Musings after jury duty

Jury duty ended up being a lot like waiting at an airport terminal, but without the part where you look forward to going somewhere or picking someone up or the excitement and energy that surrounds travel. Jury duty is pretty much devoid of the things that make life interesting, unless you are picked to pass judgment on people, I suppose. I was not.

I sat on one of four couches for the better part of the day. Every now and again, the nice lady in the blue sweater would announce that we could have another 10 minute break. I didn't realize until the day was over that the breaks were probably for smokers; it seemed like they came very frequently.

A rabbi was sitting near me, and he called to talk to someone whose mother was in the hospital at one point. That was pretty much the highlight. Other than that, the person who most caught my attention was an annoying girl who rocked out to her headphones in that self-conscious, "I hope you all think I'm cool" way. If she was really rocking out, it probably wouldn't have bothered me. Either way, I would have thought it rude that she took up a whole couch to herself when comfy seating was at a premium. She also called someone and tried to carry on a conversation in Japanese, which was kind of funny. I've learned just enough Japanese to know that she is nowhere near fluent, so it didn't surprise me when she broke into English to ask, "Did you fix your pants?"

All in all: thumbs up for only having to go to jury duty for one day. Thumbs up to the jury duty staff, who are incredibly nice, despite the fact that they work with the public every day. Thumbs down to Annoying Girl; I predict she will become cool at precisely the moment she stops trying so hard.

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Musings at jury duty

When I first moved to Portland, I wound up with jury duty at almost precise two year intervals, which is almost precisely how often they can call you. The first time, I was excited. I hoped to get on a case, hear a story, see how the judicial system works. Moreover, I was doing data entry for an insurance company, and they had a good jury duty policy, so it was basically a week off. I spent a lot of that week playing cards with old guys named Hal and Ed, until they discovered that a) I wasn't playing for money and b) I won at least as often as they did.

Hal and Ed had never suspected that the 20-year-old data entry clerk before them had been playing poker since she could hold cards in her hands. Hal and Ed had never counted on Grandma Fuller, who taught my sister and me to play Blackjack, Five Card Stud, and my personal favorite, Down 'n' Dirty. We'd sit at the table in her cabin with stacks of cheap plastic poker chips that didn't slide well across the old vinyl table cloth, and ante up for hours (or until my sister or I lost all our chips and started crying). During a game of 21, she'd nod over at a pair of jacks and take a drag on her cigarette. "You gonna double down on that?" she'd ask, and then blow the smoke out her nose.

The second time I had jury duty wasn't quite as exciting, although I was still happy to have a break from the world of insurance. I also got on a case that time, which was neat for approximately ten minutes and 23 seconds. It was a wrongful termination suit. To sum up briefly: dude got injured on the job, dude was pushed into retraining program that was completely unsuitable for him (dude wasn't too bright), dude sued, dude lost. I left feeling that the judicial system did not protect this man, and that his lawyer was disinterested and didn't prepare him well for the trial, and that the employer's lawyer was the biggest asshole I've ever had to listen to for the better part of a day. Good times.

Jury duty only lasts one day now, unless you're on a case that goes longer. We just watched an informational video, which is intended to remind us that we're here for a very important reason. It's a good reminder, but I can't say that it managed to completely quell the sense that I've got a lot of work to do. At least I wasn't called up to be on a grand jury, which would take a whole month. Then again, I probably could have gotten out of that one fairly easily. I wonder how the rest of the day will go... I'm obviously chatty lately, so I'll probably tell you all about it.

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By the way...

Nerdygirl.com is 10 years old this month. I registered the domain on August 3, 1999, back in the heady days of the dot com boom. I was working at an insurance company at the time, and all the web pages I built were for the company's intranet, which meant that when I applied for other jobs, I couldn't point people to any URLs. Thus, nerdygirl.com was born, so I could say to prospective employers, "See? I can make web pages!" I began blogging about five months after that (before I'd heard the word blog) because people kept complaining that they would go to my website and not see anything new. "I know!" I thought. "I'll write little updates like it's a journal or something!" How original and clever I thought I was...

The site has gone through a few incarnations since it first went up with a splash page I created in Flash (with no skip button, I am ashamed to report!) At least I never used the blink tag, right? I look forward to keeping it up for years to come, even if it doesn't always seem like I have the time or energy to spend on it.

For me, the best part of having a blog has been maintaining connections with family and friends, and making new ones. I've met a few people through it, introduced a few people through it, and inadvertently started conversations (and a few arguments) between people who may never meet in person. The comments continue to be the thing that makes keeping this website worthwhile to me. Since I added them in July of 2003, there have been 3,364 comments on 308 blog posts. Isn't that wonderful?

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"Relief" is spelled o-v-e-r

I was nervous. I was so nervous my eyes kept watering up and my voice got shaky. Logic and reason were no help to my nervous system. I knew I would not die, accidentally show up naked, or pee my pants in front of a crowd. And yet...

Yesterday, I gave my first public reading. I have a story in the Fall/Harvest issue of Alltopia. The zine was put together by my friend Lara, and I was pleased that I had something to contribute to the Clothed/Naked issue. (No, it's not smutty.)

Unless you're one of a very small group of people, I didn't tell you about the reading. This is not because I don't love you, but because I spent the three weeks leading up to the reading trying to convince myself that I didn't actually have to do it, or avoiding thinking about it altogether. I am really not comfortable in front of people. The fact that I am so uncomfortable in front of people also makes me uncomfortable, which snowballs into some kind of effed up asymptote of emotions. So I didn't even tell my parents, although I did buy them copies of the zine and will mail those off this week sometime.

During the 4-6 minutes I stood in front of people, shakily reading a story about meeting my new nephews and niece in Ethiopia, I did start to grow a little more comfortable. The two glasses of wine probably helped. In retrospect, I wish I had asked the audience to look around so they could see exactly how ridiculous it was for me to be that worried. The only way a crowd could be less threatening than a nerdy bunch of Portlanders at a zine launch party would be to include children, or bunnies.

Someday, I hope to make sense of the electrical signals zooming around my brain, or at least control them. Until then, I guess I'll just continue to take things as they come, and if my eyes water up and my voice shakes, well, I'll drink more wine.

P.S. You can buy a copy of the issue at several Portland bookstores, order one from Lara, or check one out of the Multnomah County Library. Details are at alltopia.org.

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Lovely relaxation

Beer + beautiful weather + a par 3 golf course = tons of fun! Ransom and I took off for parts slightly East of here yesterday and had ourselves a good old time. We didn't write any code, check any email, or even get any phone calls. We were so footloose and fancy free! Sadly, we are terrible golfers, although each of us had a couple of nice shots along the way. I think it was our lack of nifty outfits that did us in. Either that, or we didn't have enough beer.

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I know this week

I've been here before. It's the end of a long software project. A difficult project. We're (fingers crossed) building this weekend. I know this week well.

Here's how it goes: I start the week by working all weekend. I tell other people I may ask for help with certain aspects of the project, then decide it's easier to do things myself than to explain them. Why do I do this? Because I am an idiot. I tell myself I am making good progress. That light, that end of the tunnel, it's so close!

It is not close. Monday, I probably take the night off—all work and no play, etc. This is a typical denial of the amount of work remaining to be done. Tuesday, I work until I either fall asleep or close all the bugs, whichever comes first. I come in Wednesday feeling tired but refreshed, and as though I really do have the whole thing under control. The code is built to the testing server.

Things unravel. First, several small bugs are logged; I am more or less able to stay on top of them. Most of them are the result of whatever I checked in right before bed the night before; the fixes that were so easy, I didn't bother to re-test the whole site.

Then, John walks over to my office and takes a deep breath so that a grim sort of silence surrounds his entrance. I look up, fear in my eyes; I am a deer in headlights. "Oh no," I ask. "What?"

He tells me about the bug he's found and that it's a "deal breaker," the term we use when there's something so wrong that we can't build until it's fixed. I gulp and start thinking of possible hacks solutions. I click through the code base while he's describing the problem and ask him to repeat himself several times because it's hard to read code and listen simultaneously.

This might not be the big problem, which means it's still out there, lurking. I hate it when they lurk.

I hope we find it before Friday at 4:00pm because I'd like a weekend off, but I'm not putting any money on it.

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How relevant is your content?

Dear Internet, Please add the date to your news articles, blog posts, and other informational content. When I'm looking for information, it's generally helpful to know how current your content is. As new information becomes available, old information frequently becomes useless. Please give me some clues as to how useless your content is. Lovingly yours, Rebecca

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I've been picturing my skull a lot lately

You know how in Some Kind of Wonderful, Duncan the skin head shows Keith the carving of a skull he's made in his desk and says, "This is what my girlfriend would look like without any skin?" Of course you do, go watch it again.

Anyhow, I've been thinking about that a lot lately and here's why: for the nearly two years, I've had Invisalign braces and am very close to being done, but I've recently had the unpleasant addition of wear rubber bands on my back molars. They are there to pull my teeth closer together (top to bottom, not side to side). You see, if you insert plastic between your top and bottom teeth for nearly two years, it might just happen that those teeth no longer meet up.

With the rubber bands on my teeth, I can open my mouth and feel them tugging at my teeth. In fact, I frequently open my mouth to make them tug so this whole stupid thing will be over with as quickly as possible, which is why I resemble a fish so often these days. But that's not the point. When they tug, I picture my teeth. Then I picture the jaws to which those teeth are connected, and pretty soon I've worked my way up to the whole naked skull and really start to wonder what it would look like. Then I wonder if you could drape skin over a skull and see what a person looked like. I bet if I ever watched those forensic shows, I'd know the answer to that.

Incidentally, Some Kind of Wonderful was my favorite of the John Hughes oeuvre. I was sad to hear of his death. It's strange to look over all of his writing credits. What was happening in his life from 1983–1988? He was so on fire back then! He had commercially successful movies after that, but that was really his heyday. I'm glad I was there for it.

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