It's almost 1am and I'm standing in the train station trying to figure out how in the fuck I'm supposed to identify Grzegorz who I've never met and probably hasn't been informed about how I stick out like a sore thumb given my long black hair and facial piercings. It's been one hell of a trip so far since I started working with a new startup created by the purchase of a French software company that has a development office in Poland. In order to kill multiple birds with one stone, I volunteered to be the first American engineer to visit the development office and start getting to know the team better so we can establish a real working relationship.

( The longer version of how I got myself into this... )

Carlos came home one night from band practice and informed me that he was quitting the band, wanted to quit his job (which he had been hating ever since they hired the art director from hell) and I took advantage of that moment to ask, "so, you wanna move to New York?" He replied, "yes." Well, then he spent the next week waffling back and forth on that before finally saying he'd go after some prodding. That of course is not how he remembers it going down believing he was the one who suggested moving after I had spent the Summer of '99 planting the seeds, but that doesn't matter now.

The next few weeks were quite the whirlwind. I chased down a corporate apartment for us to cram into, we sorted out what would go to New York and what would be left behind. Carlos chased down a storage unit for us to move what we would keep to while we hunted for a permanent residence once we arrived in New York. I managed to chase down a job with a San Francisco based company that had an office in New Haven that would allow me to telecommute from New York once we arrived. We packed 3 bags each, said our goodbyes and left San Francisco on the morning of March 10th, 2000.

We arrived at our temporary residence on E 60th St. and 1st Ave. early in the evening and after hiking up 4 flights of stairs with our bags, stepped out to start exploring the neighborhood and grab a pizza for dinner. The next few days were spent running around getting the logistics figured out for what we'd need over the course of the next couple months: a mailbox for a temporary mailing address, a couple cell phones so I could sit on work calls and he had a number to be contacted at while looking for work and then finally, finding an apartment.

In retrospect, it all came together so well. It only took him a few weeks from sending out resumes from a cybercafe to landing a position with Mars Music's Soho eCommerce office. Commuting to New Haven was a drag but worked out for what I needed in income while we were getting started there. We were paying crazy rent on the corporate digs but still managed to sock away a little more to handle the reality of having to pay a brokerage fee to find a place and while we expected the employment and housing searches to take 2 months, it didn't kill us that it extended to 3 months.

It worked out that our last day on the UES was June 9th without having to pay an extra week but our move in date for the place we found on Mulberry and Houston was June 15th. We had originally intended to ship everything we were going to keep and replacing the majority of the furniture we had in San Francisco with new stuff from Ikea that we had set aside for since we didn't want to deal with the cost of shipping but instead it turned out it would cost the same to ship everything as it would to rent a UHaul, so we reserved the smallest truck they would give us to go across country and decided to just load what little we had left in the truck and be homeless for 5 days crossing the country.

We spent the night of June 9th at a Newark airport hotel since we had an early am flight and then upon arrival in San Francisco, had a friend take us to the UHaul location and picked up the truck, went to storage to pick up everything and then headed out of town headed east on I-80 towards our new home in New York. We worked it out so we'd have a stop off in Salt Lake City to visit my friend Sandy who had relocated there, then after a nap there, lunch and back on our way, we crashed out for a brief time at a rest stop in western Nebraska. We then drove through to Illinois and spent a night in a motel since we were both exhausted from the road and really needed to spend a night in a bed.

We gassed up just before the Indiana border since I had absolutely no intention of us stopping the vehicle in that state and dealing with any locals and after powering through Ohio and Pennsylvania, we made it to a rest stop in New Jersey at about 1am and realized we should just crash for the night there since we wouldn't be able to pick up our keys for the new place until the next morning.

We went straight to Ikea and picked up a bunch of items I had already selected to fit into the new place and we had already purchased a TV at Circuit City that was due to be delivered a couple days after we moved in. We made it out of Ikea with our items and after a quick stop off at The Home Depot to get a dead bolt for the front door (we were informed we'd have to supply our own) we arrived at the new place and got our keys then moved everything into the apartment. The UHaul went back and the next 2 weeks were spent unpacking, putting furniture together and getting settled into the place.

Once we were there, I couldn't believe it. I had actually managed to get him to leave the bay area and move to a "real city" where everything was going to happen. What that "everything" was I had no idea in my naive young brain, but I was just absolutely sure it was going to be great. We celebrated my 24th birthday 9 days after arriving at our new apartment with a dinner out at Lucky Cheng's with friends and a couple of my coworkers. We were young, dumb and ready to have the time of our lives.

The footnote to this happy story though was about 6 weeks in, frustrated with not being able to find an apartment, my feet killing me from all the walking I wasn't used to and absolutely fed up with the horrid crowding on the subway from 59th St. down to Grand Central 3 days a week, I laid awake in bed one night wondering what the hell I had gotten us into. Far from "home" and with only a handful of people that I knew, I wondered if we'd ever find a place to live or if we'd be doomed to suffer under crippling rent in the temporary corporate apartment that was a rat trap from hell. I was only months away from turning 24 and horribly impatient with the pace of progress having been spoiled in the bay area with being able to find a place to live within a couple days of searching, being able to walk out the door from a layoff at one ill equipped internet company and right into another job that afternoon. Hell I was used to being able to have videos, ice cream, cigarettes and soft drinks at my doorstep within an hour of clicking on a few things on a web page (thanks Kozmo!) so the length of time it took to search was quite disheartening...until we realized we absolutely needed a broker to get into a decent place. That was just a lesson in the difference between New York and San Francisco. One of many I would begin to learn as time went on.

As the decade comes to a close, I feel a bit compelled to document something about it. It's been a crazy, strange, fun, painful, depressing, uplifting 10 years. There's been good, there's been bad, there's been just plain ugly. I've been standing on the cliff between sanity and lack of sanity more times than I can recall and I've done a lot of things I never thought I'd do. I've learned so much about myself I never realized and yet know it will be a long time before I really know myself well.

The trouble is, I scarcely know where to begin and think this will be a series of entries closing out the year. Perhaps a series of the major events I'd like to remember?

December 31, 1999 - San Francisco, CA

I had spent the better part of the month collecting bottles of good champagne to ring the new year in. Everyone was caught up in the craze of Y2K for the years preceding it and knowing what some of the risks were if someone had royally fucked up at say, a nuclear reactor or aviation systems, etc. I wanted to sail into the man made apocalypse in style and nowhere near sobriety. It was just me and Carlos at home that day. The plan was to watch the new year as it was ringing in halfway around the world and if all hell was breaking loose, start drinking until the wave of fallout hit us. Stayed up until about 4am and noticed everything was fine with the world so I went to bed and passed out, plan averted and I had a great collection of booze.

Around 7pm, we popped open a bottle of champagne...a bottle of Piper dressed in a slut red bottle corset designed by Gaultier. We were drinking, watching videos and just generally being lazy. Around 9 we popped open a bottle of Krug NV, and heard from a friend, Derek who was heading up to the city for the night and was planning on parking at our place for a bit before heading out. We invited him and the friend with him to ring in the new year with us and the 3 more bottles of champagne we still had to work our way through.

Derek finally arrived around 11 and by this time, we were pretty damn drunk. Derek took advantage of this predicament to herd us out the door and over to the water front to watch the fireworks display that was set for midnight. He had 2 small tonic water bottles with him, one filled with gin and the other with citron. We were passing the bottles amongst the 4 of us for the walk over taking swigs...such a great idea on a stomach still full of champagne. We got to the water front about 10 minutes before midnight and just picked out a spot in the crowd, continuing to pass the bottles around getting more and more intoxicated. Finally the clock hit midnight, the crowd broke out into loud screaming and the fireworks went off.

The world didn't end, we were still drunk and there wasn't much else to do but turn around and head home...continuing to pass the bottles back and forth between all of us and stepping around the people puking in the streets. We got back to the place Carlos and I shared, I popped open a bottle of Veuve Clicquot NV and we all had a glass and hung out for a while so Derek could sober up enough to drive home.

There was such an odd sense of euphoria around us that evening and it's still really hazy in spots, but at that moment in time, I could never have imagined all that would follow in the next 10 years.

Wow, been a while since I posted anything. Being busy will do that...waaaay too busy. Not much of a social life these days, mostly work, work, work....and uh, work. Oh, and aside from a week off in December, it's going to keep up like this until at least February since we're in redesign/relaunch/replatform/retarded hell right now. I've been finding Twitter quite useful for letting out small tantrums of frustration in a nice 140 character or less cryptic format that allows me to capture the moment of pure, raw emotion with a limited amount of incriminating context. It's a bonanza for keeping the insane ramblings to a minimum.

Zynga Facebook games are also quite useful for those long, boring conference calls since I can just clickity click away only paying partial attention to the inane things being said on the phone and just tune in when my name is called out. Who'd have thunk that I could spend so much time on that kind of thing...it's almost an addiction at this point but it's cheaper than drugs.

I've pretty much sworn off all the usual haunts. Ryan and I decided to start seeing other people so we've been going places other than the Eagle and the NYboL functions. *chuckle* Seriously though, I'm moving on from the same old, same old because I have no energy for all the usual drama and histrionics involved there. I get enough of that crap at work, being out is supposed to be fun and as of this past summer, it just didn't seem like people were really out to have fun so I'm a lot more selective with the free time I do get and end up staying in and watching a lot of movies and TV shows that are online. It's way cheaper that way but it sucks that I've been gaining weight because of it.

On the holy fucking LOL front, Eleggua has added more to the punchline of a joke from last summer. I nearly pissed myself at my desk yesterday in the office I was laughing so hard...boiling it down...a good friend has a date with a "body mod" guy on Monday. Turns out it's 1 of the 2 "body mod" guys I dated briefly last year who by my birthday had ended up together. By the end of summer, they had apparently split or something, can't remember when I heard that since I was too busy laughing that the 2 of them had ended up together. I swear off all dating, refuse to even consider dating Ryan and then end up in a relationship with him...now the lesser of two evils of the "body mod" guys meets my friend and books a date for him on Monday. When I figured it out with the friend via Twitter, I just couldn't stop laughing. Who knows, maybe it'll end up turning out well for the two of them. If so, at least I know some of the guy's tastes already and can make a couple gift recommendations for my friend to give him. I certainly wouldn't begrudge either of them finding some happiness. Perhaps that's part of the joke and a lesson that Eleggua was trying to push me toward? *shrug*

I'll now return to my regularly scheduled stupor.

meme stol'd from bentrazor

Using song names from only ONE artist, cleverly answer these 15 questions:

Porno For Pyros

1. Are you male or female?
-Cursed Male

2. Describe yourself:
-Freeway

3. How do you feel about yourself?
-Bad Shit

4. Describe your ex-boyfriend/girlfriend:
-Blood Rag

5. Describe your current boy/girl situation:
-Pets

6. Describe your current location:
-Thick of It All

7. Describe where you want to be:
-Tahitian Moon

8. Your best friend is:
-Wishing Well

9. Your favorite color is:
-Black Girlfriend

10. You know that:
-Orgasm

11. What’s the weather like?
-100 Ways

12. If your life was a television show what would it be called?
-Porpoise Head

13. What is life to you?
-Sadness

14. What is the best advice you have to give?
-Dogs Rule the Night

15. If you could change your name what would you change it to?
-Meija

...because I'm half asleep. Left a comment on another journal and as I was moving the cursor to navigate the touchpad gave out for a second as it was hovering over my usericon. I was amused that the popup that appeared said "This is you." The little voice in my head popped up with a stand up comic mocking his girlfriend, "OH! HOW DO THEY KNOW?!?" Maybe I should be sticking to twitter these days.

...or at least, I've been updated in the company directory. Not sure when any of the small financial reward will kick in but I've been promoted to a Director of Technology. I've got 2 direct reports now and sometime soon (hopefully early next week) I'll be moving into an office after being banished out into the cube farm for 9 months and 8 days ago. Considering I've survived the last 2 layoffs, was only hired to full time staff 2 years ago and spent an unhealthy amount of time in that span being a little bit of a trainwreck, I have to say making it this far only 6 months behind the original schedule I had set for myself when I finally decided to give a big scary corporate gig a try. Now I guess it's time to reset the countdown for the next promotion. 3 1/2 more years is probably too soon to try and make a jump to a VP position, but who knows, maybe 5 to 7 more? Assuming of course I can ride out the faltering economy without getting sacked.

It's been an interesting 3 1/2 years for sure and I've learned a hell of a lot of stuff where I am now that I didn't even realize until recently. Sure, there's the whole entertainment domain knowledge and how that industry works but the most invaluable thing I've learned is that I really can delegate things. It's still trial and error to learn the strengths and weaknesses of other team members and I think that will always be the case since some people will drop a ball now and then but at the end of the day, as long as the projects are getting completed and are working in a sustainable way, I can let go of a little control. I don't have to solve all the biggest technical challenges on my own and I can give the big things to team members who are capable of completing the work instead of thinking I'm the only one who can get it done. I'm not in startups anymore and the economy may be tight but there are resources at my disposal. It's time to put them to use.

Supposing you're part of a hypothetical organization that happens to throw a party on the same night that a gargantuan party will be going on. Suppose you're trying to siphon off a little of the traffic going to that bigger party to stop off at your organization's party as a bit of a pre party. Now, suppose this bigger party has a certain theme to it that most of the guests are dressing for. Now suppose you put together your marketing materials for said smaller party and you've got a picture of a guy on it who looks like he could be headed to the bigger party...now, why on earth would you name your party and mention the theme is something contradictory to the image on the marketing and the general dress theme for the bigger party you're trying to get traffic from????

Yeah, that's right, I just took a shot at my NYboL brothers...what the fuck?!? Guys...get it together!! Please!!!

...seriously, not a peep about Blacksun Festival this year, not even a mention that the event isn't happening. Then, C15 on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA with a cap of 300 attendees??? That 300 cap sounds awfully optimistic (to their credit, they did mention it will be great to get at least 150 attendees) but seriously, Long Beach??? Doesn't appear to be much of a call for DJs this year and they mention they already booked their live band. BAND? As in, singular??? They don't mention any line up for it yet (it's not happening until July so I guess that's not too bad) but seriously, this year is turning out to be teh suck as far as travelling seems to go. So far it appears I'm grounded for the time being with no trips planned to LA or SF while the company cuts costs.

By the time I would be required on a trip to SF that office will have relocated to LA (yup, they're packing them up and consolidating them with operations down there.) So rather than a trip to SF, it's looking more like a trip to LA will probably happen in the summer. Lovely.

IML is not happening this year for me. Plane tix are still pretty stiff for that weekend to Chicago and I'm not in much of a mood to finance a trip for 2 on plastic this year. MAL was an odd one this year so it looks like I'll be looking at vacation plans closer to home this year if I take any time at all. What a strange year this is going to be while everyone holds their breath hoping for the best.

In other news, speaking of things closer to home, I think I may be able to get the derby on and head down to the Charm City vs. Gotham Girls bout in April. Finding ways to talk the boyfriend into it and think he'll be game for it. Would definitely be good to get the chance to see dayglodivine since I think it may be as long ago as last May that I saw her last. Wow, time is just flying by...

Just because he's playing Social D doesn't mean that I'm going to sleep with him!

4 pints of Guinness and a bottle of Beck's...I'm sooooo out of practice, but that's a very good thing!

...and totally horrified at a couple pictures of myself I came across on the internet from Folsom East this past summer. Ugh, I looked horrible in them! I think this year I'm going to try and track down a spacesuit, that way, at least when pictures are snapped you won't be able to tell what I look like. *chuckle*

Over the past year or so, I have received many invitations from well meaning people on Facebook inviting me to "support" some cause cause or another. While I believe that it's great to get the word out about something through Facebook in order to connect people who are interested it leaves me wondering how many people accept the invites and then promptly do nothing more? It makes me wonder how many concerned, well meaning dolts think that just by clicking the "join" button on the invitation they've actually done something to "support" the cause? How many of them think they've done their part by simply joining and then forwarding the invite to everyone on their friends list that it is helping somehow? Maybe raising a small amount of awareness, but if cause after cause gets addded and then passed around you have a large network of nitwits passing the invites along while accomplishing nothing but adding more crap to clog the tubes.

Yes, I understand there are those out there that do put their money where their mouth is and step up to do something besides getting the cause listed on Facebook and raising awareness by spreading the word...but I wonder, how much word ultimately ends up in action? I guess what I'm trying to say is, if all you're going to do is passively recruit more people into a "cause" and nothing more, you're simply a cog in a machine who is doing nothing. If you really believe in something, make some time, step up and just do something besides sending the cause invite to everyone on your list. If you've got time to sit there and forward on the invitations, you also have time to get up off your ass and go do something aside from passing along the invite. Connect with the locals in your area, converse with them and help organize. It does start with an invitation, but it makes a real impact with action. Put your money where your mouth is and do at least one additional thing beyond forwarding the invitations along. Perhaps then I'll stop ignoring them.

"You installed speedbumps on the handicapped ramps, you passed out cigarettes for a smoke-a-thon on Earth Day and most recently you threw 100 pounds of meat on a peaceful vegan protest."

"Oh come on, that was way more than 100 pounds!"

Ask me a question about each of the following:

1. Friends
2. Sex
3. Music
4. Drugs
5. Love
6. Livejournal or something random

No matter how confidential or far fetched I will answer the question honestly.
Then post this in your journal and see what questions you get asked!
Comments NOT screened

...but I honestly don't feel like doing anything but sleep and watch some DVDs at home for the next few months. Maybe my mood will improve when the weather does but seriously, I'm highly tempted to pack my bags and run off to Europe for a week to ride trains around Germany and Poland. It has been a long time since I've dropped in on either of those places for a visit.

So I'm back from MAL and have been working like crazy since getting home on Monday evening. The project that was supposed to be wrapped up a couple weeks ago is still dragging on but with any luck it will finally get pushed out to our live environment today. There's just a couple small visual formatting issues at this point and data ingestion problems when our statistics servers fall over. Hopefully with last night's maintenance and the new release that was supposed to fix a bug with that it will finally be working the way it's supposed to. I'm not holding my breath since aggregating data from 3 sources into one storage tank has been a pain in the ass since we only control 1 of those sources and the other 2 are services provided by other groups. I just really want this project to be over with since it's been dragging on for way too long.

MAL was very odd this year. Had the boy down there with me and he ended up getting sick which put a crimp in some plans, but nowhere near as many plans as I just had to change because the weather was frigid the whole weekend and the city filled with people there for the other big event going on. Food was a challenge since it seemed like there were extensive waits at every restaurant we went to and not wanting to wait outside in the cold, we ended up opting to get food at Whole Foods and CVS the whole time we were there save lunch when we first arrived and breakfast one day in the hotel. Tensions started setting in by Saturday and some tempers flared up in a big way on Sunday. I doubt either of those things would have happened had the weather been a little better and we could get in anywhere to have real meals on a regular basis. I also think the boy wouldn't have gotten sick had the food situation been better. Still, through all that, we still managed to have some fun.

While I was there, I was wrestling with a very big decision I had to make. Given that my work schedule has been going bonkers lately and the projects I have to complete this year are stacking taller and taller, I realized that the time has come for me to step down from being a full brother in New York boys of Leather. We had 2 other departures of brothers this month already and I was trying to figure out how to put it off for a while longer so it doesn't appear like we're having an exodus from the group. When I got back and saw the stack of what's to come I realized I had to do it and it's the right decision for me. It took me 2 days to write the email to the board since I kept writing and rewriting it to try and get precision on the reason I have to step down. It has nothing to do with the boys and everything to do with the requirements of my occupation in this difficult time for the economy.

Now that I have that down, I have to figure out how to break it to another friend that I cannot work with his party any longer. With all the tensions that have been flaring there the past couple months, I've been treading cautiously on that one because it has nothing to do with drama and is for the same reason I have to step down from my regular involvement with the boys: work. The party is monthly on a Sunday night and being there until 4:30am and crashing out for a few hours of sleep and then heading in to work just isn't going to fly in the face of the major projects I'm being assigned to. I have to figure out how to sit down with him and have a conversation that it has nothing to do with him, the party, or any reason other than work is rough and taking a lot more time this year than it has in the past and my free time is being whittled down quite a bit. I'd rather end my involvement for the sake of preserving the friendship than start becoming flaky about when I'm available and then having that time get nabbed by being sent on a work trip to LA or something else.

I'm still waffling on going to IML this year. I want to go to support one of my best friends who is competing. I want to go to see some friends who will be there that weekend that I don't get to see very often. Alas, there is still work though and uncertainty around project schedules and deliveries.

It's all looking like this year will be a low profile socially and a high profile professionally. I'm adaptable that way I guess...it's been 4 years of slacking professionally and pouring myself into a social life I enjoy but now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Perhaps along with this pendulum I'll also do something about the weight I've been gaining the past few months. I seem to arrive at this place every year, "how did I let myself gain all this weight during fall and winter again?" It seriously has less to do with how I look and more with how my clothes fit...I really don't want to go spend money on that right now and should just stop eating so much junk food. Ugh...why hasn't the caffeine kicked in yet???

...to hit MAL and have a drunken, stumbling weekend of fun. Just one problem...I still haven't packed. It's so unlike me. Usually I have an entire grid of what I'm wearing when so I know what to pack and what to leave behind. I never wing an event like this but think I'll just try on a few things and if I'm not too fat for them, I'll throw them in the suitcase. I guess I just don't care that much this year and my mind is elsewhere. I'll have Ryan down there with me and look at it as a chance to spend a lot of time together away from all the distractions of every day life and into a new set of distractions. I've been working nonstop since New Year's on trying to get a project out the door and yesterday we had to make the call to postpone the launch until next week, so rather than getting panicked calls from work while I'm down there, I'll be coming back to the project on Tuesday to pick up where I left off and hopefully get it out the door next week. Not sure which is worse but I'm guessing not having work calls while I'm away will be good.

I'm still left with open questions on what to pack...there are the obvious items, but oh the rest is too complicated for me this year I guess....now I know what I used to do with all the excess time I had when I wasn't working so much and wasn't seeing anyone, how pathetic!

Definitely not buying anything new this year while I'm there other than my usual 5 packs of boot laces.

Am jumping from one random thought to another in procrastination, I should charge people to do their procrastinating for them.