2002.09.26
For starters, of course, there's literally less daylight. I think we've officially turned the corner where it seems to get dark "early", like 7. Most assuredly I live too far north for my own good. And the weather's still holding, but there are some hints that winter is on its cold and ice-laden way.
Then there's the war. Yet again, we are really going to war. Maybe it'll go ok, modulo a spike in oil prices, a worse recession, ever-deepening hatred of the United States, future terrorism, all that, but we don't know what we're gonna do with it after. You know, Iraq is not stupid, once you factor out Saddam's thuggish worldview. Sometimes they play us and International Opinion like a violin. (And you know, I haven't heard much about the fact that Iraq stopped the inspections when it was clearly proven that the inspectors were spies for the US. We're convinced we can get away with anything.)
And the economy...gak. My company had some minor layoffs a few weeks ago. Mostly "junior developers" who had earlier been working on the product that was replaced with a new acquisition and had been retrained for work on our grand march Java product, management thought they weren't pulling their weight or something. But a big core piece of that project is now in the hands of one of them consulting firms from India...never a good sign. My bet is hedged a little bit, I'm the one developer on a conversion bit for the old legacy systems and the new acquisition, but y'know, I'm very jumpy. I dunno what to do. Haven't voluntarily looked for work since the downturn. And I'd even feel guilty, some developers don't even have jobs in the first place. (Ooh, maybe I shouldn't be posting this in public; ah well. I do like it ok there, but I no longer feel I can relax about it. I want to be able to take having a job for granted for a while.)
Sigh.
I'm off to Florida with Mo, for her 10 Year High School Reunion, so there will be filler for the next couple of days.
One Bright Note
Spirited Away is a bit of a bright point. We saw it with Peterman and Leslee the other day, arguably the best movie I've seen all year, a cross between Alice in Wonderland and...well, a lot of things. One of the characters (the first one to show up in the flash animation on that link, actually) is "No-Face" who wears a simple stylized mask. Peterman pointed out that this is a clever little pun, because the mask is from "Noh", a Japanese performance art. Noh masks are known for their ability to have different expressions depending on the viewing angle, as shown here if you look closely. (I guess the ability to
have both happiness and sadness is a pretty obvious metaphor for how I feel right now.)