I am just the most maudlin weepytoad ever.

From my desk in my cube, my ears perked up--where was that sound coming from? Should I try to find it and find its banal source or shall I hope it's only my imagination feeding my homesickness? If I do find it, I can at least ascertain that I'm not hallucinating. I'd like to hallucinate, though: be officially certifiable. How do people ever know you're really hallucinating and not just making it up?

I followed the sound. I figured it would be banal, the hum of a new printer or copier. It was the new digital copier, but in my cube listening for the noise's source, I had filtered out the main copying noises and heard only a secondary hum.

A foghorn, very low and distant, the way I heard them at home. Old Lyme had none, but one of the two lighthouses in Saybrook had one. A foghorn across a mile of water, through mist.

Home.

How amusing.

I found out when CoolBoss and I were discussing my promotion Dot Org's the first impression of me. They wondered at darkstar in my email address and wondered if I were a witch. My hiring committe comprised CoolBoss, the person I would replace, and a strikingly intuitive woman still in the program, with whom I was just now chatting. She told me that she had looked at my website too, which had a constitutional reference. Of course: that was when I had the first amendment on all my pages ('cause it's my favorite!). I protested: "But I always thought you interviewed me because [the woman I replaced] liked the look and the content of my résumé, and I always assumed she had been the first hurdle!" Oh sure, I'd had the skills, but a witch in the ACLU: they couldn't pass up a chance to meet me!

And so I showed up in my houndstooth interview suit and pumps with my hair all up and sleek and putting on as best a show as I could muster of being desirably employable and only interestingly abnormal, though neither a witch nor in the ACLU.

What I can't can't figure is why I put my entirely personal, oh-so-sloppy site's URL on my resume, so I'll have to look through my old job-seeking files and see what pattern there might be, why I did it.

I started this the day before CoolBoss made the offer. What I was doing at the library that day was supposedly doing job-search stuff. One thing I found out was that Dot Org has an ISBN: it was a publisher and so I reeeeally wanted the job.

And I have the job and I have the First Amendment on my wall and my name is in books, yippeee!

About HAO's page linked up there. You'll notice she doesn't give the full story of Hallowe'en. I suppose I should scan the picture of her all signed into law. In that photo she's cheating: wearing the law badge before earning any signatures. Not intentionally cheating, I should clarify; merely pre-party.

This doesn't rival Sister Sledge at an Italian festival. It's just that They Might Be Giants will be at the LoDo music-fest this evening and Haitch and I are going to go around yelling "Minimum wage--heeyah!" Well. That will probably be only me.

See, Shelley, I used a name. H plus "aitch." But even HAO refers to herself as Hao, "Hey-oh," and maybe that was why I pursued her as a friend: she understands the initials thing and had pronounceable ones. I envy people whose initials are acronyms.

Wheeee! RDC borrowed a web cam from work. My exhibitionist streak (which is, as is readily apparent, wide) pulsates with glee. Further reports as events warrant.

Where did that phrase come from? "Further reports as events warrant"? The first I remember is Charlie Brown or maybe Linus Van Pelt announcing the various steps that would take him outside to play, but I thought one of the Peanuts carrying a note to school which would "self-destruct in 60 [?] seconds" was original too, that it was a joke too sophisticated for my eight-year-old mind to grasp.