It's 9 PM. I've been in this office since 8 AM and I'm showing no signs of wanting to go home. They clapped for me at this morning's staff meeting, and replaced the
dining room table I had been working on with a massive improvised L-shaped desk larger than my boss's. Not that he cares, because he sees me as a good investment, what with all the mad tricked-out rock star
Dean-esque internet work I've been doing.
My car is falling apart, not that it matters, because I only really need it to get to Orlando and back every other weekend, just an hour and a half from my ghetto apartment on the south side of Tampa. My old laptop's keys keep sticking here and there, making coding laborious and logins a bit of an adventure.
I feel alive. Escaping school might be one reason. It's not that things have gotten easier, mind you. I do more work now than I ever did in college. But the work is gratifying... it actually accomplishes something. What we do in a back office in Tampa has the potential to reverse the status quo in Washington, to end the blind interventions and the soulless domestic policy.
But that's another story. There are bigger things on my mind.
I talked about her in a previous daylog. Just a few weeks before graduation, I found myself lying next to her on her dormitory bed, looking up into her eyes. There's a little bit of Punjabi blood in them, enough to make them glow brown. (Yes, brown can glow. Trust me on this one.) And those glowing eyes hooked me and drew me in.
This is the first real relationship I've been in for... well, years. I don't even know how many years. Maybe the proper answer is "ever."
Our summertime romance script is fairly well-defined. We meet around Kissimmee early in the evening, spend an hour or two in the open together, get into the same car to go somewhere for dinner, delay our dinner for an hour or so, finally get around to eating it, get back in the car with intentions to see a movie or somesuch, and end up leaving the same darkened parking lot around 1 AM. And then, for the rest of the days we can't spend together, our nights are full of chatter over tinny cell phone speakers.
It's truly a dog's life.
Anyway, my point is this...
A year ago, I was totally depressed, and I felt like my life was totally fucked up. At the time, I attributed this to two key factors:
- No romance
- No motivation to do what I was supposed to be doing full-time
If you've read my daylogs of
April 26, 2003 and
October 29, 2003, you know that I wasn't a happy person. The noding spree that I went on from 2002 to 2003 reflects this pretty well: 886 writeups in just over 2 years. Were it not for this daylog, May of 2004 might have been my first node-free month since I joined E2.
But there was something bolder within me. One of my friends dragged me into campus politics, the bloodiest politics of all. I raised my voice for the first time. I called out crazy liberals alongside crazy conservatives. I had freshmen following in my wake. Unthinkable, a year ago. But it happened. Now, it's hard to hold me back.
So now I have a growing resume, a girlfriend far lovelier than any of my past crushes, and--best of all--a reason to live, a reason to keep marching forward into tomorrow. A meaning. A little bit of hope that every tomorrow will be better than its yesterday. When I walk out into the baking heat of a Florida afternoon, I praise God, because it's all good so far, and it's all good as far as the eye can see.