31 Dec
January 1, 2000
The Y2K bug does not result in airplanes falling from the sky, stock markets crashing, or nuclear missiles launching on their own. Pundits decry the wasteful spending of billions to ensure nothing significant happened. IT departments worldwide sputter in bewilderment. “But! But!”
October, 2000
I come out to a few select friends and family. My parents immediately fight over which one of them is most accepting of it. It later turns out the answer is “neither”.
September 11, 2001
The American Century comes to a close. The subsequent decade sees Western civilization dig its heels in, ineptly seeking security and short-term gains at all costs. I watch CNN for 6 months straight.
October 23, 2001
Apple releases the iPod. I fail to see what the big deal is. Investors disagree significantly on this point.
December 20, 2002
“Second Life? What’s that?” I ask as I click the link. “What a stupid name!”
February 1, 2003
I move to Vancouver on an ill-advised whim. The next three years are…interesting. To this day, I still wake up thinking cockroaches are eating dead skin off my face.
January 14, 2006
Some dude cuts most of my face off and totally goes to town on my skull with power tools. Fortunately, he was a doctor. I can breathe through my nose now.
August, 2006
As a part-time contract LSL developer, I am paid in US dollars. Currency fluctuations force me to give up LSL development in favour of working a minimum wage retail job. I like it a lot better.
November 18, 2006
I manage to get published for the first time. It is not exactly my finest work.
December 20, 2006
I’ve just been told about this new CMS that’s supposed to be pretty good. “Drupal? More like Poo–pal!” I exclaim to a circle of blank, embarrassed faces. Nice.
April 21, 2007
A lab test indicates I may have cancer. Subsequent tests indicate I have stress. I consider remedying both by having alcoholism.
July 22, 2008
My Palm Treo dies. I buy an iPhone. Unfortunately, everyone I know can be divided into two camps: People who already have iPhones and people who don’t care that I am now the coolest person ever.
August 15, 2008
I learn my knee pain is likely to be the result of osteoarthritis. At such an early age, the implication is that I will not be able to walk in 10 years.
September 1, 2008
I am told I do not have osteoarthritis after all. As such, I am likely to continue walking for some time. “Your knees look great,” the doctor says, peering at the x-ray. “Say, how much exercise do you get?”
January 1-Dec 31, 2009
I endure a great deal of bullshit. My friends are kept appraised of the situation–to their dismay.
And that’s what I did during the aughts. How about you?
25 Dec
I just got back from Kingsway and Broadway, the scene of the latest highly suspicious fire in Mount Pleasant.
For now, I’ve uploaded a Flickr set–tags to follow shortly.
With typical Vancouver cynicism, consensus among most of the bystanders (also, news media, city workers, firefighters, etc.) seemed to be that the soon-to-be-constructed condo towers at Kingsway and Broadway and Main and Broadway would be very nice and profitable indeed.
Update: The Vancouver Sun has also posted an extensive gallery of pre-dawn photos.
Update #1: I made a Google Map illustrating what might be in store for Main Street when developers get some of this land rezoned.
22 Dec
“Your family just moves from one crisis to another,” my therapist said.
As an introverted, queer teenager, I’d been forced to talk to a pretty long list of psychologists and psychiatrists. Despite this, I’d certainly had never heard one make a lot of sense before. Psychotic fundamentalist bullshit, certainly, but an accurate observation?
I was shocked. I hadn’t seen her long, but so far, we’d mostly talked about my strained relationship with my parents. And she was right. We totally did. She emphasized to me that she was my therapist, not my parents’, but made no bones about the fact that she thought a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder was pretty fitting for one of them.
Ten years later, I suspect I’ve still got the ‘crisis’ habit, despite my best efforts. My friend S. disagrees, convinced mine is a calm, measured response to the universe’s inherent anti-Catherine nature. Still, my therapist’s words have always stuck with me, as I worry about whether I might have inherited anything more serious than a habit.
On that note, this article from Scientific American was particularly interesting to me, as it discusses biological components of BPD, but also implies that, as with autism, ADD and mood disorders, there exists a “drama queen” spectrum. Neat. Maybe there’s a drama queen Kinsey scale.
“Dangerous Liaisons: How to Deal with a Drama Queen” (via Pete Quily)
14 Dec
Eugene Cernan walks on the moon, Dec 13, 1972
I’m skeptical of the usefulness of manned spaceflight, even as I believe in its long-term necessity. (Besides, should it be necessary for humans to leave Earth, we could get that going on fairly short order. The technology’s straightforward, even if we don’t have interplanetary ships today.)
I was born almost a decade after the last time a human stepped foot on the moon. The Apollo program was Cold War nose-thumbing and sabre-rattling at its most blatant. It was a corporate boondoggle on a scale scarcely seen since. It was a distraction from the horrors of Vietnam and from the waning popularity of two Presidents.
Landing on the moon was also the most impressive thing humans have ever achieved.
Despite all its flaws, I’ve been a big supporter of the space program for my entire life. Building better telescopes and probes is absolutely necessary for the same reasons the Large Hadron Collider is necessary: because if we don’t seek out knowledge about the universe, if we don’t appreciate it, what the hell is the point?
36 years ago today, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt stepped into their lunar module and returned home, the last humans to step foot on another world. That’s not appreciating it, guys.
