Loki makes for a pleasant coworker, but sometimes he takes a toll on the productivity.

• Been tapped for my French and Spanish language skills, with jokes/promises that pretty soon they’ll have me speaking Portuguese as well
• Met a lot of genuinely nice people
• Learned that working from home is awesome because I don’t have to commute and can wear yoga pants and fuzzy pink slippers
• Learned that Loki is only a good coworker if he’s sleeping
• Been put to work on interesting and challenging problems
• Had to stretch beyond the limit of my technical ability, but found support for the learning process every step of the way
• Been told I’d be useful at an upcoming event in Europe

It’s good to change things in your life every once in a while and make a fresh start if things feel stagnant. Especially if it means having this much fun.

It’s back. Oh, insomnia, you heartless bastard. I thought I told you not to come around here no more? Ambien was supposed to be the bouncer, but he seems to have gone on a coffee break, so somehow insomnia managed to crash this brain-goo party.

Too much is swirling in my head right now. I miss my cat. I try to ignore the little burgundy box with brass fittings sitting on the bookshelf, and when I do notice it I try to distract myself with clever little musings that Ripley is now Schrödinger’s Cat, immortal and safe in her quantum state of . . . ashes. It doesn’t work. In ten hours it will be three weeks since I felt her heart stop beating. I can still feel her grow cold under my fingertips.

I don’t miss my old state of mind with regard to the meaning of life and the universe and all that, but I wish I was a little farther along in my process of rebuilding a worldview. It sure would be useful right about now.

It’s been too long since I’ve been home to L.A. I miss the beach. I miss the sun. I miss House of Pies in Los Feliz on the way to an adventure, and I miss Canter’s on La Brea at three a.m. after a night out. I miss salsa that clears your sinuses. I miss not having to wonder if it’s warm enough to wear flip-flops outside. I miss having family there that would be sincerely happy to have me visit.

I’m stressed about the future. I need to find a new job. I didn’t think that in addition to family stress and the evil attack of the cancer on poor little Ripley that I’d also find myself suddenly unemployed, even though I’ve been doing as much as I was able to show that I have a lot to offer the company. Despite my efforts I’ve been wedged firmly between the Scylla and Charybdis of apathy and frustration.

I can sympathize a lot with German Shepherds. They’re smart and eager, and if you put them to work they can do amazing things. But if you lock them up in the yard and just give them a ball to chase once in a while and never let them do more, they get bored. Then they get frustrated. Then they get grouchy. Then one day they bite. That’s what happens when you go crazy from being cooped up. In the end, the owner of the German Shepherd just sees a crazy, useless bitch. But the owner rarely, I’ve found, recognizes that they created the situation by stifling potential.

Anyway. Unemployment. I’ve been working on getting myself a promotion for some time, and the timing felt right to try to make it materialize. It backfired. The short version is that I explained that after 3+ years in the same position I was ready for new challenges. Then I got fired. I didn’t hear the words “you’re fired” so much as hear that my boss agreed I was ready for something new and so my last day at work would be next Friday. That’s how you fire someone without saying “you’re fired.” It was a pretty slick coup de grace, I have to admit.

I don’t take it personally. At no point did anybody promise to be Virgil on my journey through the nine circles of corporate hell. I know I was on my own in trying to escape a dead-end position. Any efforts to do well at work had to be based on altruism. That’s rough. Even with a decent paycheck and benefits it’s hard to stay motivated when I know the career potential is identical (zero) regardless of whether I am awesome or I am mediocre. All I had to do was fill a function just well enough not to be a disruption. If I’m not interested in filling that function any longer, well, that’s a disruption. Fair enough. It just would have been nice to know that ahead of time.

So that’s the only part that rubs me wrong — the disillusionment. I truly believed what the organization said about being all about the people, man. Finding out that you’re as disposable as any other schlub working at any other company that thinks of employees in terms of the roles they perform and not the achievements they are capable of is a bit of a letdown. I think in the future I’d be safer working someplace without such lofty Utopian aspirations. Then I can’t be disappointed when they don’t live up to them. I mean, who can, really? I see that now.

But the main point is . . .

. . . oh yeah. So some company treated me like obsolete software. Whatever. I think I’m worth more than that, so I need to figure out my next move and make it like a rock star.

Maybe, like Peter Gibbons, I need to leave Initech behind and get a job slinging a shovel at a demolitions company. Fuckin’ A, man.

Maybe I just need to accept that I’m horribly overqualified for any job that I can manage to get an interview for, but horribly under qualified for any job I’d actually want, and the answer is to give up and work two part time jobs, one at Anthropologie and the other at Peets’ Coffee. I’d have awesome clothing and free wi-fi whenever I needed it. Do I require much more in life? Not really.

Maybe I need a Room of One’s Own and five hundred pounds so the ideas screaming to be let out of my mind can finally escape.

Mostly what I need is a fucking break. In so many ways. I’m ground down. I look it. I can see it when I look in the mirror. I’ve accepted that the universe isn’t fair, and that sometimes no matter how hard you pay your dues sometimes you don’t get a return on the investment. So I have to remember the words of the great Sarah Connor: No Fate But What We Make. Whatever happens next, it’s going to be done on my terms for once. I’m done bowing to Authority for no real reason, and I’m done being a tool for others’ purposes when there won’t be anything in it for me.

If anything, all this shit piling up on me all at once is making me appreciate the good things I have going for me. I have the most awesome boyfriend in the history of the universe. I have good friends who like me for me, with no preconditions to acceptance. I have a remaining cat who has an epileptic hamster in his skull instead of a brain yet despite this is an utterly lovable furball. I have sisters who stick by me thick or thin, and two best friends who I know have my back no matter what. I have a lot more than many people, and I have a lot to offer.

I have tried to get a leg up in the world in various ways, only to be swatted down. Maybe I’ll stop trying to beg for carrots and instead try helping others with whatever it is they’re trying to make progress on. Little stuff like that matters. Whether I’m writing my sister’s English essay so she can focus on Physics or just bringing some brownies to work because I know they make this one dude there like 5% happier, I have a lot to offer the world and I won’t stop handing it out to people who appreciate it. It’s vicarious accomplishment, but it still feels good. For those who don’t appreciate it, I’m just going to have to start setting credit limits on altruism. I only have so many hours in the day, and I’d rather invest where I’ll see a more meaningful return.

Anybody have an opening with benefits and decent pay that will let me just make the world a better place without self-sabotaging organizational nonsense getting in the way?

Today at the office we are celebrating Towel Day with a lunchtime reading of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And brownies.

Douglas Adams was the first author who made me think that maybe after all I could become a writer. I’d been plagued with self-doubt for most of my life, which kept me from trying or from sharing any of the work I did. Being a grade a weirdo is generally frowned on when you’re in grade school, and in college I found myself in an environment that valued conformity so highly that independent thought was a virus that caused social leprosy. It wasn’t till I skipped town for my junior year in London that I realized there was a wide world of weirdos out there, and cutting myself down to size so I could fit into a prepackaged box wasn’t the only path life offered me. I could be myself, and people didn’t have to like me. In fact, if people didn’t like me for choosing myself over conformity, they weren’t worth my time.

Shortly after arriving in London, I picked up a battered paperback of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at a second hand shop on Portobello Road, and finished it in a few hours at a pub near Notting Hill Gate. The title sounded entertaining, and at 35p it was within my budget range. It blew me away the first time I read it, and I still relish being thrown into fits of giggles by Adams’ turn of phrase. It was utterly unlike anything I’d ever been exposed to. The stunted literature courses I’d taken in college chose tame titles and taught them within safe boundaries, using the curriculum to make been-there-done-that observations worthy of a monthly book club — nothing that expanded thought and experience. But this text threw all convention out of the window. Whatever I had previously believed that literature had to say about the meaning of life, religion, god, interpersonal relationships, and the kitchen sink, it was all blown away with the irreverence of a rowdy kid doing a high-dive cannonball into a nice orderly lap pool. It was the first book that really made me think about reality and existence, and it made me laugh while I was doing it. What a revelation.

I gobbled up all of his works as quickly as I could. As much as I was enthralled by his fiction, it was ultimately his least known work that I loved best. Last Chance to See is an amazing text; it ought to be taught in high school Biology courses because I have never encountered something that really gets it when it comes to conveying the nature of the relationship between human beings and the rest of the planet. I can’t recommend this work strongly enough.

The day Douglas Adams died I was very upset. He’d spent most of his career trying to get the damn movie version of his book made, but he died just shy of its release. Leave it to the creator of the Infinite Improbability Drive to kick off in the most improbable way possible; prematurely and while exercising at a gym. I wish he could have written a few more books, and that he could have lived to see the iPad so he could have made fun of it.

So wave your towels high, kids, and raise a cup of tea in honor of DNA. So long, and thanks for all the fish.