess) *** flashbacks of insanity continue from the asylum *** tuesday 18 may 1999 today's thought crime: thought is crime. * * * * * * i just discovered that i got put back into the webring that i got kicked out of several months ago. i still don't completely understand why i got kicked out in the first place, except that the person who runs the ring thought i wasn't writing anything because she couldn't see it with her computer software. so she took me out and i wrote her back begging her to put me back in and then i didn't hear from her for months and about a week ago i get this strange email from her saying she "fiddled around with my code" but couldn't get anything to be viewable. so i just decided i was permanently banned from open pages because my html was so sloppy that this site could only could be viewed on webtv. so i've been looking for a webtv ring so at least someone else could see it besides me and today i looked at my index page again and discovered that i was back in the open pages ring. so now i'm really confused but i'm happy because i'm back in open pages webring. and even if no one else can see it, well at least i'm back in. so anyway that is my latest excuse for not writing in here since easter. i was thinking "why bother? no one will ever see it, why should i write it down?" now i have to think up another excuse for not writing here, hah. actually i've been depressed a lot lately because i've had the flu or strep or some strange horrible sore mouth/throat/lung thing. i think it actually might be something like lung cancer. but i am currently deep into the cleopatra syndrome and completely denying anything to do with my health, or lack thereof. so if i'm dying it's just too bad. at least i'm back in the open pages webring. thanks to kymm. but to pile ironies on top of ironies, i just looked at my horoscope and it said the moon was in cancer. no wonder i've been so emotionally down in the mouth (or throat) lately. i'm surrounded by omens. sunday 30 may 1999 access denied ...... contents spidermoon.net ......