I am a fire dancing God --err, Goddess.

I am a minor fire dancing deity of some sort.

I am mighty! I am talented! Pull your hair and grind your teeth in dispair because none of you will ever be as cool as I am at this moment.

I got the behind-the-back-crossover-follow. Every little group of dancers that I know has different names for the moves, so I'm sure this means nothing to you. You'll just have to take my word for it. This is a remarkable achievement.

How did I manage to do this with work eating up my life? How did I do it when I haven't been to a group practice since November? I took my chains to work. When most people went out for coffee or played foozeball to work off their nervous energy, I practiced my dancing. I'd spend a half an hour or so on one move or a single transition, then run back to my desk, soot-streaked and bruised, to see if a file transfer had finished.

For the first time in months, I feel as if I've really made progress with my dancing. When I was practicing with Burn Unit, there was always someone who could take a look at me and help me to figure out where I was going wrong with a move. It was a little harder when the best advice I could get was "Just throw your hands back." That's a little like telling someone they could fly if they just flapped their wings.

It feels great to get out there and do a trick that not only looks great, but is obviously difficult. Maybe I'm just a hopeless showoff, but I'd always thought that the behind-the-back tricks were what seperated the reasonablly good dancers from the really skilled ones. I probably sound smug as hell, but I need this moment, this one little moment in which I feel like I've achieved something.

Then I'll just smack myself in the face with the poi again. Ow.

You know the scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden is yelling "You are not your job! You are not the contents on your wallet! You are not your fucking khakis!" He's wrong. I am my job. My job has swallowed me whole and now it's digesting me.

My body goes home sometimes, but my brain does not. I go to bed early so that I can get up early. I don't drink when I go out, so that I'm not tempted to oversleep. When sombody asks me how my day was, I launch into a description of my latest server problem. Since many of my friends are geeks, we wind up scribbling diagrams on the back of a napkin, shouting over the club music. There are nights when I collapse on top of my bedcovers, still wearing all of my street clothes, at just about the time when I'm usually deciding where to go out for the evening.

I don't eat much anymore. I'm on a liquid diet at work, a rotation of lemon tea, coffee, soy chai lattes, and orange juice. I drink until I feel queasy. Around 9 o'clock, my co-workers order Chinese food or pizza, and I get a little bit of that. On weekends, I can't eat a full meal. I don't think my stomach can handle anything that isn't pizza or noodles anymore.

I wonder if it's possible to simultaneously become skinnier and gain weight. I'm shrinking out of my clothes. I have a pair of pants that were snug in August that fall off of my hips now. At the same time, I wake up every morning feeling unbelievably fat. I'm inconsolable about it. There are days when I feel as if my thighs could eclipse the sun.

I'm going to expand until I fill the room and I'm going to waste away until I'm just a pair of green eyes. I'm going to become some harried little office creature that never leaves the computer terminal. I will be hunched over and have a permanent squint. I will unable to discuss anything that isn't related to Solaris 2.7 kernel configurations or the RSI in my wrists. The little title on my business card will be the sum of all my life --homo engineerus, a wide-eyed drone that lives on ramen noodles, needs no sleep, feels no pain, and is incapable of experiencing joy. It works to live and lives to work because, really, it's forgotten how to do anything else.

Oh yes, there's so much to look forward to.

I know I'm stealing somebody else's line, but walking down Market Street at night is like walking through a city in the aftermath of the apocalypse. Sewer gas comes up through the manholes like warm fog and the downtown streets are empty from Church to the Ferry Building, except for the homeless. There are bodies under army blankets, next to shopping carts stacked high with cardboard and crushed cans. There's a whole family of gutterpunks that sleeps in front of Perl Art Supply, marking off their territory with rope strung between Safeway carts. There's a man who makes a point of sleeping under the No Loitering sign in the nook that houses a Bank of America ATM machine.

The only people walking are the Late Night People, the ones who can close their eyes and recite the name of every restaurant open past two in the morning like a mantra: Denny's on 4th and Mission, Grub Steak, Bagdad Cafe, Sparky's, Sam Wo, It's Tops. If all else fails, there's the supermarket. Some enterprising young raver has put together the comprehensive cheat sheet on this subject, but real Late Night People don't need that. The cheat sheet is for amateurs, people who only go out on weekends.

When it rains, rain that falls with a sound like frying bacon, the streets become even more empty. Lately, it's been raining and cold. By the time I come home at night, my toes are tingly and numb. Hot water bottles aren't enough. Warm blankets aren't enough. I need to turn the heater up to seventy-five degrees and leave it there until something frozen at the core of me defrosts.

My PG&E bill is enormous.

I forgot to mention that I added a links page. I'm terribly self-concious about the whole thing. I wanted to put up links that left visitors breathless with my knowledge of obscure corners of the web, but in the end I simply put up the sites I visit most often, even if they're not altogether useful.

I also changed my archiving scheme from weekly to monthly. Four months of links were getting just a little unwieldy.

Forget being a supervillain, I'm going to be a kung fu master. Well, I can't really be a kung fu master, being a girl and all that, but I will settle for being a kung fu master's plucky daughter, a student of the arts from a very young age. My father will be killed in battle with his nemesis, the former-student-turned-evil-kung-fu-master, and I will have to regain the honor of my family by Avenging his Death.

Despite being tomboyish (I will repeatedly dress in men's clothes and be mistaken for a man, which will lead to all kinds of Comedy of Errors misunderstandings), I will be engaged. My fiancee will be a buffoon. If at all possible, he'll be rich and arrogant. My Love Interest will be a kung fu master in his own right, though young and impetuous. I will have to beat him in a one-on-one fight scene that's all sublimated sexual tension. In return, my Love Interest will have a chance to beat up my fiancee, which will be played strictly for laughs.

I will fight with a variety of implements. Sure, there will be bare-handed combat in which every punch elicits a little cloud of dust from my opponent's clothes and every kick sends him flying across the courtyard into a wall. I will also use a sword, possibly two, some sort of long pole, at least a dozen chairs which will crumble instantly, and a tray of tofu. I will use these all in the same fight scene, during which I fend off an entire army of opponents. It'll have to be a fight in a restaurant, since that's the kung fu movie equivalent of a barroom brawl.

I will have magical talismans, given to me by my father, which will probably allow me to fly. I have to fly, you know. I must also run on water and bound from one bamboo pole to another, even if I have no idea why I would be chasing somebody while balanced on bamboo poles.

The villain will be enchanted by me, of course. He will talk about how beautiful I am, mostly to make my Love Interest jealous. He will capture me at least once, and try to make me his concubine. I will respond by trying to kill him, but he will enjoy this because he likes his women "with spirit." I will call him a filthy dog, unfit for an honorable death, at least that's how the subtitles will translate it. Eventually, my Love Interest will come to rescue me, perhaps aided by his Amusing Sidekicks, and we will have to battle the legions of evil by standing with our backs to each other.

At least one of the Amusing Sidekicks will die in the final battle, but so will the villain. Honor will be restored. My Love Interest and I will look meaningfully at each other while treacly Asian pop plays in the background. Then we can all live happily ever after.

I'll bet I could do it, too, if I start training right now.

I'm walking back to my office with a cup of coffee when our painfully-expensive, flown-out-from-Virginia Oracle consultant stops me.

"You'll never guess what happend last night," he says.

I bite. "Tell me."

"The other Oracle guy and I were here pretty late applying patches to the new database. By the time we were done it was four in the morning. So we walk out the front door, ready to go back to the hotel, when we see that the front gate is locked."

I've worked a lot of late nights. One hand is bringing the cup of coffee to my lips and the other points towards the side door, which opens directly out onto the street.

"Yeah, well, we didn't know that. We had to climb over the gate and then walk back to the hotel. Unfortunately, when we get there, we realized that we'd forgotten to shut down the database server and there might be rolling blackouts in the morning."

There weren't, but none of us knew that.

"We had to walk all the way back here and climb over the gate again. Then we couldn't find the server room. At one point, I walked into the back hall and the door locked behind me. I had to bang on the wall until the other guy heard me. Finally, we called Sabu and he told us where the server room was. Then we powered the machine down and had to climb over the gate again. By the time we had a chance to go to sleep it was, like, five thirty."

"Well, it sounds like you got your exercise."

"We had to do it. We knew that if PG&E did a blackout in the morning and something happend to that server, you'd kill us and no one would ever find the bodies."

"Yep."

I think that my co-workers are finally starting to understand me.

It was the last night of Fury Bar. I had to drink. It was a moral obligation. Normally, I'm not much of a drinker. I go out four nights out of any given week. If I dropped twenty bucks on drinks plus five to ten dollars on cover every time I went to a club, I would be destitute.

Fury Bar isn't really a club. It's like walking into somebody's living room with a well-stocked liquor cabinet and the stereo turned on just a little too loud. On a good night, there are maybe one hundred and fifty people. Just to give some sense of perspective, Assimilate, a reasonably successful club at Cat's, sees between five and six hundred people on a good night. 1984, a night at Cat's so crowded that I won't even go there, can get eight hundred people before midnight. There's a line all the way down the block.

Fury Bar is mostly empty, a hangout for Thunderdome people. The DJ's play They Might Be Giants and Denis Leary's Asshole song. One night they played Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash from start to finish. Why not?

I'm wandering away from my point now. I'm trying to explain something here. I'm trying to answer an essential question --why did I wake up this morning feeling as if a rat had crawled into my mouth and died? As I sit here, gulping water, trying to put together the pieces of last night, one thing is clear: Fury Bar is bad for me. Any bar where the drinks are free is bad for me, but a bar where the bartender serves me a Red Death in a pint glass is catastrophic.

Fury Bar is trouble. It's singing along to Cheap Trick at the top of your voice. It's throwing ice across the bar. It's a drink that starts as a Cosmopolitan and ends as a Cape Cod and has eight cherries in it. It's being the only person on the dance floor. It's laughing as you stumble down Folsom Street because none of you can walk a straight line.

I'll miss it.

So long Fury. It was fun, but my Wednesday mornings will be much easier without you.

I think that the worst of my workload is finally over. On Friday night, I was at the office so late that I missed Assimilate entirely. I passed Cats on the way home at four in the morning and the club looked empty and sad.

I spent most of the weekend making up for lost sleep. I slept until the middle of the afternoon twice, just to prove that I could. Whenever I was tempted to wake up, I would hug my pillow, turn over, and go back to bed. I had breakfast at five o'clock in the evening: cinnamon apple pancakes, a red pepper, onion, and havarti omlet, and Dunkin' Doughnuts coffee sent to J by his parents. There were things that I wanted to do, things I should have been doing, but it felt so deliciously good to do nothing that I willfully forgot them.

I stayed home, for the most part. I stayed home and read my diary. When I started this journal I said I'd never really kept a diary. I guess that wasn't exactly true. I kept a journal of sorts for a couple of years, from my sixteen through nineteen. It wasn't a daily diary. It was just something that I scribbled in every once in a while. In three years, it took up two volumes, even though the entries were often months apart.

That diary was everything that this journal isn't. I drew pictures in there. I wrote poetry, gut-wrenchingly awful poetry. Mostly, I talked about boys. I wasn't always a brain in a jar, you know. Reading those things now, it seems as if my head was filled with nothing but boys. Not to name names, they were always "he," so it seems to be the chronicle of one ever-changing boy. Now he's a tall, skinny punk rocker with purple hair. Now he's honey-tan and blond, a sculptor. Now he's the black sheep of a respected Southern family, kicked out of the five most expensive colleges on the East Coast. Now I'm in love with him. Now we're just using each other. Now his girlfriend drops acid in a bar and tells me she has a crush on me. Now he's on his knees with his hands around my ankles nearly sobbing and I'll never quite understand why.

What comes up again and again in those diaries, between the embarassing poetry and the Nick Cave lyrics, is how exciting it is to be wanted. It's still true. Nothing makes my heart race like someone who knows better but just can't help themselves, at least in theory. In practice, just reading about all of the time I spent wondering Does he like me? How can I get a moment alone with him? Should I call him back? What about his girfriend? What about my boyfriend? What did he mean when he said that? is exhausting. It's so much easier to go back to sleep.

You don't think it ended there, do you? I didn't leave the office until 10:30 on Wednesday, which I admit is before lunch. I got home just in time to nudge J out of bed so that he could make it to an afternoon meeting. I don't begrudge J his late mornings. He's worked more all-night shifts than I have. I lost him in LA for three days when his last company launched. Someday I hope that I can be so good at my job that I can come to the office in the middle of the afternoon and still have the CEO and half of the Board of Directors send me Christmas cards.

No matter that at least seventeen cups of coffee buzzed through my veins, I fell asleep. I landed face first on the velvet duvet and I didn't so much as twitch until 6:00. If I dreamed, I don't remember. It's nice to go a night without nightmares of work-related inadequacy. I could close my eyes without visions of layoffs dancing through my head. My previous employer (longtime readers of this space will recall how reluctantly I left my last company) announced layoffs early this week. Useless, no-longer-accurate business cards littered the streets of the financial district. Looking down at the sidewalk was like reading the names of the dead on a war memorial. No matter how bad I felt for them, all I could really feel was a fantastic sense of relief that it wasn't me.

The good times have stopped, kids. The era of easy money is over. We all knew that it was going to happen. Last year and the year before, we were sitting in Beldin Place restaurants with our chocolate martinis and flirtatious French waiters, predicting the demise of dot-coms, then consulting companies, then industry magazines. We discussed the future valuations of Sun and Cisco. When the music stopped, we all planned to be somewhere safe and comfortable. In hindsight, I bailed on my last company just in time.

Sure, the technology sector will always need rock stars. There will always be an immense demand for people with a diverse skill set and years of experience. These are the people who build companies. Andersen Consulting, Scient, Viant, and MarchFirst have all proven that you can't rent that kind of talent. People like J will never be out of a job. I'd like to think that I'm in that league. I've spent the last five years building up a pretty impressive resume. I just hope I'll never have to put it to the test.

Now I think it's time to get some lunch. My stomach is very angry at me for living on ramen (shrimp flavored, the worst kind!) and coffee. I have to make amends. I'll bet that some restaurant on Beldin Place has an open table tonight.

8:15 and I've reinstalled the OS, patched the kernel, installed Sun's RAID manager, and installed Veritas. Now the root disk won't encapsulate and I can't fsck it. I must be getting tired. These are starting to look like stupid mistakes. I don't think I'm going to get out of here before lunch time.

It is 5:30 in the morning and I have to reinstall the OS. I really will cry now.

It's 4:30 in the morning. I've installed Solaris, patched the kernel, and made it most of the way through the Veritas install. Now suddenly the server doesn't want to boot off the disk again.

It is 1:30 in the morning and I can't boot off of the cdrom or the disk. I hate the world.

This is not about underwear. I'm not feeing particularly cheerful tonight. It's nearly midnight and I've still got roughly five hours of work ahead of me to finish configuring this server in time for the massively overpaid Oracle consultant who will be coming in at 9:00.

About fifteen minutes ago, the delivery guy finally showed up with another internal disk for the E4500, which will hopefully get me to the point where I can finally start installing the godforsaken operating system on this beast. Have I mentioned that I'm in the server room, where server safety dictates that the temperatures should be kept at just above freezing? Have I mentioned that, delicate and fragile flower that I am, I cannot feel my toes? Oh, and we're out of coffee.

I'm going to cry. I'm serious here. The stress of my job is giving me a great big lump in my throat. I could cry here, you know. I've been the only person in the office for hours. Who's to know? This whole build has been a nightmarish, frustrating experience. I understand that I should not take this quite so personally. No one ordered the server without an internal disk just to spite me. The just-delivered-this-afternoon internal disk did not fail simply to make my life more difficult. The new disk isn't being delivered in the middle of the night as a personal affront to me.

Still, I'm certain that if I was a man, I wouldn't even be thinking about crying. I wouldn't be feeling the urge to hyperventilate in a corner somewhere because in some awful recess of my mind, I suspect that I just can't handle this job. If I was a guy, I would be sitting here with a can of Jolt in one hand, a computer-related magazine by my side, methodically tapping away at the console until I figured out what's wrong with this server. Later I would catch a cab home (without once feeling a tinge of self-pity for standing on the street alone in the middle of the night), have a beer, and then sleep without nightmares in which the I'm fired in a public and humiliating manner.

I certainly wouldn't be turning the server room upside down looking for a scsi terminator. Yeah, I'd know exactly where it is. Men never lose things. Men don't suddenly feel ugly and fat and blotchy-faced because they can't make a piece of computer hardware work.

Why yes, this is an entire journal entry devoted to underwear. Thank you for noticing. Well, not so much underwear (utilitarian cotton stuff) as lingerie (slinky, silky girl-wrappings), things with clasps and hooks and eyes, the kinds of things that make you blush when you remember you're wearing them. Unmentionables. Lingerie is essential to my existence. If I were trapped on a desert island, I would bring a leopard-print push-up bra and maybe some martini glasses. Then cannibals would find me and I would make Betty Page "surprised" faces while they tied me up and...nevermind.

I've always been in love with the idea of something that you put on solely for the purpose of taking it off later. What's the point of putting on all of those complicated layers of girl-clothes unless it's to drive sombody crazy trying to undo all of the buttons and snaps and zippers? Wasn't that always the appeal of pinup girls? They're dressed, but they're readily undressed. You know they're just up to no good. Indeed, the pin-up era in where all of the best lingerie comes from. You've got bullet bras and tap pants and girdles with garters. You've got little silk step-ins to wear with maribou mules and whole array of semi-transparent peignoirs and negliees because dressing for bed is even more complicated than dressing for work.

Is it wrong to be terminally nostalgic? Am I the only person who thinks that there's nothing about modern culture that's even remotely romantic or sexy? It doesn't make sense to wear a garter belt under jeans. A bullet bra would sure look stupid under one of those Old Navy Performance Fleece things. Every year we all look a little bit more the same. Maybe we'll all eventually be wearing one-piece sci-fi jumpsuits because that's all clothing stores will sell us.

I can imagine the GAP ad now: Everybody in jumpsuits.

Every woman will own at least one pair of white cotton panties that say I got crabs at Dick's.

I fear for the future. I'm hoarding my crinolines and longline bras. I will corner the market on one-pieces and step-ins to get me through the impending dark age of lingerie. Yes, I have seen the future and I'm quaking in my bloomers.

It's over. Monolith is finally over. The New Year's Eve party was actually over days ago, but we've only just had the chance to pat each other on the back and talk about what a good job we did. It's all being lost in a pink fuzzy miasma of good will. I'm already forgetting what it was that upset me around midnight. I can barely recall that temperatures fell into the high thirties and I was shivering cold even with my coat on. The broken champagne flutes don't seem terribly important now. I can't remember which fire dancing moves I didn't nail, just that people stopped me later to tell me how impressed they were.

All of the things that irked me throughout the party seem silly and trivial now. It's an auspicious beginning for a new year. Somewhere around three in the morning, I relaxed and let it all go. I remembered that I was not in a high-stress office, there was nothing at stake here. I was surrounded by my friends at a party that was going to go until dawn. If I can't enjoy that, then I should be packed up and sent to a retirement home for prematurely aged hipsters, because I am no longer capable of enjoying anything.

There's nothing like greeting the dawn of a new millenium with a severe hangover. Yes, I'm bragging. I worked hard for this hangover. I'm proud of it. I've earned it. It's all mine and you're not getting any. Get your own racoon eyes and soot streaks and singed bangs and burns on your arms. Someday when future generations will ask me how I spent this New Year's Eve, I will tell them that I helped throw an underground party for hundreds of people. We worshipped a replica of the Monolith. Bellydancers danced. Firedancers burned. I wandered between dance floors, buzzed and happy, with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Everywhere I looked there was a friend to throw my arms around and be grateful because it's been a good year. Life has been kind and I've been lucky, as some distant relative of mine would say with his upraised shot of vodka.

Growing up, New Year's Eve was a family holiday. This may be the only real tradition we brought over from the Soviet Union. The Christmas tree was bought and decorated just around Christmas and then ignored until the end of the year when we would exchange gifts just after midnight. New Year's Eve meant a ten o'clock dinner at my grandmother's house, with the white linen table cloth and cut crystal glasses from Poland --black bread and red caviar, strange cold meat things I didn't like, and pilmeny with sour cream. It was the night I got to drink wine like an adult, even if I only liked White Zinfendel. No one could raise a glass to their lips without somebody making a toast, a lenthy and meandering speech in which the speaker wishes the guests health, wealth, happiness, and success in their future endeavours so sincerely that he nearly starts crying right there on the spot.

By eleven o'clock, the women bring out tea and sweets. The tea is red and scalding hot, served in glasses with little metal holders, as if no one had told the Russians that metal and glass are excellent conductors of heat. There are little Polish caramel candies called karovki (cows) and poppyseed cake and sometimes Turkish Delights.When tea comes, the toasts are over and it's time to argue about politics, which always means the Middle East. Rabinovich would start. Even when I was little I knew that a man who knew five languages and mangled them all was not very bright. Then my grandfather would join in and my father too, sitting back with a soda and tying them up in such logical knots that he'd have all of the old Russians advocating Palestinian liberation by the end of the evening.

While the men argue and the women roll their eyes, it's my job to turn the television to the local news and tell everybody when we've got a minute left. Everyone hurries out with their glass of champagne. While they're counting down, I'm trying to stay awake because in four...three...two...one, it will be Christmas for me. By 12:15 I'm asleep in a pile of wrapping paper. The whole Reagan Era passed like this. The year ends and you get your presents. In those first moments of January, holding my new pencil holder/Transformer/sweater/box of watercolors, every year looked like a good year.