For me, a big part of living away from home is dealing, or perhaps coping, with things I could do without; things such as unwanted noises, obnoxious people, foul smells, meals priced in the spirit of collusion, just to name a few. I've learned from past experience that this sort of thing must be dealt with or it's a sure deal that unhappiness and perpetual grumpiness will be my plague.
It's hard to deal with these things gracefully. Much of my second year at RIT was spent in a red-faced fury, throwing markers or strangling pillows as my fat upstairs neighbor crunched around on his over-stressed desk chair. I found new realms of fury that could have fueled full-sized pickup trucks, all because of an unwelcome noise that intruded on the place I was forced to consider the most comfortable. I am again stuck on a floor with someone above me, again forced into being a captive audience to every fallen item and shift of chair on the uncarpeted floors above me.
I've got to deal though, and I've found kind of a fun way to do it. Reality just isn't any fun, the reality that I am on a college campus someplace in the United States, on Earth, going about earthly things. That's really boring. Instead, it's enjoyable to put myself on a huge, city-sized space vessel making its way across the cosmos. My dorm is just part of the residential sector, an environment of other workers, technicians, officers, all going about their daily business on the ship. I look out my window and up at the sky, imagining myself not on planet earth, but somewhere among the empty interstellar vacuums, on a trip to somewhere with a mission, perhaps as mundane as a mining excursion or as glorious as a scientific expedition. Glory is an exhausting thing to pretend, so I'd rather imagine we're just looking for something to dig at.
On the ship, a startlingly vast ship, I've got my own living quarters, a humble rectangle with my belongings in it, assigned to me by the administrative command. It's in this room that I cope with the emptiness of space and the passage of time. I've got my terminal, on which I now type, which is connected to the ship's impressive communications systems, in turn tapped into an even more astounding interstellar network. Even out here we still manage to get transmissions from various bases across the cosmos, each linked together by fleets of ships, some related, some not, all adhereing to what amounts to a galactic peer-to-peer agreement. Data sent out by other craft or planets are intercepted and amplified by our own ship--or any encountered by the signal--and sent onwards until it reaches its destination. This far out, it's the only hope for maintaining contact with other people or beings who are privvy to news more engaging than the ship-wide malfunction of chicken soup dispensors.
The engines are so far away that it's rare to hear their omniscient drone. When I first got to the ship, I remember I could hear it clearly; it was positively annoying. But since being here, auditory fatigue and adaption by my brain have developed a perfect filter. If I am near enough to the engines to hear them, I don't even notice anymore. It's just one of many ways the body automatically adapts to a situation that has every potential to surgically remove one's sanity. I notice here that there is an unspoken rule to almost never acknowledge that everyone on board is merely just a crew member, one of a few thousand, drifting through a sea of mentally-choking inky blackness. To acknowledge the situation is to pick the scab of the wound first inflicted when joining this vessel, the wound of realization that "home" will be millions upon millions of miles away, literally if figuratively.
Unlike most of my crewmates, I take solace in acknowledgement. I feel like I'm part of something, that there is a commonality to the mundane tribulation encountered on this ship. Most people want to forget that they're here, so far from home; I hear it in their voices when they speak earnestly about the weather, which they know full well is generated the atmospheric encapsulation systems. "I can't believe summer is almost over," they say, swallowing the suffocating truth that a technician behind a large, esoteric console is merely manipulating an array of inputs that control everything from the scent of the summer breeze to the degree of "streak" in the clouds. I guess I can't blame them. It is after all pretty disheartening.
Planet leave is the best though. It's what I live for when facing long months in the Outs. The last 4 months of leave were spectacular, more than I ever could have asked for, or have received in the past. Planet leave is like one huge holiday; celebration and relaxation every day, enjoying the presence of friends that one hasn't seen in ages. I just can't aptly describe how great the planet leave was. For the first time in recent memory I am homesick, days after reembarking. I miss my friends, I miss the parties, chilling in bars, laughing until my throat hurts, living days consumed with humor and comfort. I always like to plan for self-improvement at the beginning of leave, but this time around it happened by itself. I feel wiser, healthier, more durable, and just better about myself, without even trying.
Regrets, I guess there are a few. A friend of mine assigned to a vessel so far flung that it literally hurts to consider, managed to get back briefly for her own planet leave. To see her was like a liter of water after a walk in the desert. Those moments were so fantastic and make me miss leave even more, but damn. So few of those moments. She's assigned to a new ship now though, another military ship that patrols a great deal closer.
So I think a lot of entries from now on will assume this 'shiplog' theme. It really is pretty fun. This entry was way bigger than I had planned. Hopefully someone was bored enough to read through the whole thing, and will remain bored enough to enjoy continuations of this fantasy manufactured from the rinds of an excessively boring reality.
shit starts soon. i have no conceivable expectations.
erasmus v2 deadline was missed because i hate configuring greymatter (weblog program). i'll work on it as much as i can.
comments will be reopened soon, in spite of the looming thread of spam. it turns out that the 'new' version of mt-blacklist is just an emergency release. the actual release is pending movabletype 3.01 (not dev edition).
if you're my friend and have a log online, update it because i'll be missing you. and take lots of pictures, as i will do.
Erasmus V2 is approaching completion now. What remains is one last bit of HTML (which IE is making very difficult), putting up the flash embellishments, and doing preloader stuff. Not a whole lot. I'm so proud of this project. I'm proud of my code, proud of my layout, proud of the efficiency and cleanliness. It's miles and miles from V1 in so many ways. I think you'll enjoy it.
I'm going to hold off on commenting here, probably until V2 is all done. I'd like to have it done by Sunday, when I go back to school, but that all depends on what drags me away from the computer.
I guess the one let-down about having good code is that no one notices it unless they're nerdy enough to view the code. Nobody will be able to tell the difference between how I did things, and how the page would look if i just hardcoded everything. But then, expansion is easy and modern browsers will handle everything (hopefully). And I get to go to sleep at night knowing I finally figured out advanced DHTML.
So, stay tuned. New stuff is coming. No, it actually is. I'm not bullshitting.
The summer definately feels like it's winding down. I only have about 2 more weeks of work, which really pains me for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that if it weren't for school, I could work straight up until labor day and make off with another ~$880. Who am I to complain though? This was and is a pretty fantastic job, as I've said in the past. If I'm in a pinch next year, I've got a job if I need it (one that will surely afford me a car by the end of next summer, if I was to begin work on memorial day).
Lots of ifs I guess. But I don't much feel like talking about my future.
The room is hot. I want to leave it.
With any luck, MT-Blacklist for MT3.01D will be available in a couple days, so pending that, I'll open up comments again, for all you people who uhh...comment.
::crickets::