Thus began and concluded yet another of my most suckiest movielog entries ever. The ever silly one liner. Has the inspiration left me?

And is it just me, or does the Britney Spears "Toxic" video have a total Sydney Bristow vibe to it? All this making out on airplanes, getting in disguises, flamboyant changing hair color wigs, sneaking into top secret secure facilities, climbing the sides of buildings... Random? Or too many similarities to be an accident?

Last Saturday, scottgalvin.com, Jaeger, and I saw Mystic River. It was mysterious, if a bit odd at certain points. (How strange that the sentence I just typed was both longer and more informative than the sum total of my movielog entry about it.)

After some random conversation in the theater afterwards, Jaeger decided to go home, leaving the rest of us extreme crazies to concoct schemes of our own for the rest of the night. We wandered by both of my parents' places, where I passed the Y Tu Mama Tambien disc (from Jaeger's netflix) on to scott so he could watch it too as well as some other discs from my collection, and from my dad's place, attempted to ping one of our recently installed servers that scott's pager informed him had recently gone offline.

From here, it looked like the machine was indeed down, so we decided to wander on over to the colocation farm and try to figure out what was going on. (By now, it must have been approaching 0300.)

We spent a couple hours there diagnosing the problem, and ultimately concluded beyond any shadow of a doubt that the problem was not with our server, but the switch it was plugged into (not owned or administered by us, but by another of scottgalvin.com's business contacts). Oh joy.

Afterwards, scott took me out to whatever you call the meal that occurs between 4 and 6am after you've been up running around all night. I suppose it could tentatively be called "breakfast" since we had stuff like eggs, hash browns, biscuits, and pancakes, but it was dark outside, and neither of us ordered orange juice, so... It was whatever it was.

There, many things were discussed, and we reflected on similar such outings of the past. Fortunately, on this occassion, no one in our party attempted to leave the restaurant with any containers stuffed under their coat. Whew!

By the time we departed the restaurant, it was beginning to get light outside. I went home and slept.

Sunday afternoon, did some straighening up, watched some tv, and then on Sunday evening, after being awake for a mere 6 hours... I slept some more. 2200 - 1000. 12 straight hours of sleep. I guess I had it coming.

Today, I worked on $SUPER_SECRET_PROJECT_2 for a while, and made significant progress.

And now.... Here I sit. I thought I'd have gone to bed by now (again, trying to get back on something that almost resembles a "normal" schedule), but I haven't.

I'm feeling borderline depressed, and a little overwhelmed. Not regarding anything I'm doing with what I now seem to be calling "work". At least not directly. Or maybe I should rephrase, because it is kind of about that.

I mean... Hmmm...

I feel fine about what I'm doing, inasmuch as that goes. It's right where my strengths are. The projects are going well.

But....

I had a little talk with my dad over lunch today. Last month, after scott gave me some exciting news about the latest, and by far the most significant deal in the history of scott's business ventures, I passed the good news on to both of my parents, along with the possibility that it might lead to real full time employment. While that may eventually end up being the case, provided things go well, I probably shouldn't have said anything. Or at least not as much as I did.

Here was the scene today.

Dad: "So, did you and scott end up getting that job you were talking about?"

Me: "Yep."

Dad: "So when does it start?"

Me: "We got started on it last week. I've actually been working on it today. Getting the code migrated, getting things up and running, etc, etc." (Any real details would pretty much be over my dad's head anyway.)

Dad: "So is it going to be a full time job that you're going to start pretty soon?"

Me: "Well, hopefully. Right now, we've just got to get this project done right, and if we do, and we're lucky, then he'll hire us to do more work in the future."

Dad: "So is this guy you're working for going to give you a paycheck, or are you going to get paid by scott?"

Me: "scott."

Dad: "Oh, I see."

In other words, at least as far as he was concerned, I may as well have said, "Nope, there is no job. Nothing. All I've been doing has been twiddling around, playing, and chatting with my buddies all this time. It's all just a big ruse, and nothing will ever come of it."

And he would be right. I have nothing to show for it. Certainly not yet. Maybe I will next month, but there's really no guarantee of that. Even if it does happen, it's not likely to "look" very impressive for some time to come. (scottgalvin.com's optimism notwithstanding.)

Showing them a web site I just got working doesn't cut it. (I even tried this afternoon, and my dad just sort of shrugged.) Showing them me leaving for an office everyday might. Showing them me moving into my own place would not only impress them, it would make the whole thing moot.

Grrrr... I wish I could just crawl my way out of this stupid hole. It wouldn't even be so bad if I weren't (back to being) dependent on my parents, financially speaking. Then there wouldn't be any need to answer to them about my career path, such as it is.

But that's just the kicker, isn't it? If it were a real career path, there wouldn't be any of this financial dependence to worry about. Grrr... grrr... grrrr.

Last month, when scottgalvin.com showed me what was in the works, I decided to once again give it a shot for all it was worth. That's what I've been doing for the past several weeks. Rather than spend time in the want ads, I've been focusing my energies on this.

If there's any chance it can be a career for me, I'd much rather be working on servers, writing code, creating databases, and troubleshooting firewall issues than driving delivery trucks and slicing meat.

If there is nothing left of life but the latter, then please hand me the cyanide pills right now.

Gack, but this goes deeper than that. I should probably just stop typing and go to bed. It's obviously not making me feel better.

I hate this world, and I hate this country. I hate the way it fucked my dad over economically (the defense industry, in particular), even though he doesn't seem to see it. Shit, he should be retired by now, not working shit jobs too.

I want to make enough money to not only provide for myself, but be able to make things a little better for he and mom too. Instead, I'm sitting here leeching off them like a fucking idiot.

Maybe it's time to go apply at McDonald's again. If this stuff with scott doesn't start totally taking off like he's been saying, and very, very soon, I'll have to anyway. But damn me if I don't do everything I can to make it work while I have the chance.

To that end, I really must be getting to bed. There is still much work ahead.