tj hooker

A dream where Ivy and I had to travel a long distance on bikes. At one point there were few or no streetlights, and I had no light on my bike, so I rode in darkness. For some reason I was sleepy, and had to resist closing my eyes. Then the darkness lifted, and Ivy and I were pedaling through a street fair in North Berkeley, near my therapist's office. We saw a friend of Ivy's, a girl. Ivy played with the friend, and then the friend's father wanted to take the girl home. He handed me a stack of papers, and an arm. I thought it was a doll's arm, but when the father returned to get his papers (and arm) his daughter was clearly missing an arm, there was nothing below her right elbow. I looked in my arms, astonished to see that the arm I held was a living arm. Ivy was very upset by this, and I tried to calm her by telling her that "many characters in Shakespeare were disabled. For example, Richard II was a hunchback." David was there, offering jokes. "Yeah, an...

Sick and tired. Both! And thinking a lot about the bad economy.

Recession hits Bay Area hard Feeling ill-prepared, and reluctant to commit to any longterm vision of anything as far as "career" goes. Bets, as they say, are off.

I�m thinking about Y again. I had a million dreams about him. Strange that I want some memorabilia about him� a magazine from his pile of magazines, a CD from his vast store of CDs (I would burn MP3s from it). His Perl book, a can of Diet Coke from his store underneath his desk. Strange craving to have a piece of him now. He seemed so� permanent. But of course no one is permanent, nothing is permanent but the idea of God I guess.

We had another layoff today. The man who hired me was let go. A charming guy, not always easygoing, but he hired me when I really needed a job. Layoffs are like deaths, transitions that are difficult and necessary and awful. After the meeting my boss said to me, "the hardest thing is that we have to just go back to work as if nothing had changed." I can't believe I haven't been laid off yet. I feel like the least knowlegable person in this building. I guess value isn't measured by college degrees alone? I really don't have the answers there. Who knows what management was trying to do? It's probably the case that, back when the company was much smaller, some of those laid-off guys were hired by the very members of management who ordered the layoff. Awful. And, of course, one is glad one still has a job.

We might be hitting the wall on chip design. And there are questions as to whether or not things like optical fiber and asynchronous clocks will help.