oily donuts

With all the wonderful changes I mentioned in my previous post, my cynical self had been wondering what the catch was going to be. I found it.

Four times now I’ve unwittingly attracted the affection of a woman who’s had a significant relationship that was either ending, recently ended, or badly neglected. Four times I’ve opened myself up to her and supported her. Four times she’s then realized just how troubled her relationship had been, and four times she’s summarily abandoned me after these epiphanies for the sake of “space” and “needing to work on [herself/her relationship].” 

I start my new job on Monday. New career, actually... after 20 years, I’m a systems administrator no more. I’m now a full time software developer (Ruby, Javascript). I’ve been trying to make this happen for 4 years, and tomorrow I’ll walk out of this building for the last time and into the relative unknown. I’m beyond thrilled and equally terrified.

We’ll close Death of a Salesman on Saturday afternoon. It’s been a hell of an experience, a long-anticipated dream role for me, with a wonderful cast. And there’s this one cast-mate in particular...

I finally asked her out. We’re both very glad I did; it’s been a fantastic 3 weeks. The only downside to the situation is that Sunday I’m putting her on a plane and she’ll be literally halfway around the world until August. She’s very private when it comes to social media relationshippy stuff, and I can’t say I blame her, so... no name and no photo, at least for now. Suffice to say, she’s talented, brilliant, and gorgeous, and I marvel daily at how lucky I am to have had this time with her and to be able to look forward to her return. We don’t know exactly what we are yet except very, very happy to have found each other.

In conclusion, suck it, Life. It seems like all of this has been far too long coming. My stress at the moment comes only from these (wonderful) changes instead of my inadequacies, failures, embarrassments, frustrations, and dissatisfaction. This kind of stress has a far softer edge.

I’m playing Biff Loman in Strollers Theatre’s Death of a Salesman, opening tonight, for a four-week run. It’s the feel-good hit of the spring!

Apparently I’m too dumb to figure out how to embed a proper Mixcloud player widget here, but if you’re in the mood to listen to about a half hour of some chill Afro/Deep House, here’s a mix I recorded last night:

We've been rehearsing a bunch of Rogers & Hammerstein music for a performance next week. I'm coming to despise the resultant earworms, frankly.

I work on the 8th floor of a building with a clear southwestern view. In this dream, it must have been the late afternoon around this time of year, because the sun was close to the horizon.

Suddenly there was a sort of faint seismic thud. Everyone stopped what they were doing and predictably asked each other, "did you feel that?" I looked out the window just in time to see what I could've sworn looked like the sun dipping below the horizon and rising again within a few seconds.

As if that wasn't unsettling enough, there was this vague kinesthetic sense that our motion had changed. Shifted, sped up, slowed down... something. Plenty of other people had seen the sun "move" too and were also feeling this, and confusion and panic was quickly rising.

Grasping for an explanation, I realized that as unlikely as it seemed, a large asteroid impact on the other side of the world might've reverberated through the planet to become the kind of faint single thud we'd felt just moments before. If it was large enough and hit with a glancing blow, I could also imagine that impact slightly pushing the rotation of the planet off its axis, like someone slapping a basketball spinning on their finger. That might explain a "wobble" that would make the sun continue to dip below the horizon as it was.

It immediately dawned on me that an impact that large would leave an enormous crater and drive incredible amounts of dust into the atmosphere which would soon blot out the sun, possibly for many years. And if the impact had occurred in the deep ocean, it would have created a tsunami wave hundreds or thousands of meters high that would be reaching one of the coasts soon and possibly traveling hundreds or thousands of miles inland.