dannyman.toldme.com

I got up at five this morning, before the sun, and after a nice hot shower and other morning rituals, I walked a mile through the damp, dark streets, to feast on eggs, toast, bacon and orange juice at Sam’s. I rounded the corner at 6:25 to help open up the coffee shop.

Working is good. After eight hours I’ve earned myself $64. It feels damn good and now I smell like a mixture of coffee and something like caramel. I’m hopped up on caffeine and hungry for some kind of greasy cheeseburger. The tips were pretty weak: I have $1.64 or so on top of the just over $2 I have saved up in coins. That could buy me breakfast tomorrow, or maybe some Taco Bell tonight. Maybe I can get someone to lend me a few more bucks tonight, or trade them an old chocolate chip scone or two for a cheeseburger. I’ll have money after I get home on Sunday, because on the one hand family likes to help, and on the other, there’s bound to be a place in Chicago for me to sell my baht off for real American money!

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I headed back towards campus and did my federal taxes. This was a little complicated because I had to hustle around and grab some extra forms to calculate my self-employed earnings from a consulting gig I did last year. Fortunately, I was able to achieve all of this at the library, despite my not being a student. Everything was done by hand, with a photocopy of everything for my own records. I’m supposed to get $640 back from Uncle Sam. I sure can use that money!

In the evening I was feeling kind of good about everything, so I figured I’d take my $7 and go have a good time. I went by the lounge where the old friend worked, and confronted a $2 cover charge. “Does that come with a drink?” Ordinarily this wouldn’t phase me, but given that I’d like a drink, and a meal on Sunday, it was a source of some concern.

Alas, I coughed up and made my way inside. There was some serious salsa going down. I don’t know any fancy dancin’, but this didn’t keep a couple of young ladies from showing me a step or two. And the long-lost acquaintance, who was working as a waitress for the evening, treated me to a Long Island, as I was keen on something strong and nursable. It was quite strong, but it disappeared when I got halfway through, a victim of overzealous bussing. Easy come, easy go. A good time was had by me, at least.

On the way home, I was feeling somewhat hungry. The half a Long Island had done well in a stomach that had only met the coffee shop scone and a fifty-cent poppyseed muffin I’d been saving from my voyage. I decided to drop a dollar at Taco Bell. “What’s a Supreme mean?” “Sour cream and tomatoes.” “Sour cream? I just like tomatoes.” “I think you can get the tomatoes for free.” But, there was some wrestling involved with the cash register, because you can’t get tomatoes for free, but he was going to get the computer to make an exception, because he’d already said I could get tomatoes, but the computer didn’t want to enable his non-conformity. I paid my dollar and took my plastic bag to the corner. Then I found that I’d been awarded two tacos, one with tomatoes and one without. I checked my watch, it was 11:45. A good note on which to end a day of lucky breaks.

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Some time back I had been chatting on IRC about the possibility of coming back to Champaign-Urbana, and a friend somehow mentioned that he knew a cute bartender in town with a very unique name that rang a bell. I thought a moment, and asked him if the lady in question was the person I thought she might be: a student who had attended the same high-school as my sister and I, my sister’s age. You bet!

So, when I got to town I dropped her a line, and she suggested that I visit her at work, where she would be “all day Saturday” so this afternoon I wandered around downtown Champaign in search of her establishment. I stumbled upon a coffee shop with an art gallery, that had a help-wanted sign for a full-time barista. Worth a shot! I was greeted at the gallery entrance by an eager young lady with an expressive face. I browsed the water colors and we got to chatting some, then I dropped in on the cafe, got a scone and a coffee and an application.

And an interview, that went pretty well. I suppose including my resume helped. The lady, who runs the place with her husband, is intent on getting service-oriented staff, along the idea that excellent service could be one of their market differentiators. Well, that and the art gallery and a periodicals room in the back, I really dug the place. The wage is pretty darn good too, and she explained that since they were from a social work background it was important to them to treat their employees well too. I was told to drop a couple of references and that I’d hear back from them in a couple of days.

Well, that was nice!

On my way out, I chatted some more with the young lady in the art gallery … but she had to go greet some more folks who had come in. I reassured us both that if the job thing works out, I’d surely see her again sometime soon. I wandered out into the sunlight, cruising the streets of Champaign’s tiny downtown business district. Eventually I found the place where my old acquaintance works, but it was closed – an evening sort of place!

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I finished my state taxes today. I have about $100 coming from California. Yay. To celebrate, I went over to Za’s to spend my very last $3 on a coffee and a muffin. I asked the cashier if he thought it would come out under $3, as I had no change. He assured me it surely must, then rang up to $3.08. I was ready to downgrade my order when he did the easy thing of reaching into the tip cup and digging out eight cents. I thanked him for his generosity, and apologized that the tips were his money. He was upbeat – eight cents spread around four people! I told him that I wasn’t going to feel too bad, because normally I make a point of tipping decently, because I have worked as a waiter. That seemed to make him happier. Indeed, every time I have been at Za’s this week I’ve made sure to leave something in the cup.

I savored the French breakfast blend. It was slightly too-hot but quite soothing. Very French! And my chocolate muffin! Mmmmm!

I met Dan and Brijeet by the library at four, when Dan was picking Brijeet up from work. They are now both LIS people; Dan suspects that he has been accepted into the PhD program because even though he hasn’t received any notification, the campus phonebook server says he is in the LIS Graduate program, and if it is on the Internet, it surely must be true.

I got some quiet reading in in the afternoon sun, and when I was finished at Za’s I went and relaxed some more on the Quad, finishing another chapter. There were a couple of girls with a box of ducklings that they were adopting as temporary pets, that would be returned to the Ag school upon maturity. That was pretty neat. A little kid came to pet one of the ducks, and when his family turned to walk away the ducks made a bee-line to follow them. The girls retrieved the “attack ducks” and remarked that they were doing their duckling thing of following anything they could. Makes sense.

They are engaged to marry now, sharing a condo in Champaign that is already appreciating. It is a nice place built in the twenties that reminded me a bit of Mom’s apartment and Grandma’s old house. Very cool. What is even cooler is their kittens, who are very fuzzy, good-tempered, and playful.

We headed out for BBQ, their treat. I was most appreciative and the three of us put away a slab of pork ribs and a brisket, along with side dishes and pop. It was good eatin’. Afterward we walked over to Kopi and sipped on delicious coffee-based treats. I was most appreciative of their hospitality, but they recalled that a while back when I was in town I made the splashy gesture of treating the whole crowd to sushi. Ah! I knew there was a reason I tried to spend money on my friends when I had it that went beyond mere altruistic friendliness! The friends you treat well one day may take care of you another time. So be good to your friends, kids!

I love talking with Dan and Brijeet, coz they’re really smart folks with broad interests. Dan in particular is a kindred geek with some creative bents. Among other things, we talked about things like networking multi-dimensional finite-state automata as kinetic art, and the local business potential for wireless Internet services.

Back at the ranch, I finally made some minor technical changes to the way I’m handling HTML on the website, wrapping it in DIV elements with unique URLs based on timestamps. This will allow me to crawl through my files and compile a list of “what is new” that can be wrapped into a syndication feed. The upshot is that I want to try and be less linear, de-emphasizing the log here and surfing around to pay attention to a more thematic system of content-development. If I have an easy way to track and report “what’s new” that would provide a more immediate sense of reward.

Another benefit is that if others wish to create hyperlinks to sections within my HTML documents, I’ll have a standard “perma-link” mechanism available for them to use. Cross-referencing among “blogs” seems to be the latest fad these days, and I’ve seen some speculative buzz as to the potentially neato implications this could have for knowledge dissemination among trust networks in the digital age. Werd!

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After coffee I pulled back on the road. Turns out that the headlight switch was still mucked up after all, so soon after I spent another night in the car tucked behind a tree at a Wyoming rest stop.

Next morning it was back on the road through more snow. Nebraska came and went hardly without note because my attention was on safe navigation through patches of rough weather – not as rough as the night before but definitely stuff that requires your attention. It was pretty rewarding. I dont know how many snowplow I passed with their warnings, “SNOWPLOW / FLYING SAND” mounted on the back with strobe lights flashing, and sparks flying where the plows scraped the pavement ahead of them.

At a truck stop I heard tell of a snow plow that got rear-ended by a semi. I later passed some orange service vehicle that was laying on its side next to the road. Plenty of cars were stuck where they had wiped out, and I saw at least two truck trailers on their sides.

Iowa came without fanfare. Now it is getting dark and the rain that was the eastern part of Nebraska is turning back to snow. I can drive with headlights and flashing hazards at my rear. Maybe it is time to relax a while and see if the weather abates before considering eastward progress through the night.

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If there is anywhere I want to be right now it is on the road. Just at Cheyenne I figured out that I could fix the faulty headlight switch by working it back and forth several times. This brute force method cleans some of the crud off the contacts. I got the idea from a pickup truck whose lights flickered rapidly several times before he got on the highway. That is the sort of solution that you’ll see in the American heartland.

But if it isn’t one thing it’s another. Now that I can trust my lights not to flicker out on the highway I’m snowed in at a truck stop east of Cheyenne. It has been snowing on and off since I hit Sacramento. I made it up the Sierras okay and then some goddess of fortune decided to kill my alternator when I hit Reno. So I got to stay a night at Circus Circus and set off the next day.

Casinos are sort of depressing but I got lucky. Since it was Thursday I got a pretty darned nice room for $30. The nicer thing about casinos is that they are eager to do currency conversions for you. They don’t handle Baht but they took the Pounds that Duncan gave me okay. They also cashed my first, last, and only check from the dinner cruise place, and far from charging me commission instead regaled me with drink credits. I had some strong, rough wine while I waited for my repairs. I did not feel at all bad about taking advantage of their generosity because it was a calculated gamble on their part that they’d make money on me gambling. I didn’t gamble, and I gave my second drink credit to the mechanic.

It was an afternoon start from Reno and I spent the night somewhere east of Elko nestled between some semis who had also called it a night in rough weather at a tire chain-up area. Come daylight it was balls out of Nevada, non-stop across Utah and nearly out of Wyoming, hitting nasty nasty snow East of Cheyenne. After wiping out a couple times and nearly getting squished by some trucks I followed a tiny convoy of a truck and two cars to a truck stop where I get to sip coffee and watch the snow. Westbound has been closed to non-essential travel and I’m going to wait and see if the snow lets up for an Eastbound fella like me.

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I’m too lazy to tune elsewhere, and BBC America doesn’t bother with war coverage anymore, instead showing reality shows where women are filmed with hidden cameras so they can be told how horribly they dress, and then given £2,000 to buy a new warddrobe with the advice of experts. So, I watch CNN a little bit every day, to see what war looks like.

It looks like whiz-bang computer graphics giving you a vague idea of where in Iraq the fighting is, and the vague capabilities of our high-tech weapons. “Well, it flies n miles per hour and is guided by satellites and it can be launched from a ship!”

It looks like grainy, jerky, crappy “live via Videophone” webcam images of guys driving around, getting into firefights.

It does not look like people getting blown up, maimed, wounded, killed, losing their loved ones. It does not show casualties. It does show Iraqi POWs sitting in the desert waiting to be trucked off somewhere, and of course eschews showing all but two seconds of Iraqi footage of American POWs.

The live dialogue always tries to bring up how fantastic their own news coverage is, thanks to technology, and their guys in the field, giving you unprecedented war coverage! Go CNN! And thanks to the philosophy of reality TV they can sink to the most disgusting lows – cheap emotional spectacle.

Last night, and it sounds like they love doing this, they got a soldier on the videophone, and then put his wife online, so we could watch them interact, awkwardly, in public, live: the courtship habits of the American military family. He was a bit shy, making sure to say “I love you,” and she was trying hard not to feel too upset at his being away. The worst of it was when he showed off his missing tooth, trying to reassure her that while he’d been hit with a concussive explosion, the worst he sufferd was a lost tooth. She was clearly distressed at the news he had volunteered that he had suffered a concussion; Sure it was just a tooth, but this just reinforces the knowledge that he’s in a situation where losing body parts is a very real possibility, and he’s being so cocky about it!

It is great, I think, that these two get a chance to talk to each other, but it is cheap, crass, disgusting exploitation that CNN is going to let a family use the videophone for the purpose of airing people’s private lives.

The decision to go to war, the decision to join the military, and the decision to marry a soldier are all very real, serious, difficult decisions that people make with great caution. The decision to be a journalist, and provide real, useful information to people, is far easier, in comparison. You don’t do that by exploiting people’s personal lives for spectacle. Michael Moore thinks Bush should be ashemed, but far more obvious to me is that CNN should be ashamed.

Shame on you CNN! I didn’t want to see you exploiting that family! Stick to the computer graphics of weapons if you are too inept to show us the real war.

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So, today I had my hearing before the administrative law judge regarding my unemployment eligibility. He makes his decision by the 28th, and I should receive the letter within a week.

It doesn’t sound too good. The letter of the law is that eligibility is contingent upon involuntary separation from your very last employer. Off the record, it was suggested that my error was in filing for unemployment immediately upon returning to the area, after previously quitting from the Pizza Place, which I had argued was only temporary employment. Had I taken a one-day temp job, I’d again be eligible. Weird laws.

Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.

In the afternoon I had a reasonably positive interview with a swanky restaurant / bar / night-club in the Metreon. Five positions, one hundred applicants, I figure I can make it to a pool between 15 and thirty for round two, which is supposed to happen in the next few days, at which point I’ll definitely be employed, or not. I reckon my odds are roughly 20% of landing the job. This is actually pretty heartening under the circumstances.

What I appreciated about the day was that both of my judges were left-handed. I called my afternoon interviewer on this, figuring it doesn’t hurt to identify a point of solidarity on our shared minority status. After all, what good is a waiter in a swanky place who can’t schmooze?

If I don’t have a sufficient source of income in the next week or two, I’ll likely be making the decision to leave the area, probably returning to Illinois, where I’d be close to family and have a lower cost-of-living threshold to worry about. It’ll probably take a week to secure some gas money, and plan a little shindig.

For those who feel they’re not making enough decisions lately, you can judge my rhinoceros.

In unrelated news, I bought a bunch of vegetables today. I felt like some hippie freak, approaching the cashier with a variety of veggies, pita, hummus, and of course, some beer. Time to snack.

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The official and private views of some ranking Jordanian officials appear to be diametrically opposed. Officially, they condemn the war and say they are “deeply troubled” about the repercussions of the war on the region, and describe the situation as “critical.”

Privately, and not for attribution, they say the United States is developing a new opportunity for the Middle East. Said one former prime minister, “If the U.S. can get a new Iraq to recognize Israel as a quid pro quo for a final Palestinian settlement, others will fall into place — Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states. Iran would then have to pull back its military support for Hezbollah.”

Lucky Break for Jordan
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large

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I was shocked when I first met a pro-war Iraqi in Baghdad – a taxi driver taking me back to my hotel late at night. I explained that I was American and said, as we shields always did, “Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good”. He looked at me with an expression of incredulity.

Daniel Pepper
I was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam

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I walked down the hill a little earlier today. Washington Mutual doesn’t do currency exchange, but Bank of America does. I had two Â¥10,000 and a Â¥1,000 to exchange. Bank of America charges a 1% transaction fee to those who don’t hold an account. My answer was that I’d rather pay the 1% than be broke. The guy went to get the exchange rate book, and a big color catalog of what different currency notes look like. I had figured that at 120Â¥ to the dollar, the Â¥20,000 ought to earn me $160, with another $8 for the Â¥1,000.

“Sixteen dollars and thirty-three cents.”

“That’s the transaction fee?”

“No, that’s the exchange.”

He re-did his math and decided that I was in line for $163.50. “How would you like your money?”

“Twenties.” The yuppy food stamp.

He counted out more cash than I’ve seen in a good long while now, and I remarked that I was going to fill my tank.

The 1% charge was waived. I attribute this to a combination of his mis-placed decimal point, and to the impression I got that he was sweet on me. He suggested I open a checking account, now with no fees. I responded that I just might do that in the future when I had some money to put into such a thing. As it was, I was immensely pleased that the exchange cost me less than $5.

Flush with cash, and tomorrow my day of reckoning before the administrative law judge, who may determine once and for all my eligibility for unemployment benefits, which could see me with $2,000 pretty quickly, and a lot less worried about problems.

But what I have other ideas I want to play with now. No more War news for a while, just me, Michael’s stereo, a comfortable office chair, and an Internet terminal. Maybe I can get some ideas worked out.

It is nice to have money in one’s pocket.

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If I cry now is it for fear
  or joy?
 Elation or    Depression
   Peace or War
Idleness or  Opportunity
         ?

I have no lover, can I not love all?
They love me back, subtly and
                 I will also feel scorn
    but that too is a feature of
 Romance.

E pluribus unum
          The many but no one
                   all for me
all for me up to me all the time
with no relief except in sleep,
work or pleasure I can't
so well afford.

   cant cry why would I nothing going
                 on emotions -not Today
                       perhaps Tomorrow

                 I'll follow the sun

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