The brutally honest, first-person account of Meitar Moscovitz's life.
Oops. I made a mistake. In my previous entry I left a note to a commenter stating that I believe Danica does appreciate me, but just doesn’t know what she wants.
I was evidently wrong. I am now single. Now, to get her out of this apartment as quickly as possible. Does anyone out there need a female roommate? She’s not really that tidy, but she’s quiet as a whisper!
I almost vomitted crying. I think I need sleep.
Danica woke me up today like a puppy might have. It was late (almost 2:30 PM), so in preparation for a meeting at five o’clock I made myself breakfast and prepared to go. We didn’t speak much.
After the meeting, at around 6:10 PM, I called home to see if she were here or out with Randy. There was no answer, so I figured she was out with Randy. I gritted my teeth and headed for the subway.
When I got home, I noticed that the lights in our apartment were on. Sure enough, she was home. She was preparing to go out to see Randy. Anger ensued, which mostly consisted of my hitting the punching bag she bought for herself while she did her best to ignore it. (I think I seriously sprained my left thumb’s joint. It hurts a lot.) I then went online to try and find an online polyamory support group of one sort or another. I found a lot of old resources but nothing promising.
Finally I turned to her and apologized for my childish behavior earlier (the punching and the being overtly angry). I was still upset, though. She said she understood and I promptly interjected that no, she did not. She relented and continued to prepare for her date. Despite what she might say, I sincerely (and seriously) doubt she would have an easy time of it if the roles were reversed.
Thankfully, by now, I had found #polyamory on Undernet. Just a plain old IRC channel, but filled with folks who (though sometimes asleep at the keyboard) live and talk about polyamory. I had just begun speaking with a very kind lady about my situation when Danica was ready to go out.
I told her that I had found an IRC polyamory support channel (though I realize now that’s not exactly what it is) and she said, “That’s great.” Sort of made me feel like she thinks I’m seeking “help” for something. Whatever. I told her, “Please come home at a reasonable time,” and she responded “I’ll try.” Which is both absurd and inconsiderate, but whatever. I said again, “Please come home at a reasonable time.”
When she had gone, I went back to IRC and spoke with the supportive woman in #polyamory until nearly 12 midnight. Danica had not called once. Nevertheless, I was feeling a lot better about everything. I started preparing myself some dinner.
At just about 1 o’clock in the marning, the phone rang. I picked it up and said hello. It was Danica; she said hello. There was silence. I asked her what was up and how she was. She said fine and tired. I asked when she was coming home. She said she wanted to stay over. She said she fell asleep on the sofabed again. She made some lame excuse about how it’s cold outside and she was too tired.
I chuckled. Was the girl serious? So I asked again, “When are you coming home?” She said, “Well, I’ll leave at about 6 in the morning and—” I cut her off and asked when she’d be coming home tonight. When she didn’t answer, I asked her if she really thought it was okay with me that she stays over there tonight.
When she still didn’t answer, I said, “No, of course it’s not.” Still, all I got was silence from her. So I asked quite plainly, “Are you going to stay there tonight?” Finally, a response: “Yeah.” I almost had to laugh. “Fine,” I said. “Goodnight.” And with that, I hung up the phone.
Such childish and utterly disrespectful behavior is the best way to ensure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I won’t take her word for very much in the future. Is that what she wants? Like it or not, that’s what she’s going to get if she doesn’t change her attitude.
That sounds like I’m angry. I am. I’m pretty hurt. I feel like I’m being treated like a doormat. I’m not a doormat. I won’t let myself be treated like one this time. And, interestingly, that resolution makes me feel surprisingly good.
Important points I forgot to mention:
Hmm. Nearly 2:20 in the morning. Danica’s on a date…. She called me over two hours ago. Wanted to “stay over” at the guy’s house. Um…duh. No. It’s late. Come home. So I tried calling back a half hour ago but, as usual, no response. Ninety percent of the time she just doesn’t realize her phone is ringing.
Ninety percent are good chances. Right?
Danica just called. She said she fell asleep on the sofabed. Hmm…. I told her to come home; take a taxi, I’d pay. She said okay. I asked her to call me back when she’s in the taxi.
No call since over a half hour ago. Is she not in the taxi yet? Grr.
Had to call, it’s been almost an hour. Thankfully, I got an answer. First words I heard were, “Yeah, yeah, we’re getting a cab now.” Uh-huh….
Though there was no so-called official timeline for tonight, the established consensus (yes, I asked before she left) was that she’d meet him at 7:30 downtown, would sit and chat with him for about an hour to let him in on the fact that I exist, and would take it from there. If things went well, it was movieokie and a good-night hug. If they didn’t go well, it would be no movieokie but other events were undefined.
Obviously, that is not what happened. Movieokie, by the way, would have ended at 11. Perhaps I should have asked for definitions for the not-going-well bit other than just naively assumed it most likely meant a phone call to me and coming home?
She’s in-taxi. Called for our address. Chuckled. We’ve been living here for more than a month….
She’s almost downstairs. She called to tell me where she was and that I should probably bring some money to pay the cabbie.
She’s blowing her nose in the kitchen. She told me a few details about the night. Kinda faught a bit. I’m obviously pissed that she’s home at this hour. Pissed even more that without active intervention on my part I would have awoken to an empty house tomorrow, I’m almost sure of it. (I have a history about being correct when predicting Danica’s behavior.)
She did some kissing and some cuddling. The guy didn’t know how to react to the news of my existence. She says they just stared at eachother for an hour and a half “Umm”-ing.
Whatever. I’m not happy. Make the bad feelings go away.
She’s showering now, and my eyes are getting heavy. Feel better now, though. Not great, but okay. I could never really formulate what, exactly, I felt so bad about. I wasn’t sure if I was angry, frustrated, hurt, or what. Still don’t know. Don’t really care.
She said she’d see him tomorrow because over the weekend, he has a ski trip. I don’t know how likely that is, but I didn’t like the sound of it either way. I have a meeting tomorrow with someone regarding some pro-bono PHP work I’m doing. I need sleep for that. Guess I was a little upset that this night was the night that this happened too.
Wasn’t really mad, I don’t think. It’s a pretty expected reaction. People say it’ll go away with time and good experiences. I hope so.
In the spirit of a wiki-blog, rather than post new entries as the night wears on (or the day encroaches), I’ll just keep adding to this one, along with a timestamp. That’ll be an interesting experiment, too.
Apple Mac OS X 10.3.8 is available. Comes right on the heels of 10 (that’s ten) security updates for various Windows components. Internet must be busy with a load of updates tonight.
Okay, let’s see. I’ve had some rather erratic sleep cycles once again, which is totally throwing me off kilter. I’ve spent much of my time on Orkut.com because of some extremely interesting discussion on the Web Design and Development community (which is only accessible to Orkut members). It’s really helped to bring a few topics to light and help me organize my thoughts on some important topics such as client relations, personal projects, and freelance business goals. I should probably record some of them here, but that’ll have to wait until more thoughts are less half-baked.
I also caught up on several interesting weblog posts. Douglas Bowman is talking about email security (a topic I have not been advocating loudly enough lately) and has written up an extremely helpful and user-friendly tutorial to securing one’s email on Mac OS X. His tutorial does require the use of a mail server which supports SSH, however, and I’m not so sure how many typical users have this option available to them.
A much simpler solution than using SSH tunnels would be to simply highlight that inviting “Use SSL” button in your mail client’s preference window. Unforunately, even huge ISPs still don’t offer POP3S or SMTPS support these days. (Remember my little discussion with Road Runner’s tech support? Bah!)
In other technical areas, the WaSP weblog had two pretty interesting topics of note which I caught myself up on today as well. The first was regarding IBM’s migration to Linux, which is evidently stalled thanks to Internet Explorer, of all things! That’s right boys and girls, the only company on the face of the Earth with the power to smack Microsoft around like a rag doll has fallen silent on its move to Linux because of IE-specific application code in many of their intranet applications.
The lesson? Never code for a single browser. You will regret it later.
Also from the WaSP weblog, two very big sites have finished their CSS makeovers. Both MSN.com and the Staples Rewards Center got big, hefty injections of CSS and (almost) valid markup. As our good, imprisoned friend Martha would say, “It’s a good thing.”
And of course, our moment of Zen: a video of Steve Jobs introducing the MacPlus in 1984. You’ll get goosebumps. I promise. (Here’s the slashdot posting.)
Gleaning information about the various things that are going on inside of a compuer or on a web site can be a somewhat difficult process. System logs are probably the most useful source of this information, but sometimes (especially for web sites) they don’t necessarily record all the interesting data. One example of a situation where this may be true is when you want your Apache logs to record your web site’s user session IDs.
Since PHP variables are known only to the current PHP process and not to Apache, you can’t just plug them into your Apache system log without first informing Apache about the variable you want to record. This can be done in two nearly identical ways, though the implementation of each is somewhat different. Luckily for the PHP progammer, it makes very little difference which way you choose.
One way of getting Apache to recognize PHP session variables, or any variable for that matter, is to leave a note in Apache’s notes table via the PHP function apache_note(). An Apache note can be thought of as a reminder from one Apache process to another that a certain variable exists, and what its value is.
Thus, doing apache_note('userID', $_SESSION['userid']) will make the PHP session variable userid available to Apache as userID via an Apache note. Calling apache_note() from another page with only the first arguement ('userID') will retrieve the note from Apache’s notes table.
Another way to make PHP variables accessible to Apache is by putting them into an Apache procesess’ runtime environment. Note that simply using the PHP function putenv() will not work because environment variables set with putenv() expire at the end of the current request. Instead, another Apache-specific function must be used: apache_setenv().
Using the same example as with the Apache note, the code would look like this: apache_setenv('userID', $_SESSION['userid']). In order to retrieve the value from another page, you need to use the corresponding function apache_getenv(): $userid = apache_getenv('userID').
Now that Apache has been made aware of the existence of the variable, the value must be recorded in Apache’s logs. This is the easy part. All you need do is add it to the LogFormat line in your config file. So, using the userID example from before, if your LogFormat directive looks like this,
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b"
and you used an apache_note() You simply need to edit it so that it looks like this:
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b %{userID}n"
Note the small n after the placement of the %{userID} variable in the log format. This signifies that the variable will come from an Apache note. If you used an Apache environment variable (apache_setenv()), then that small n should be changed to an e to signify that the variable comes from the environment.
Analyzing your web site traffic using this technique can often be just as effective as logging information to a database but there is much less overhead involved here than with most other options.
Random bits of conversation between myself and Danica tonight.
Do you always play musical instruments with your tongue, or is that just for show?
I like when Tufik goofs off. It shows that he’s still human.
With a name like Tufik, you can never be too sure.
I like this one. It’s like your body is lava, except non-burny.
