First of would be, The Vampire in The Basement by michellepants .

There’s just something about a vulnerable Edward which make my toes curl.  Anyway, i’m pathetically rusty with the whole blogging thing so if what i’ve said was enough to pique your interest, click on the link and leave me be… hehehehe *cringing at how awful this whole entry is*… Ah hell, I figure my writing will smoothen up some soon enough or not at all…

My.Brother (rather irately): ‘Ate, were you the one who took my soap?’

Me (feeling mildly guilty): ‘Yes, sorry, I was desperate… I meant to give it back…’

My.Brother (looking indignant): ‘You never bring it back. You know I have to go to work at an obscenely early hour, and i’ve had to go to work without soaping… blah blah blah… blather blather blather.’

Me (caught between the strange combination of being completely assaulted by guilt while having to fight back peals of laughter at the thought of my newly corpoRATized sibling entering his posh office without having had a proper bath, dashing off to escape his tirade): ‘Sorry, sorry, i’ll bring it back right now.’

The irony of my brother’s questionable hygienic habits of the not so distant past not lost on me during this exchange.

My sibling is infamous for his five minute non-showers, and the discussions between him and my mother on the importance of actually using shampoo on one’s hair during baths are somewhat of a legend in our home, that is when it’s not a running joke between the members of our household.

This is the reason why I’ve been so reticent about blogging again in the first place. Finding a starting point is so difficult, crafting decent sentences can be agonizing, and procrastinating can be an enjoyable thing. These, my inherent laziness coupled by a worsening case of obsessive compulsiveness, and a multitude of other reasons, can only result in an interlude which spans years.

Not that I haven’t tried numerous times to bridge the gap between my sort-off self-imposed silence and often admittedly pompous verbosity. I’ve composed countless introductions in my mind, only to discard them, or more often than not, forget them, when the ‘lull’ of coding demanded more neurons than could be spared for any dalliances of the literary sort.

If there’s one thing that has become apparent to me in the three odd years that I’ve been working in Software Development, it is that I can either indulge the struggling writer languishing in some far-off attic of my mind, or push the still infantile programmer to the limit, but I cannot be both at one time.

Survival instincts, fine tuned to a razor point, have pretty much dictated, where my focus and attention should lie. It’s pretty obvious, given the frequency (or rather, infrequency) of my blogs which of the two sides of my somewhat fractured personality I’ve been nurturing as of late. The reasons for this though deserve another blog for another time.

This is my long-winded way of admitting that having have failed to find inspiration in the profound, I’ve had no other resort but to look the other way and seek it in the absurd, which accounts for the completely irrelevant anecdote about my brother and his issues regarding my propensity for stealing soap (to his credit though, this wasn’t the first incident, nor the second, or third, so his outrage was quite valid).

The whole point of this buildup, is to allow me to express my own ire at being cornered into creating six reports at the last minute for who, in less annoying circumstances, are among my first and most favorite clients.

Now, despite the general ritual of ranting, complaining, and raving I perform before tackling additional requests for systems i’m working on, I generally don’t mind such requests as much as it may seem. Customization, after all, lies at the core of our programming principles, so additional reports and whatnots are par for the course.

Or so I tell myself, while gritting my teeth, after being entrenched in one overlapping system after another in the past three weeks which
could justify the weariness I felt in the face of such a task. After all, i’ve spent so much time in the previous weeks practically re-hauling the HARD DRUGS DATABASE SYSTEM (HDDS), and coding features hither and tither for the currently still in development MY CREW SOFT, that having to shift the already over heated gears in my head to accomodate the unexpected reports needed for the AUTOMATED EMPLOYEE EMBEZZLMENT SYSTEM (AEES) was a rather unappealing prospect.

In recent months though, i’ve developed a tenacity (or is it more of a lunacy?) which has been invaluable in situations such as these. So as I resigned myself to spending the evening i’ve alloted specifically for relaxation after having spent the last couple of nights sleeping at three in the morning, and after having come from a two hour commute client visit to update the MY CREW SOFT system, creating the six procedures needed to extract the data for the wretched reports from the various PARENT and CHILD databases of the AEES, I consoled myself with the hilarious thought that our client has no inkling as to the fact that I had no idea whatsoever what I was doing at that time when they first entrusted me to create the system which has grown to relative maturity in the last two years or so, and had had to pretty much rely on instinct in place of the experience (which I did gain eventually) needed to develop such a software. It was only my adeptness at keeping a straight face which allowed me not to betray the trepidation and horror I felt whenever they’d ask for features which I had no idea how to deliver.

And maybe this is one of the the reasons why, after all these years, and a gazillion or so system changes and requests for additional features and reports later, they’ve kept their spot in my ‘Top Ten Favorite Clients’ list. Without knowing it, they’ve watched my system grow with them, and alongside it, I as well. With their seemingly impossible demands of three years ago, they’ve started making a programmer out of me. After all, they serve the best turon i’ve ever tasted, and being the glutton that I am, food is usually all the incentive I need to secure a place for you in my heart.

Besides, all sense of pride and ego aside, i’m not ashamed to admit that it just thrills me completely when our clients use our programs and when they express delight at realizing that the reports they need are accessible with just a click of a button, and can be generated within seconds, that I would willingly (though maybe not gladly) spend as many sleepless nights as necessary organically attached to my PC to pull off whatever features and program modifications they can come up with in a moment’s notice.

Pushover Programmer, I am.

Starvation would be a pointless way to counter ‘The Bloat’ at this point as hormones seemed to have thrown normal bodily functions into a state of anarchy. The same way that Persephone was forced to abide by Hade’s deal of reigning as his unwilling queen of the underworld for certain months of a year after having fallen prey to his cunning, tempted as she was to take a few seeds from the fruit he offered her, i’ve finally been coerced into accepting that for these few days, all efforts of remaining thin would be held hostage by hormones.

Pre-Menstrual Stress, somewhere in the galaxy there must be a purpose for it… right. *sarcasm sarcasm*

You see, though I use words to unburden myself from whatever heaviness might be weighing me down, moments inevitably come when those very words end up carrying too much of a weight and they slip down my tongue dragging it down, down, and down until it’s hanging loose to my toes. It’s quite the same as having your foot stuck in your mouth and when this happens I know for sure that it’s time to lighten up on myself.

I had every intention of doing just that, I swear. I even made a point of watching, or at least, trying to watch the first five minutes of the movie Timeline which i’ve been meaning to do for quite some time now. I placed some effort into it even if I felt as soon as it was confirmed that who was originally a professor of archeology in Michael Crichton’s book was suddenly morped into the role of ‘Dad’ in the movie that it was going to be horrible. It was like saying that the trilogy of The Lord of The Rings would remain unchanged if Frodo were to suddenly discover in the movie that Gollum was his long lost father.

I still meant to stick to my word when I resigned myself to the conclusion that I was meant to enjoy Timeline only in its written form and settled on another movie instead, but how is one to remain detached and casual when all of a sudden, flashing before your very eyes, an absolutely heart melting (i’m being trite but I can think of no other way to describe what I saw at this point) story nestled into an enchanting, autumn-nish setting begin stroking awake parts of your mind which you were determined to relax for the evening?

How is one to react when a noble young man, an orphan, without anything significant or noteworthy about him, without a family, having have grown up in an orphanage, without a past, nothing except for the goodness and purity of his heart which shone through every gesture and every intention, reaches out reflexively, protectively, and compassionately to a troubled woman who barfs on his shoulder while he’s on a trip to sell chocolates. The woman is pregnant and husbandless and is terrified of facing her restrictively repressive old fashioned family, most of all, of surviving her father’s wrath. To save her from shame, he offers to take the guise of her husband.

How can one remain unmoved when upon finding himself in the midst of a beautiful grapevine valley which has been in the woman’s family for generations, the young man suffers every insult and affront which her hard hearted and extremely possessive father throws in his direction, cruelly derising him for being an orphan, for having no idea as to who he is or there he came from.

Then how can one not feel one’s throat tighten with unshed tears when the dictatorial father, finally having been softened by the young man’s earnestness and sincerity realizes that he has been deceived, albeit without any malice, by his daughter and the young man. The hearts which break the most painfully, after all, are those which took the longest to melt, especially if that heart is a father’s heart.

And how can one not feel a poignant mixture of sadness and joy when the entire valley of grapevines is burned into ash by a lamp being hurled unintentionally in a fit of rage during a tussle which would’ve
spelled the end of a whole tradition and a way of life of a family whose pride and fortune has been built in the harvest of its grapes but for the young man who found one live root within the smoldered remains of the original root from where the valley was born?

How then can one not place her foot in her mouth?

Here is where I am in the divide…

And yet we wonder why humans profess an insatiable desire to navigate the stars, the planets and galaxies not our own. The universe, for all the unknowns intrinsic to it, is nonetheless infinitely easier to come to an understanding of than the chaos and complexities, not to mention the conflicting tendencies of our own human minds, especially when you throw the parts of us which are mystical into the equation. Newton and Einstein would throw up their hands in a gesture of surrender if it were we they had to explain away instead of the various laws of physics, unchanging perhaps across space and time, but definable still.

There’s the truth of it though we may convince ourselves that it is our thirst for knowledge of the things outside ourselves which drive us to pursue supernovas. It’s an escapist attempt which allow us to think of ourselves as noble, when in fact what we secretly believe is that the less we know of ourselves, the better and the safer it is for humanity to remain as it always has, always poised on the verge of some discovery or another, about the universe, about planex X or Y or V, about a weapon which will surely obliterate us, anything and everything but the discovery of ourselves.

As I was saying before a herd of imaginary almost identical sheep danced acrossed my consciousness all bleating out ‘Bah bah black sheep,’ we look to so many sourses in the hopes of unraveling the mystery of our lives as human beings. We look to the stars, to the breakdown of our physical attributes which is the very purpose of why genetics exists (not necessarily the creation of an assembly line churning out loony nursery rhyme mascots), looking even to other species such as pigs and sheep and the occassional orangutang in our pursuit of answering these questions, all the while claiming that we belong to a higher order of evolution than these animals do. We consecrate ourselves to numerous deities whose way of life we couldn’t half care about or adhere to, admitting only to ourselves that we would just as soon bow down to worship the porcelain god, but for the hope that it will bring us redemption.

Then when all else fails, we curse God and ourselves to damnation, too lost in self induced agony and pity to realize that in our haste and our impatience, in the clutch of the sudden desperation which drove us to hunt down what we do not know, that we’ve traveled and looked everywhere but to the one place where lies the only hope that our questions might be answered. We forgot to look to ourselves, the one to be blamed for raising all those questions in the first place, the root of all our puzzlement.

We never once stopped to consider the awesome implications of why we are capable of asking such questions of immeasurable magnitude and depth in the first place. Never once did we take a moment to think of how is it that these questions seem to materialize from the very source from which they arise, from the answers which we twist ourselves into pretzel like contortions to find. Answers which we choose to avoid for no other reason then that our lives will suddenly be locked into a certainty, and we fear that certainty, the inevitability of it all.

We blanch at the thought of the day when meaninglessness will fall away and shockingly inescapable purpose will stare us unblinking in the face. We find ourselves as potential roadkill in the overwhelming face of the truths we half hoped we would never discover which is the very reason why we practically transported ourselves to the moon and to the unreachable stars beyond, everywhere but the place where we knew the answers would be.

All of a sudden every excuse to dither and stall and to procrastinate ourselves to death is lost to us, uncertainty and its comforting cloak of ambivalence falls away from our hunched shoulders and all hope of deluding ourselves is ripped from us. When you find those answers, whatever they may be, i’m afraid there’s no going back. The baby steps which we take to enable us to wobble through life will no longer be enough, it’ll only take a leap of faith without even a blindfold for comfort to bring you to the next divide.

Please bear with me as I am still in the process of making my way across.

No, knowing that your supposed readers are snoring away as you type, you still have to relate the tedious tale about how worried you were about the already manic Monday which seems to unavoidably come about after every weekend, about how you were thisclose to getting into a fistfight and laying a one-two-knockdown whack on a certain bossy and obsessive yet undeniably loveable individual breathing hot breath down your already sweaty nape, and about how horrible the weather is, effectively transforming an allegedly tropical climate sought after by tourists who want to lie on its talcum powder-esque whiter than white beaches with their bikini tops askew into a half decent immitation of the Sahara. No wonder the pirated DVD toting, humanitarian folks who inspire fear in the bigot minded, and who seem to have a soft spot in their hearts for movie loving citizens whose funds are tied to the milkbottle feel perfectly at home. We applaud your efforts at thwarting [-name-deleted-because-some- people-with-dubious-eyesights- claim-he-holds-a-similarity-to-my- husband-lookswise-]’s pitiful efforts at raiding your stalls.

Point proven exactly. Blogs lead us to expose portions of our minds so giddy and dizzying with its barrage of whirling thoughts and ideas that we are actually swept away into an array of run-on sentences which would make our high school English teachers apoplectic with rage. Particular as I am about grammatical perfection to the point of it being a paranoia though, those run-on sentences occupy a very cozy spot in my heart.

I love it, all of it, I can never tell you just how much, the digressions I make, the vagueness I can form into a pinprick so subtle you don’t feel it pricking your soul, whether to draw blood or to soothe, depending on whether it’s the demon in me you’ve roused or the well concealed angel, and though I often fight it, claw at it, and shriek from the intensity with which it grips me, the life which makes it necessary for these words to flow.

After this evening’s gastritis inducing gastronomic experience, I cannot for the life of me conceive how the Chinese population can possibly remain as bloated as it is in number considering how potent the spices which flavor their traditional dishes are. The fact that their population does not suffer a downward trend due to burst blood vessels and daily onslaughts of coronary thromboses due to the spices in question baffle the mind. One night of having fish fillet in tausi sauce for dinner and my head and my stomach, if not my wallet seeing as how I didn’t have to spend a single cent, are already paying the price for my cravings.

Perhaps it’s because they have an enzyme in their bodies specifically designed to breakdown these spices into aphrodisiac form to be put to good use which might account for their population not decreasing.

Whatever the reasons may be, I now see with greater clarity why Chinese food is best eaten at home, adverse reactions notwithstanding and all, headonism will win out over prudence every time, at least, when it comes to food.