Tuesday, January 28, 2003

My goodness. I have been neglecting this journal.

Ah well. Here’s my situation:

I watched the Superbowl at the apartment belonging to that friend who wants me to move in with him. The first friend. It’s a nice place; well-furnished and clean. The rent’s cheap, too. There are two main problems: I’d be living in a fairly small room, and my commute to work would take an hour, each way.

However, this friend and his roommate will be moving in a few months as it is. It might be worth spending a few months with a long commute to get the inside track with these guys, so that I’ll be a stronger part of the decision-making process (they’re looking for a place nearer to my neck of the woods anyway).

The commute to the other friend’s house — which will be coming available over the next few months — shouldn’t be as long as I’d feared. My Dad estimates a half-hour commute from there, which is fine by me. OTOH, his house is fairly old.

Which raises the third possibility: renting a new apartment nearby. There are quite a few two-bedroom apartments near here that are going for $1600 a month or so; I could definitely pay $800 a month, and several acquaintances are in the same situation.

Which means that my range of options has moved from “straight or curly fries?” to those five-page menus you get at Chinese restaurants.

Meanwhile, I’ve been writing more. Over the past few weeks, I’ve begun to seriously yearn to spend a significant amount of my time writing. Since I do have the skills to write professionally, I’ve been consciously using some of my free time to sit down with Navi and bang out a few paragraphs here and there. Nothing of consequence has sprung from this work, other than a review of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams and Noir, but my desire to write has strengthened, and I’m just thinking about it more. I’m coming up with possible strategies for writing more.

It feels good.

I think my ideal work routine would be to have several part-time jobs: writing for a couple days a week, programming for a day or two, painting for a day. It sounds like bliss to me (though I know that the work would be stressfully erratic), but why not?

To realize that dream, I have to commit myself to building up that work now, so that I can quit my full-time job or cut back to part-time and still have enough to cover costs.

Plus, my costs will skyrocket if I move out.

STUN Software ground to a halt over the past few weeks as I tried to get Saalon and Brennen up to speed on what I want to do with it. I’m hoping to solve that on Saturday night with a conference call between us all.

I’ve been tweaking the visual layout of Points of View based on a few graphic design books I checked out of my local library last week. I’m learning all sorts of useful things about page layout and such.