I’ve written before about how I destroyed my knee while fencing in the US National Championships. It was my first, and last Nationals. I went from spending most of my day thinking about my sport (all of the exercises and Eat to Win diets and self hypnosis and positive visual imagery and training and exercises and reading books on fencing and competing every weekend) to having been roughly thrust out of that world into an ex-competitors world with nothing to do but spectate.

(Could I have had knee surgery? Yes, there was surgery available – even though prior to keyhole surgery you were left with huge s-shaped scars around your knee. But surgery like that isn’t available in the US to young single mothers with no health insurance and not much money, and so I just lived with it.)

Anyway, Piggy was a gift from the airport gift shop after the competition. Picture a JFK airport bar, me sobbing into a large scotch, my husband (who was also my coach) making the pig burp to try to make me smile. When I see him, I am back in that bar with my leg cradled on a chair, crying.

Between one second and the next, your life and everything you want from it can change. You can lose your dreams and have to begin searching for new ones. Sometimes, however, you get a second chance.

I’ve finally gotten my referral to an orthopedic knee specialist, and today am going to see if the knee can be repaired. (Hurrah for the UK and the NHS!) I can’t tell you how much this means to me. Do I still have dreams of becoming a US National Sabre Champion? Obviously not. But so many things are opening up to me again.

Piggy will always have a place with me, of course. Sometimes our failures, more than our successes, make us who we are.

Not that this makes me unique, pretty much everyone does here, even the ones who were actually born and raised here. It’s mid-June, and the weather is cold and grey, with a real mean wind blowing. It’s threatening to rain at any moment. This is a problem for the brisk walk that I had planned on taking during my lunchtime, both for stress management and for exercise.

Sometimes I get really, really nostalgic for Los Angeles. I know that it’s not all beaches and sunshine (it wasn’t even when I did live right on the strand at Hermosa Beach, just steps from the sand and water). I have this very idealised vision of what it was like to live there, kind of a “good parts” version. You know, the one without gangs and smog and traffic jams and the possibility of getting shot. The good stuff.

Just once, though…just once I would like to have a proper summer. One where the sunshine and warm weather last more than just a few days. I’m a hot weather girl, I really miss sunshine – I’m probably a much nicer (less depressed) person in the sun. I want an endless stretch of sunny, hot weather, frosty drinks by the pool, sleeping with the windows open to catch the moonlight and night breezes.

That’s why everyone I know here has a dream of moving to Spain. Or Portugal. Or Greece.

Then I blinked, and it was gone.

That was one of the stranger things I’ve ever experienced. I clearly saw the close rows of red symbols on his skin, his entire chest and arms covered in symbols that I couldn’t understand. Translate THAT one for me. :)

The other night I dreamed about a winged kitten, which I had allowed to get outside somehow, and someone hurt it. I remember looking at a gash in her poor little side, and trying to straighten the broken wing. When I woke up, I felt such a sense of grief, which lasted most of the morning. Interpret that one.

No gaming, too fried…except that I did reinstall Runes of Magic and played last night until 1:30 or so because I was too stressed to sleep. It was simple, mesmeric, and nice.

Back to hell, see you all later.

I wish you all purplez, and grindless levelling, and magical flying star ponies who fart rainbows.

I’m at the stage career-wise when the next stage is “Suit”. Proper middle management, not just a developer who leads web teams. The salary and all the perks would be quite nice, but I think about doing suit-things all day and I lose the will to live. I’m enjoying my rather hybrid lifestyle of leading web teams and also doing design, branding, front-end development, information architecture, etc. But I’m stagnating. Who do I really want to be when I grow up?

My last project was a large-scale social networking site. I loved it. Online community management is a lot of fun…but I simply couldn’t afford that title/salary. Although I can do some front-end development, I would never call myself a proper developer. I absolutely love branding and marketing, the art and science behind why people buy (or why they do anything that we want them to do), but I can’t see myself doing that exclusively. I’m a maker, I like to see things that I’ve built.

Tough call. It’s just interesting…and scary, to be honest…to be thinking about making a total life change at this point in my career. When I was a kid, I thought at some point that I would actually grow up and become an Adult. Who knew that “Adult” doesn’t actually exist? Did my parents feel this way? Probably. Scary, scary thought.

Economy-class transatlantic flights are torture. They were never exactly fun, mind you, but at least you could try to sleep through it. Now the seats are so narrow that there’s no room for regular-sized people, much less Kevin Smith-sized people, and there is no leg room whatsoever. I’m just under 5’5″ (walking next to a tall person I look like a Chihuahua trotting to keep up), and I had no leg room. I was also sitting in the middle of five seats. If you want to stand up to use the lavatory or just stretch your legs, you need to ask two other people to collect all of their stuff and move into the aisle so you can get out. I got up twice during the trip. I kept myself awake by having territorial elbow wars with the fat German teenage boy next to me. (Don’t mess with me boy, I’m much meaner than you are!)

My sisters and I all got a tattoo together – the kanji for family, combined with a blue-green dragonfly for my mother. Two of my sisters had never had a tattoo before, and I have video of them concentrating veryvery hard, trying to “cowboy up” and not be a crybaby. :D

I’m catching up on tons of blog posts in my feed reader – trying to read anything, even just checking mail, was impossible on dailup (which is all my father has). I can’t believe that we ever put up with that. The connecting noise brought back memories, however.

Lots of Cataclysm news. I’ve been reading through it, but I feel a bit distant from the changes – it’s difficult to really get excited over things when you’re not raiding.

And I have to say that Red Dead Redemption looks totally awesome. Awesome to the point of considering buying a second XBox so we can play together.

My mom passed away last night.

I haven’t been home in a long time. During Top Sekrit Projekt, I was putting everything into a startup. It was going to be my Facebook, my career-maker. I didn’t make the time to go home as often as I should. Then with the advent of the recession, the project failed, and we went from having a very comfortable living to trying to survive on practically nothing – with no jobs to be had, anywhere. Eventually I clawed my way back from that precipice, but I was too damned broke to go back home. So I waited for times to be better. And then it was too late.

You can never get that time back. You can never undo mistakes like that. Sometimes you never get the chance to say “sorry”. You never get the chance to say “I love you”. You don’t get the chance to be a better daughter, to love someone in the way that they should be loved.

And that is eating at me. I can’t get away from it. I can’t take it back, and I can’t make it better. There are no do-overs.

I love you, Mom.

]]> http://www.ravven.com/blog/2010/03/too-late/feed/ 4 http://www.ravven.com/blog/2010/03/blog-whining-day/ http://www.ravven.com/blog/2010/03/blog-whining-day/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:16:10 +0000 Ravven http://www.ravven.com/blog/?p=2355 …or “whingeing”, as they would say here in the UK. I totally forgot about Blog Whining Day. It may have been yesterday, I don’t know – I’ve been lost in a haze of work and stress and site mockups and wireframes and ecommerce site builds and I’M JUST SO FRICKIN’ STRESSED! WAAAAAH!

Is that enough of a whine? :D

I’ve hardly logged in in days, due to the aforementioned Real Life Suckage. Yesterday I finally made my flight reservations for my trip back home to the US (I was scheduled to go home in May, as my mother is quite ill, but it seemed as though we might be on shorter time than I hoped, so I moved it up). I am totally, totally panicked at the thought of going home. Oh, I want to go home, I miss my family desperately. It’s the thought of flying that is making me so tense. I had so many security issues last time, which led to me missing connecting flights, which led to me sitting in airports for ages like a displaced person. I don’t like the thought of full-body scanners. I hate the rudeness of TSA personnel and the whole cattle-car feeling of it. But at least I’ll be home, finally.

While I’m having a whinge, the last time I logged into game I had the same damned problem back with framerates of 9-15 fps. I can’t do any group runs like this. It is so infuriating.

OK, enough whining for one day. I haven’t run out of things to whine about, but I’ll want to slap myself if I continue. :D