And though I had slain a thousand foes less one,
The thousandth knife found my liver;
The thousandth enemy said to me,
'Now you shall die,
Now none shall know.'
And the fool, looking down, believed this,
Not seeing, above his shoulders, the naked stars,
Each one remembering.
--John M. Ford, The Final Reflection

The Asylum Director

My photo
"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any." - Russel Baker

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Update Of The Minor Variety

Been a little off lately, in many unpleasant ways. However, things are starting to look up for me bit by bit. But before we get into those sorts of details, let me get into an update of my dull and uninteresting life; a life, I'm sure, nobody really pays much attention to.

My time as part of the Circuit City Inbound Sales team is over. No more stupid people asking for confirmation that the iPod (regardless of which variety) is out of stock when it so clearly states on the web site that it is. No more thoroughly misleading ads. No more stupid issues with a website that advertises products which have been discontinued or customers so stupid as to fail to understand the concept of ‘up to $400 off on all TVs’ not being $400 off on all TVs but the number actually representing the maximum discount given on more expensive models and people who think whining and bitching to the sales team about something that they should be whining and bitching about to the corporate office anymore. I'm free! Free of all that stupidity and insipid, errant foolishness! Yet, it feels like such a loss to me. I left a few good friends behind, both in Circuit City and in the other accounts of that specific area. Good people, all of them, and people I won't hesitate to call my friends.

Sentimental weakness? Yes, a fatal flaw of my persona, I must admit. It won't be to anyone's benefit for me to deny it. The fact that the new account I've been dumped into (Ingram Micro) is in an area that's dangerously isolated from the other accounts, and therefore has isolated me from my buddies, isn't doing the company, the account or the questionable management any favors in making me like or even consider staying with them. Frankly, I wasn't really enjoying working for the Inbound Sales team but I was enjoying the people I was working with – even some of the superiors I worked with but I felt weren't exactly fit for the position. The people were nice enough on a strictly personal level but work was far from pleasant, no matter what angle I look at it from. Now, with everything that I'm learning about Ingram Micro, with every bit of knowledge I learn about the way things work there, the more I dislike the very idea of getting to the production floor. Thankfully, I've got that little detail covered, and with minimal effort at that!

Now, moving further along. After finally getting my hands on the damn The Godfather trilogy DVDs, I am happy with it. It is more than satisfying to watch through the life and times of the masters of the Corleone family. That was an exceptionally good treat. Not to mention my getting my hands on an original copy of one of Hikaru Utada's albums, First Love to be specific about it. I can't find my burned copy of Deep River anywhere and that worries me but I figure I'll be able to find an original copy of it somewhere…somehow. And from there, it becomes a simple matter to find the other albums and singles, even her first English language album Exodus. I'm also developing an interest in another J-Pop star, Yui, who vaguely reminds me of Michelle Branch and Frank Sinatra for some strange reason. And of course, with The Godfather in my hands, I must go on to grab the other movies I've been meaning to place under my control. The Rocky series, Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Kill Bill Volume 2 to name the ones at the top of my head at the moment. Who would have thought I'd end up expanding my neglected-for-so-long movie and music collections. 2 things I'd not have expected to even bother with for most of my life.

On more personal matters, my love life is zip, zero, nada. And there's really nothing new about that, is there? A lot of girls I easily consider my friends but not a girlfriend. I'm likely not going to end up falling in love with someone, really. It hasn't happpened before and with a mentality like mine, it likely never truly will. The ladies that manifest in my fiction and in my twisted mind are really just manifestations of what I look for in a girl and, disturbingly, I tend to feel more attached to them while I‘writing the stories they're in than I do any real girl I might end up falling in love with. There is The Girl, of course, the one and only exception to that but she's far from my reach and trying to rech out and take her hand is…stupid, to say the least. Not that such a truth is stopping me from feeling the way I do about her.

Like most other bloggers, I'm a diary-keeper and not a journal-keeper, which while causing me to be disappointed in myself, I can't say I'm shocked. I mean, despite all my self-critical ravings and self-loathing, self-pitying and self-hatred, deep down I know that, like Howard Stern, I love myself. I'm just not in love myself enough to let it go to my already substantially inflated head. And for those who don't know the difference, diary-keepers tend to talk/write more about themselves, their reactions and their feelings while journal-keepers tend to write more about others, other people's actions and the motivation behind them, other people's personalities (from the journal-keeper's POV) and some deep, moderately philosophical observations on things, people and ideas that they encounter daily.

And finally, to my fiction's progress – or lack thereof. I've got one single project in the works that's still in the concept stage and being tweaked into a full idea. It's an attempt to throw back to the days when I didn't care what people thought about my work and the only opinion that mattered was the one that is lurking somewhere behind my conscious mind. Chances of completing it are, in the words of one of my characters, not exactly the most abundant resource in the world. Still, I'm nothing on this matter if not stubborn, head bloody but unbowed. Whether or not I will be invictus remains to be seen, to be honest, however.

Well, that's it for this post. The dullness that is my life goes on…

Currently Playing: None
Currently Listening To: Hikaru Utada
Currently Reading: Nothing. Yet.

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