2002-09-05 - 5:04 p.m.
Subsiding into silence.

I resigned yesterday. Bit the bullet, handed in my two week notice ... it was that, or else help write up a pages-long "how can we help you do your job better" contract to tie me to this place for another year. Given the pain etched into me by a mere seven and a half months, what choice did I have? I'm gone. As of the 18th, I'd damned well better have something else in mind, or I'll be in serious trouble.

It was a relief, in one way. Do you know, those "choked up" moments, chin trembling, eyes threatening to spill over, voice thickened, are always much, much more painful than the ones where I let go? I didn't want to cry, didn't think I could over this decision, but in the end I took the kleenex, undammed the works, and suddenly found myself able to laugh. It's always been that way for me. Acknowledging pain is such a relief, a quick bright flash of sharpness before the ebb, compared to the months and months of drawn-out, soulburning endurance against that which should not be.

In moments like these, I catch a glimpse of the reasons people turn to cutting. Not me, never me, anymore than I could take up a gun and press it to my temple, not ever, no; I've heard it said that "anyone can be driven to" yadda yadda yadda, but that's a fallacy. We all have our limits, they're just not all in the same areas, and that's one of mine. I would rather keep enduring than cause pain, and that's what self-injuries do; they don't hurt the inflictor (under the surface, where it counts), they hurt everyone else.

All the same, I empathize.

Okay, enough of the dark depths. Time to change the topic. =)

I found out a few weekends ago that there is Cherokee blood in my ancestry. I'm 25% Norweigan, another 50% or so descended from various British immigrants traced to famous ships that came over in the 1600's, but the rest is cultural scattershot. I knew of German, and Irish, and a drop of French, but Cherokee was news to me. It'll be a few weeks before I can get a copy of the records, though. Grrr.

I came across a fanfic author (can't remember the name at the moment) that writes Sentinel fiction, and Stargate, and B5, and others. It's perhaps understandable that she casts Jim/Blair, Jack/Daniel as soulbonded pairs -- not shoehorning them into slots marked Brothers or Best Friends (or even Lovers as slash fans tend to do), just as pairs of souls who once chose to face all their futures together. The idea was spun out along the concept that great deeds cannot be done by one alone, but by two, and that together they can accomplish more than they ever could apart. Those pairs fit the framework she spins better than most other labels writers tend to give them.

It's a beautiful idea, actually. The concept of a bond between people that is not family, nor lover, nor really even friend, but somehow transcendent and always present even when the two face each other in enmity, is rather compelling. You don't often find relationships like that in real life.

I don't really believe any of that, any more than I believe in the concept of reincarnation, or magick, or vampires, or any of that stuff, but after all, I am a Christian. By nature, that means I do believe in the existence of some mystical things, so it's kind of hard to draw the line and say that one thing can be, and another can't. I'm not gullible, but neither am I stupid or narrow-minded.

Oh. Oh, shit ... I just called the transmission place. Not $1250 like the last transmission, but $1406. Which I don't have. And I'm jobless, now, in 13 days ...

I can't write anymore.