February 12, 2002 - Now that I'm unemployed I guess now is a good time to write more. I've only been unemployed for a few weeks and I'm already starting to get anxious. I think I'm mostly anxious not because I feel like I need ot get back to work, but because I feel like it's really easy to be unemployed and if I don't get a job soon I might never have the motivation to get one again! It's not that I'm not doing anything. On the contrary, I'm doing quite a bit. I relish my "time off" like it was an extended paid-vacation and I try to use it to the fullest. I clean the house and I read, I run errands and enjoy the day, and I'm even shooting again. I always felt like I needed to be off of work to start shooting again, so now I'm going for it. Luckily, I was laid-off after the profit sharing bonuses came in, so I was able to buy my digital camera with it. Now I'm shooting with a Nikon Coolpix 5700. It's rather nice but I have a few complaints about the battery life and I'm not accustomed to using autofocus camers at all, so it's an exciting new experience for me.

It's amazing how upset I was when I got laid off. I immediately felt rejected, obviously. The rejection I felt not only came from the fact that I was being severed from the company, but from the distance I always felt between myself and my co-workers. I felt like the entire office realized how out-of-place I was in that company, so they banded to together and decided to get rid of me so that they could have they're own homogenous, technophile world back. They never liked me and I would never fit in, so the only thing to do was to get rid of me before any more visiting clients saw me looking at glasstire or zonezero instead of wired or hardocp. It's not like I had that much work to do.

Then again, I wasn't doing a very good job, anyway. The expectations seemed to get more intense once I came off of the contract and back to the office. I was messing up alot and it seemed like I couldn't do what they needed me to do. I also broke a few things and locked some accounts out. When I was on contract, everyone did that and it seemed like just one of those things you need to do in order to learn more. The office attitude was not like that at all. Everyone seemed to be nice enough when I had just got there and they thought I knew more than them. Then as they gradually came ot see that I didn't know more than them and I didn't care to learn more, their treatment toward me got a little more condescending. That's probably not why they condescended, but that's what it seemed like.

I didn't care, that's right! I didn't care about web site development, php, PERL, microsoft certifications or XML and dotNET technologies. HTML was just something interesting I learned in college and my friend Ralph was nice enough to refer me to a small design company four years ago. I made a little bit of money doing something I thought I could do well without giving a thought to the fact that I might have to invest more time in learning more. I tried to learn more and found out that I'm not interested. I'm not interested in any of it. I'm interested in art and photography and that's what I'd rather spend my spare time learning about and working on. I was in the wrong career for four years. I've had a four-year break from my original career path, now it's going to be even harder to get back on it. I've wasted my time making money and now I have to do what counts.

I realize now that my company actually did a very nice thing by laying me off. They really could have terminated my employment in a much harsher way, but they didn't. They were gentle about it and I thank them for it. They gave me the best option to leave the company for their sake and for mine, so I have no complaints. The day after I got layed off I realized that I didn't have to go back there and it felt great. Just when I thought I couldn't take another day of it, I was liberated. I felt horroble that everyday I hated my time there when it seemd like everyone else was really into it. I felt tlike I was wasting not just my time, but everyone's time by pretending that I was capable of being part of their company. Even with all that feeling, I didn't leave because I was getting paid. I was soaking up as much as I could. I kept convincing myself that I could improve; that I could work harder and try to fit in more or that I could learn more and be more useful. Now that it's all over I can say freely that I had no intention of doing those things. I wasn't even willing to do those things for money! I make a terrible capitalist and I should be ashamed. But I'm not.

It took the company to help me do what I couldn't. It took them to tell me to leave instead of leaving on my own for my own reasons. That's a terrible way for me to let things happen, but they happend. Maybe one day I'l learn.

January 6, 2004 - The Metro Light Rail went on its inaugural run on January 1, 2004. The train ran fare-free for the first run, so we decided to take a walk into downtown and catch the rail and participate in it. Marky, Michael, Frank, Sara L., Sarah and myself all went down Main Street into downtown. We avoided going beneath the "Main Street Subway," a pedestrian and two-lane car tunnel that takes Main Street below some old Southern Pacific railroad tracks. The tunnel always smells. We went the long way, around the tunnel and over the tracks, passing some junkyards, empty parking lots and old abandoned warehouses where we could see Transient-Americans hanging out and enjoying the 80 degree weather. All that's really not a big deal, it's just that the route we took is completely unlit and can get profoundly dark for being in the middle of the city. We knew we'd have to do something else on the way back, but we were going to think about that later.

We got to UH-Downtown and saw that there was a ridiculously long line to get on the train. It turns out that the City had some kind of festival or something happening with the opening ceremony. There were so many people there that the line to get on began at the train stop and ended at the bottom of the Main Street viaduct - like an hour wait at least! We decided that it wasn't a good day to get on, so we just walked around downtown looking for a good resturant. We finally settled on Mia Bella (Italian resturants are usually good for the vegans in the group). We had our fill, walked around some more and headed home.

Now we came to the decision of how to get back home. It was about 5:30 and it was already getting dark, so we didn't want to go back around through the junkyards. We didn't feel like having everyone pay a dollar to ride the bus only a few blocks, much less like having to wait for it. We decided to brave the tunnel. We may have made a bad decision. As we approached, we could begin to smell the urine. By the time we entered the tunnel we had to cover our noses with our sweaters. Michael remarked that it smelled like the Zoo and indeed it smelled worse than the zoo. The floor of the tunnel was wet (I hope it was just water) and the ground was littered with wet paper and old wet clothes. We decided to run through. We had to run with a distance between us so we didn't splash each other. We noticed smeared human feces on the walls and hoped to God we weren't stepping in any. When we finally emerged on the other side, I removed my sweater from my mouth and could still smell the stench. In fact, the smell didn't seem to disappear until we passed Burnett St. We tried to step in puddles and scrape our feet over pathces of grass on the way home to remove anything we might have picked up on the bottom of our shoes.

If anyone from the City of Houston Public Works Dept. is reading this, may I take the opportunity to say, "Please clean the Main Street Subway." Thank you.