A blast from my teenage past

A friend sent me a link to a remix of Our Darkness by Anne Clark today. I said “Wow, I haven’t heard the name Anne Clark since the early 90′s.”

It turns out I had heard Our Darkness many, many times before although I didn’t know that it was called Our Darkness, but I did know that it was Anne Clark. They used to play this song at my beloved first club Cartoon, to which I went for a few months in 1991 before it unfortunately shut down. This song played there religiously, and I loved it. It always elicited these feelings of seriousness and importance in me, like “This is our world now, and this is the kind of music we listen to.”

Maybe I have always been a little bit goth.

What do you think of my new WordPress site?

I have been using Blogger for eight years. Throughout my years of blogging, I have started perhaps eight blogs, all with Blogger. This one has been the most long-lasting and active one. You could say that when it comes to my blogs, I am somewhat resistant to change. I don’t redesign my sites often because I don’t enjoy tinkering with HTML/CSS very much, and I have never switched blog publishing systems because that also involves a bunch of tinkering.

Being owned by Google now, Blogger decided to make some changes. For a few months now, every time I have logged into blogger.com, I have been greeted by a message saying that Blogger was discontinuing the support of FTP publishing and that I was going to have to migrate to either a blogspot-hosted site (e.g. verabug.blogspot.com) or a custom domain (e.g. blog.verabug.com). Neither option sounded appealing to me; I wanted to stay at verabug.com.

So I decided to switch to a new blog publishing system. The deadline is May 1, and I had been putting it off until this week, dreading it. I spent most of Monday and Tuesday evening trying to figure out how to import all my Blogger posts into WordPress. Rather than trying to transfer my old design, I decided to start fresh with a new WordPress design. This probably saved me many hours of work.

I still need to migrate mediasparkles.com and dragonflypsychic.com, but I don’t post much on there, so I think it can wait.

Even though I still have to make some minor tweaks (such as getting the favicon to show up again), the migration of verabug.com is complete and I feel relieved and somewhat accomplished. What do you think?

We do confuse people sometimes

One recent Thursday my new German friend came to Noc Noc and brought a friend. He had come previously when Kean was out of town and when Jeremy and I had been DJ’ing there. That time I had introduced Jeremy as my boyfriend. This time Jeremy and I were sitting at a table with my German friend and his friend, and his friend said “So who’s DJ’ing right now?” (Kean was.) I said “My boyfriend.” He looked at Jeremy and then looked very confused. A little later my German friend said “Your boyfriend looks different today.” I said “Well, actually…”

One recent Saturday, Kean and Jeremy were both DJ’ing at a birthday party for one of Jeremy’s friends. I ran into somebody I know there that I hadn’t seen it years. He asked “So what brings you here?” I said “My boyfriend is DJ’ing here tonight.” He said “Which one is he?” I said “Well, actually…”

One time Jeremy and I went to eat at the new restaurant where Kean works. We sat very close together and acted like the lovers that we are. We also interacted with Kean quite a bit, and he joined us at our table several times. As we were leaving, a lady from a nearby table walked by and asked me “How do you know our friend the server? Is he family?” I said “Yes, he’s my boyfriend.” She said “He is your boyfriend?”, looking confusedly at Jeremy. I said “Well, actually…”

I can’t deny that I’m enjoying the confusion. It always makes me giggle a little.

Who deserves to be loved

I watched the movie The Hottest State last night. It’s based on a novel written by Ethan Hawke, which has been on my wishlist for years but which I still haven’t read.

There is a beautiful scene in which the 21-year-old main character visits his estranged father and asks him for advice on how to win back the girl who broke his heart.

Dad: Fuck her. People who turn their back on love don’t deserve to be loved.

Son: What does that say about you?

Dad: I don’t know what it says about me, but you being here today says a hell of a lot about you.

Good news about my job

So I have been working at the company that makes Flash for the last two and a half months. On some level, this may seem like a step backwards but on other levels, there are some wonderful things at play here:

1) I have become friends with “the other German goth” at the company. He is a recent transplant (within the last two or three years), and he is the first German I have encountered on this side of the Atlantic in many years that I am actually willing to speak German with. I think this means that I am finally making peace with my German past–as has been my intention for a few years now–and is quite refreshing. It tickles me that when we run into each other, we say “Morgen!”* to each other.

2) My new German friend is part of a gang of guys at the office who own nerf guns and break into war several times a day. My office space is smack dab in the middle of the war zone, so I never miss any battles. The nerf gun activities have been amusing me very much–much to the surprise of my German friend who was afraid that this behavior was too childish for me–and I have been talking about this so much, that Jeremy recently confessed that he was getting me a nerf gun for my birthday (which is on May 5, by the way). When I announced my future nerf gun to some of the guys at the office today, one of my favorite sharp shooters conspiratorially handed me my very own, temporary nerf gun, “until you get your birthday one.” It’s small but powerful, and he said “I want you to keep this in your purse.” Then he gave me a small shooting lesson, just like in the movies, where the man stands behind the woman and reaches his arms around her to show her how to shoot and, you know, hit on her or something. I think I may have blushed. And I cannot wait to join the battles.

3) They love me here. You may think that quitting and sending out a mass email saying “Macromedia is not Macromedia anymore” may have burned a bridge but quite the opposite seems to be true. I keep being offered full-time jobs, I keep being told that the door is always open, and I keep hearing that I have been missed and that “we need more freaky people around here.” While I have no intention of coming back on a full-time, permanent basis, I am very touched that I am welcome. And I have been told by several different people that before I started this contract, there had been an excited buzz in the office that Vera Fleischer was coming back. Awww. That just about breaks my cubicled heart.

So yeah, I am making the best of it, and it’s working.

*In case you haven’t guessed, this means “‘morning!”

Family planning

Nobody knows how things are going to turn out, but thoughts are being had now, and many conversations have been had in the last few weeks.

Kean, Jeremy and I are moving towards a true V relationship, with both sides being equal. Up until recently our relationship had been of the primary/secondary nature, with Kean and I being primary partners and everyone else being non-primary, because that’s what Kean and I had agreed to long ago.

Kean’s return from Olympia last month and temporary move into my apartment (he’s staying with me until he finds a new place to stay) triggered Jeremy into voicing his dissatisfaction with being a “secondary” boyfriend. He didn’t want to be limited to spending just two nights a week with me (up until Kean left, we had spent about two nights a week together, and while Kean was gone, we had spent three nights a week together) and felt that our love didn’t deserve the label “secondary.” So now, after many conversations, we are transitioning into a V, where both partners get roughly equal amounts of time and commitment.

V is for Vera. It works for me because I have a lot of love and attention to give, and I also need a lot of love and attention. It works for me because I live for feelings and relationships. Now I get to “work on” relationships and process feelings with not one, but two people.

It works for Kean because he now has more time and freedom to pursue relationships with other people and because he believes in allowing relationships to go where they want to go. We had never planned for a V relationship but now that it’s presenting itself to us, he enjoys allowing it to happen.

It works for Jeremy because he no longer feels secondary and like his desires and feelings don’t matter. Also, much like Kean, he enjoys the novelty and unconventionality of having this type of relationship, compared to a traditional one girl/one boy relationship.

My fantasy is that eventually we will all move in together. My fantasy is that there will eventually be a child, and that we will all raise it together. A V seems like a very safe and supportive place to raise a child–even just visually: It can rest there and be held inside the V. We may even cohabitate with another family, so that we’ll have a whole village to raise children. Although, given that I have lived by myself for the last 4+ years and have quite enjoyed it, I am apprehensive about that. On the other hand, I have been dreaming about a more tribal life, and one of the things I admire about Jeremy is that he has lived with the same two housemates (a couple) for eight years.

As always, things are uncertain, but boy, am I lucky in love right now. Who knew it could be like this?

More possible future adventures

The biochemistry professor I used to work for at the University of Virginia, recently got back in touch with me. He’s working on a new interactive ebook for Introductory Chemistry, and he would like me to do some of the development work. He said that I would be working remotely, and that I can work part-time if I want to.

Right now I’m still working at the company that makes Flash until the end of this month, possibly longer; then I’m going to Germany for two weeks in Many. Hopefully this project will get rolling some time after that.

It would be great if it works out because that man was one of the nicest people I have ever worked with. Plus, I have been wanting to get back into the educational/elearning side of Flash for a while now.