Venial Sin

About a million words, somewhere in the realm of ten thousand comments, four years, seventeen billion crying jags, thirty-eight distinct dramatic moments, a dozen-odd close new friends, twenty-nine “you said WHAT about me?” confrontations, a hundred and some rethinks, eleven panicky e-mails to support staff to undo changes, four botched backup attempts, six thousand agonised (and agonising) phone calls to some very patient friends, innumerable IM conversations, and just about as many telephone calls. Not to mention the week spent [...]

My hosting and domain name contract expire in about a week or two, and right now, I’m thinking of simply shutting down the blog. Votes aside, a number of things have contributed to this, and I’ve been struggling with the idea for the last year or so. I don’t know if any of that conflict reflected in the blog itself, I’m too close to home as far as this issue goes to really address it with any accuracy, but there’s [...]

I realised something a few nights ago when talking to a friend who bounces between continents the way most people commute to work. I don’t much like blogging any more. It’s not the comments (a lot of the hate-filled ones I delete anyway, because I’m just tired of getting into flame-wars with random prats), or that I’m looking for some sort of affirmation (“Oh do keep blogging, don’t ever stop!”). It’s that I’m not doing it for the same reasons [...]

That was when all the fun began. I realised about halfway through my dirty (dirty, dirty!) martini that I hadn’t arranged for a ride to the airport, and wound up calling the hotel to sort me out with a limo for the next afternoon. “I’ll take you to the airport,” whispered Hopkins wistfully, eyes tearing up. “You don’t have to do that,” I muttered into my drink, trying to avoid eye-contact for fear of outright sobbing taking place. “The company [...]

So, while I work on finishing up the Bangkok story, from all of…good grief, two months ago now, there have been a number of other little things going on that I’ve been meaning to write about and never actually got around to. There were a couple of trips to Lahore, including a very strange one in which an acquaintance was convinced I was someone else on IRC, and another one in which a complete stranger asked me if I’d like [...]

By the time we made it to my room, past the members of the Super Junior Stalker Club and a couple of wary security people who alternated between glaring at me and just avoiding eye contact, Heartbreak definitely seemed to be fading fast. Either that or he just enjoyed stumbling and ricochetting off the corridor walls. Opening the door to my room was a little tricky, since he’d overcome his shyness of making physical contact in a public space (a [...]

Dear Madeleine L’Engle, You will be missed. For many reasons, but I think the best one is that you used to say things like this: “Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer. “It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.” I still get [...]

It was at two in the morning, while Hopkins was asleep (and snoring lightly), that my cell phone started shuddering across the bed-side table. Trying to slide my arm out from under him so that I could reach across to the phone, I tunnelled and twisted my way through the bedsheets (the hotel bed was enormous, I could have had an orgy with sumo wrestlers on that thing and had enough room for a barbecue to be held on one [...]

This article in The New Yorker is perhaps one of the single most disgusting, disturbing things I have ever read. At the end of the nine pages, I would cheerfully watch each and every one of the people involved in this travesty of human behaviour suffer. A lot. And people wonder why there’s so much rage against the current U.S. administration. Perhaps because they seem to consider that they are–in some way, shape or form–inherently absolved from adhering to policies [...]

I just don’t understand the logic involved in giving me a double-promotion and knocking six years off my career-path but STILL waiting the remaining month of my probation period before making me permanent. Am I missing some essential logic here?