Emotions and Dreams

Last night I had the most amazing dream.  Let me begin with a few facts.  I'm not a father, nor have I ever come close to being one.  I don't consider myself to be a father-figure to anyone nor am I ready to become one.  I do love, however, helping and protecting so I guess that's somewhat fatherly.  Also, I'm not religious.  I consider myself to be agnostic.  I don't particularly believe God has anything to do with our daily lives, He probably has better things to do.  I do believe in God, I don't believe in religion.  Let's move on.

The circumstances are shady.  For some reason I have two children and the mother isn't in this dream, it seems.  I'm in a synagogue/church.  I'm apparently here to affiliate my children with a religion.  My oldest, a boy no older than 8 will be Jewish and my little girl will be Catholic.

My son appears to be quite happy about the whole thing and my daughter seems to be almost too young to care.  He's asking questions and as we get closer to the "room" in which he's to officially accept his religion he no longer wants to go through with it.  He begins to cry and tell me he doesn't want to do it.  Immediately I begin to console him.  The exact words I don't remember but it's basically "You don't have to, this is YOUR day and if you don't want to that's okay".  He's sobbing and you can see it's just so heartfelt and he genuinely doesn't want this at all.  I get down on the floor sitting Indian-style and he kneels down and I just hold him as he cries.  I try my best to console him and make him understand that it's entirely okay.

As he's calming down the Rabbi approaches me and, again the exact words aren't clear to me but here's the general idea, he says something along the lines of "We're here for a reason and he's just wasing my time".  I don't take kindly to this.  My son and I are now standing, I'm still hugging him, holding his head with one arm as he sobs and my other arm outstretched pointing at the Rabbi with a me yelling something the lines of "Nobody yells at my son that way and you're here because it's your job".  We go back and forth and I end with "I don't need to take this from you.  I don't want to listen to anymore of your nonsense", and I appeal to another Rabbi to get him away from my family.

My daughter doesn't appear to play much of a role in this.  I'm not sure what happens between the Rabbi thing and now but I simply bring her to another "room" and that's where she becomes Catholic.

I wake up feeling such anger at the Rabbi, such love and a need to protect my son.  And within minutes it's all gone.  A wonderful dream but sadly it was only a dream.  I can only hope that in the future I have a little boy of my own, one to love and protect; to show him the world - someone that I mean the world to.  I'm not ready now, but one day I will be.

I find it amazing that dreams can bring out such emotion; emotions we've never felt before and yet they feel so real.  Just writing this post made me feel some of that again, though I'm sure even that will begin to fade.  It's too bad, it was such a great feeling.  Also, keep in mind that the dream does not, in any way, express how I feel about one religion over the other.  Take it as just a backdrop, what's important is the what, not the why.  The emotion and the characters are the focus.

The Recent Goings-on

So much shit has been going on; mostly with work.  As you know, they laid off all those people and now there are a total of 3 of us working like crazy on all these brands to get everything live.  It's the most tedious and repetitive work.  I prefer a challenge not monotony.

Enough about work, I've been feeling very depressed lately.  Not in the way you're probably thinking, though.  I've been feeling very "blah", not "The world is against me!  I want to die!".  Maybe it's seasonal, though this never happened before.  In some regards I should be happy I'm healthy, I have my handful of friends, and my family.  But lately I've been feeling like I don't want to go anywhere, do anything...I don't know.

I want to see if I go snowboarding with a few people from work next weekend.  I've never snowboarded before, I've only been skiing.  I've been wakeboarding, that was difficult but I got the hang of it after a while, though I wasn't very good.  It should get my mind off things.  Life just isn't what I remember.  The simplicity of being a kid is gone.  Responsibility takes over and I feel thrust into it.  I'm still impatient, cocky, and to some degree, immature.

I just feel terribly short-sighted.  Like I don't know where I'm headed.  I guess we all feel that way though.  There's a degree of uncertainty to all our lives.  I just never had it staring me in the face, never had to think about it before.  I've also been craving someone to hold and someone to hold me.  I've felt this before and it only lead to trouble.  But here it is again.  I mean, I have somebody that likes me...a lot.  but I'm just not interested in her.  I'm fairly picky with my choice of girls, and even pickier when it comes to guys...that doesn't make it easy to find someone - throw in some shyness and you have yourself a whole slew of reasons why I'm single.

Oh well.  We'll see where I go from here

Oh for the Love of God, Make it Stop!

So much work and only 3 people.  I tried writing about it just now and erased the whole post because it was barely coherent.  It made me sound, not only crazy, but like a fucking whiner.  I'm gonna go do something other than bitch.

"Of all the things I've lost, I miss me mind the most!" - Jadrian

Nothing could better sum up how I feel.

World record

I went over my boss' house Friday after work. We invited one of our friends who was laid off. We had some drinks, watched Iron Man, played risk and drank some more. I wanted to go home at the end of the night because I don't like being offered to stay the night due to my stupidity. I drank too much and didn't want to be a burden. Granted, staying was the smart choice since driving in that condition would've
been terrible.

Her kids love me to some odd reason. I've noticed most kids do. I don't think I've paid them much attention until last night, which makes it all the more amusing. Her 4 year old was drawing me pictures and her seven year old was being a typical boy and jumping around. He eventually got tired and laid down on the couch next to me. The he kept scooching over until he was laying against me. My boss gave me this look like "Wtf? Is he bothering you?" and it was far more amusing than bothersome. It was actually cute.

I spent the night and left around 10. I couldn't have been anymore pale. I felt like shit. I made it home at some point, I have no idea what time. And I've been sleeping since. I think it's been about 19 hours at this point. I'm a mess :-P

A sneaking suspicion

I posted a comment on josh's blog and got an email from google a few minutes later saying my email couldn't be sent. I checked it and it
was a comment notice to josh with my comment. The odd part is it was addressed to webmaster@freshboy.co.uk. Now, I'm no rocket scientist but to my knowledge he's supposed to be a teenage boy in Oxford, not the webmaster of a gay porn site.

Oh, and the Internet is fucked up here at work so we're twiddling our
thumbs.

Aint that some shit

If I already used that as a title for another post, sorry.  This totally deserves it though.  Today they made ANOTHER round of cuts.  My boss (she's still around for the time being, God knows when they'll get rid of her too though) called me into her office and told me there was going to be some stuff going down but that I shouldn't worry.  A few hours later the lead Flash developer gets called into the CTO's office.  He comes out, puts his hat on and his coat and leaves.  This is at 4:45, our day ends at 6...I knew what had just happened.  Then I saw more people leaving.  It was scary.

The Front End team is down to 3 people, the Interactive team has been dissolved, and the back-end is down to 4.  Aint that some shit.

I've been talking to a recruiter lately about a job in Toronto, Ontario (yup, up in Canada).  I really want to take it since they're willing to relocate whoever they pick for the job.  We'll see how that goes.  The NY Times never got back to me so whatever.  Maybe a move away from the American economy is exactly what I need.  I hope it works out.  I hate the cold but I'll deal if I get to move out on my own and explore another country.

Fruits of My Labor

So my project FINALLY went live!  It's about time, too.  I was at work til about 6:45 making sure it launched without a problem.  We have a few things to add to it still so it's not perfect but it's pretty good so far.  One of the back-end guys messed up a query which caused it to send some empty data to my app and because my app shouldn't receive empty data it failed at one point.  So I'll be putting in some extra checks to make sure it doesn't do that if it receives unexpected data (or lack thereof).  Without further ado, I give you my project: http://www.playboystore.com/landingpages/customizer.php?dept=women

Fucked up

I love knowing stuff that other people don't. In this case, though, it's more of a curse. I'm out having drinks for my boss' last day. The problem is nobody knows it's her last day.  She was laid off and nobody knows yet. Fucking awesome.

They're making more cuts. Of course the first to go is the one that makes the place run somewhat smoothly. My faith in the company is shaken. On the bright side my project finally goes live Monday. This week was fine until today.

I'll post a link to my app on Monday

Seeing somebody die

I had the most fucked up dream I've EVER had last night. Only once have I felt emotion so strong in a dream and it was horrific.

Last night I went to sleep and I don't remember much about the bulk of my dreams except for the fact that I know I had more than one but only one sticks out in my mind. I'm in what appears to be a mall, in a store. In this store is my boss and with her are her husband and my old boss (we all work together). Suddenly we see the sewers (in the middle of the main hallway of this mall as if it were a street) start to explode upwards with a rush of water and a fireball engulfing the column of water. One by one they do this down the "street". It seems that in this dream my boss' husband is a firefighter and he's going to go rush off to solve this problem. We tell him a few times that he needn't worry (odd), possibly because nobody's hurt or walking there...and it's a dream so stuff doesn't make sense. Around the 3rd-4th explosion it reaches a central section, kind of like an intersection. This intersection simply explodes and collapses. Now we have a problem.

Water starts gushing out onto the "street" in all directions. It seems that this "street" is on the 3rd floor of this "mall" though. There are 2 girls at the edge of the street when the water starts gushing and it starts to cover one of the girls and push her. After a few tense moments it seems she's ok...but the other girl jumps for some reason. I quickly take off a layer of clothing, my jacket I think, and jump after her but land only one floor down. I'm sure she went further. I run around to the side she was on when she jumped and hurdle a wall that appears lead down another floor. At the top of this wall I realize it's a fountain. It's shallow. I look to my right and see the little girl crushed. She landed in this shallow fountain. Her mother comes running behind me a few moments later and scoops up her dead child. I'm in shock. Somebody yells to get her camera. She had a camera around her neck when she jumped. For some reason getting the camera seemed important. I run to get the camera and see it's completely smashed in but not shattered. This camera was symbolic of the girl and her state. My boss comes up behind me to give me a hug. I run and curl up in a corner facing the wall as I hold the camera, whimpering. I wake up whimpering. I've never felt so much loss.

Music - part one of many (and a job offer too!)

I'll most likely keep you guys informed as to music I hear that I like. I like music and it plays a big part in my day so you'll most likely see these posts every now and then. The artist I discovered last night while on youtube was Maria Mena. She has the most amazing voice and she's beautiful to boot. I'll try to embed the video below (the video says embedding was disabled by request and won't give you the code so I'm playing around with it :-D)

apparently that didn't work...so just click here to see it. It seems they really did disable embedding, it's not that they don't show you the code and hope you're too dumb to figure it out. Anyway, she has a simply amazing voice.

EDIT:
I was at work today when I checked my email and saw a linked-in message. Normally I ignore these because they're recruiters and they annoy me. This one was different, though. It was from the NY Times. They're seeing if I'm interested in a position as a Senior Developer. This sort of scares me. I've never understood the divide between Junior and Senior level anything. It seems purely subjective to me. Also I've only been at the company for a year at this point so it leads me to doubt whether I'm qualified for a Senior level position. I have no way of finding out unless I ask though so I responded and I'm hoping to hear back.

Attention Whore

The title suggests anger at someone...not so. It's about me! I realized today that I was feeling particularly camera whorish, which is completely unlike me. I hate the way I turn out in pictures most of the time. Today, however, I was taking a shower and I got out and figured "why don't I take a few 'fresh out of the shower' pictures?", and so it began. No, there are no nudes :-P. I may post them sooner or later once I decide if it was a good idea or not. Figured I'd tell you about my incredibly random train of thought though. Again, this was completely unlike me.

A Night on the Town

I went into the city last night with some friends from work. We had fun. I don't dance but I managed to not look like a complete fool so I guess that's good. I ended up being the designated driver. I had the least to drink. I have NO idea how to navigate the city. The city confuses the hell out of me. Luckily we had a GPS system built into the car (which I had to learn how to use on the fly since it wasn't my car). I was going to drive them all home but Mike seemed to be feeling a lot better by the time we got back into NJ. He said he'd take it from there so we got my car and I headed home.

Mike is a very quiet, reserved guy. The man can dance! I'm beyond horrible. I enjoyed myself even though clubs aren't my thing. He must've thought I wasn't having fun because I wasn't moving much at first but, sadly enough, that's just the way I am. He wants to go out next weekend too but I don't think I'm up for it. Maybe in a few weeks.

Non-descript Update

I haven't had much happen in the past few days. Obviously America's first black president but that has more of a historical significance to me than a personal significance. I honestly didn't like one candidate more than the other. I could've gone either way on the issue.

I'm feeling kinda crappy and have been for the past week or so. I'm going into the city this weekend with a few friends from work. Could be fun, should be. I recently discovered a kickass band thanks to thejoefrom1993. I like their whole album "Wall of people". The band is "Monty Are I". Their whole album is full of passion and every song is different in terms of its sound and sometimes even its genre. The guitar and drum work is amazing and the lyrics and vocals are just as good.

That's about all that's currently going on my life I guess. Oh, I just saw today that my youtube video has 59 views and a 5 star rating (with one rating). Pretty cool.

Dumb People - They're Everywhere

I can't escape them, I swear. They follow me wherever I go. I had a brunch-like thing with my parents downstairs and we got into an "Palin is dumb" conversation and we just kept making fun of her. If I have to choose the lesser of two evils, I'll choose Obama. Now here comes the fun part. My stepfather mentions that McCain looks like a midget and does a little impression of McCain never bringing his arms up past his elbows. I got slightly annoyed. The guy is old, he was a POW for years and I'm sure it's left physical scars and impairments of some sort so to make fun of the guy just isn't right, not physically anyway.

I say all of this to them and they fire back with "We're prisoners of the Bush regime!" and I respond saying "I don't know about you but I'm not in a prisoner camp being physically tortured". Their response is "We might as well be! This is worse!".

I walked away. I think I ate for 5 minutes total before I walked away from them. At least I'm not hungry anymore, but I'm definitely not satisfied. I might go out and get some food.

I like arguments and the back-and-forth of a good debate. I hate stupidity and arguments that aren't thought through and baseless points. Just because words are coming out of your mouth doesn't mean you're conversing. A speak and spell may not have a mouth but it can speak words (who remembers the speak and spell? :-D) and that's what I'm equating people to that simply vomit words as if to keep the flow going. I would enjoy far more if you paused and thought and broke the flow than you verbally defecating in order to "argue your point".