May 27, 2005

11:40 p.m.

Where, Oh Where Has My Hit Counter Gone?

Has anyone seen my hit counter? It used to live at the bottom of my diary, but I just noticed it's gone on vacation. D'Land is loading rather slowly tonight too, and Sammy has stopped answering tech questions, it seems. I rather gave up the idea of opening a new, more secret diary here, because he wouldn't tell me if I needed a second gold membership for it. And has anybody been getting a lot of spam to their diaryland address recently? I asked about that, too, but no response. Poor Sammy. He must be beleaguered with Diaryland issues, or maybe life issues. Maybe his life's harder than mine.

Mine's measurably better after spending perhaps ten hours (not all in a row, but over two days anyway) on the phone with various tech support people in various organizations to try to find out why I couldn't send email any more from my addresses that get forwarded from the band's website. After conducting countless diagnostic and cleanup procedures on my trusty Dell Inspiron, it's clean as a whistle. The problem, as it turned out, lay in the fact that some ISPs, mine included, are starting to disallow outgoing mail from addresses based outside of the host ISP. No one tells the first level techs though, so you have to go through a lot of stuff before he gives up and refers you to the second level, where they explain things in plain terms and fix the problem.

These computer things happen sometimes, as we all know, and they seem to take forever to resolve. Peculiar to this event, though, was the fact that I actually remained cheerful throughout. I was almost giggly, in fact, by the third hour or so yesterday afternoon. And I was wondering why I wasn't all stressed out and exasperated and wanting to cry. Just between you all and me, I think it's the Reiki. I'm treating myself every day as assigned, and it seems to be affecting my worldview.

On another subject, we had a grand 11-hour day in the studio yesterday with the drummer, and it was fun and inspiring. Chris took the tracks home and has been mixing them. When he emailed me tonight and said my guitar tracks weren't the sound quality we wanted, and there was too much drum bleed, and I'd have to do them over in the home studio against the existing drum and click tracks, my jaw dropped. All that money and time and I have to do them AGAIN??????? The Reiki didn't help quite so much that time. Just so you know I haven't transcended reality!

Tomorrow I meet with Rose and Mike about the poetry book, once and for all. We're deciding everything -- what goes into it, where/how it'll be bound, what it'll look like. It'll feel good to get it in motion. We've only put it off for a year or so.

And I did laundry at the actual laundromat today... first time in years, actually. I still have some to take to Rose's but there was so much I wanted to at least get a load of sheets done.

My exciting home life continues... I watched a couple of taped episodes of Northern Exposure tonight, courtesy of Steve and his TIVO, and it's my favorite show of all time. I missed most of the episodes the first time around, and I don't have cable now, so it's a treat to have them available.

Steve... oh, Steve. He's been depressed. I'm still getting to know him, his patterns, you know. We'd talked about our occasional depressions before but I didn't realize how present his still were. A lot of it seems to hinge on the weather. There were several days of unseasonably cold, rainy weather the past week, and it just sent him into the doldrums. I try to imagine what it would be like to not have control over my reaction to the weather. And he says it's not just the lack of sunlight, like a sun lamp wouldn't help. It's the whole atmosphere. I don't know what to say. I wonder if I'm very effectual at being present with someone who's going through depression, could I be of any help at all? When I'm grayed out I don't want anyone around to hear all my negativity. I hear it in myself and I recognize it but I'm so pissed or hurt I don't want to stop letting it come out. But it's almost embarrassing to let anyone else hear it. He says he feels the same way. But he's been able to talk about it, and today came up warmer and sunny anyway and he's off to the annual big Morris weekend in Vermont, and he was really excited to be there. We (the band) will go up and watch several teams dance on Sunday evening, and go to a feast. And after this his team is done for the year, so he'll feel less rushed and overbooked, and soon the roofers will finish banging on his house all day and he'll feel like things are back to normal.

And on Tuesday next, I have my second level Reiki training.

I awoke this morning, incidentally, from a dream where Chris was whomping my ass at a board game we played at Carol's uncle's house in Illinois, called Bump. I don't play games like that as a rule. I hate them because I lose horribly. I mean, just unexpectedly horribly! I have a game or so of beginner's luck and then I'm way behind everyone and it's a smear and I think, "Who's got it in for me?" and I go off and cry, so I stopped playing them. Except for Boggle, when we're in Austin, where it doesn't matter who wins because it's fun finding words, and also Tangoes, the silhouette game at which I don't suck. But anyway, back to the dream, we were on the road and eating breakfast or something and Chris had sort of created a makeshift Bump game on the breakfast table, and he was getting great rolls and lots of sixes and ones, and I couldn't even get any marbles out. I finally said, "I'm about to quit!" and on the next roll I said, "I'm really not into this. I have to go." And I left the table and woke up feeling so bad about my cursed tendency to lose. I lay there thinking, okay, it was just a dream, and okay so I didn't win at Bump when we were in Illinois this last trip, but Chris and I played as a team and it was really close, and we had a lot of laughs playing anyway, so what's up with the sadness thing? And I didn't even know why I was so sad all of a sudden. But I had breakfast and read a bit, and eventually thought I'd tackle the email problem just a little bit, and by the time I got into it I felt a lot better. And the rest of the day was pretty darn good. I don't usually rise out of those things so quickly, or at least I didn't used to. Maybe it was just a flag, that that's one of the issues I need to look at. My unwillingness to be competitive. No, my fear of competing. I truly fear being measured up against someone else. What is this winning thing, why does someone have to win anyway? Isn't that kind of stupid?

So. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

P.S. Yesterday was freeing. I was in the studio, with Sig who knows most of the saga about Will, recording a song I wrote giving Will the boot, with a drummer that plays and records with Will regularly. And a bass player who was not Will. How time changes things.