Left alone...

Much has changed, but apparently I'm willing to let go of so few things...

They're together, I don't know if they're together right now, but they're together... I saw, I know them so well (or, knew them) that they're with each other as they have always been, I was just making myself believe that they weren't.

I don't know what's hurting more: the fact that I have feelings for her (which I have no idea where are they coming from, I know that she's gone, I know I shouldn't be with her, but... here I am), the fact that I STILL have feelings for her after all of this, the fact that it's very probable that I won't fit in with them from now on making it to be the most alone that I've been since before high school... they're the closest thing that I've got (for now, apparently) to real and sincere friendship.

Deep down, I'm really happy for them, I know... but the beginning of the end had appeared since such a long time ago, and I played dumb, to avoid the pain. Right now it's all sinking in, and it hurts, so bad. I miss us, not Julia and me, but Julia, Hugo and me; we went out, and we weren't there, I've tried, I've forced it a few times, but it wasn't there... just, they were there, and me aside. It never hurted so much to be the third wheel: it even hurted more than that time that I was the 12th wheel (yeah, four couples, and one threesome; beat that!). Little by little I saw my two best friends happy with each other (which, yes, made me happy), and my presence forcing them to include me... maybe I'm making too much of one outing, but right now I'm up to the point that I don't want to hope anymore, it hurts to hope... and hope what? That Hugo will always be there? He will, I know he will... for Julia to think of me as more than a friend? She won't, I know she won't...
But there's this sense of support that always came from them that has begun to fade away; it's weird, it's probably the other way around, I know Julia cares a rat's ass, but Hugo did took a little more interest in my opinion, and for some reason he took my "blessing" very welcoming.

I'm crap right now, I'm nothing right now, which I should be fine with, but I always thought feeling like nothing also came with feeling nothing... guess not... and that's what I want, to feel nothing, to look at them and feel nothing, just as they probably will feel towards me, cuz they sure have showed that that will be our situation in the near future...

Ultimo día en Quéretaro

Siendo éste mi último en Querétaro, decidí escribir en español. Esto de los & para escribir con acentos es más tedioso de lo que recuerdo. O perdí costumbre...

Me siento bien, voy hacia lo que quiero hacer de mi vida. Mañana me dirijo a Juárez para quedarme un mes ahí para visitar a mi familia y mis amigos de por allá, aunque me da algo de miedo... han estado ocurriendo cosas en las que no sé si encajo, es seguro que el tiempo ha pasado y estar tan cercano por tanto tiempo a amigos de allá me lo va a mostrar de una manera muy directa y sin escrúpulos... jeje, en iTunes acaba de comenzar Breathe Me de un grupo llamado Sia que me presentó una muy buena amiga mía de aquí llamada Cristina Bringas (traté de buscar su blog, pero no lo encuentro, perdí mis bookmarks en el reformateo): no sé como tomarlo. A lo mejor nada más como "suck it up and deal with it when it comes". Uno de mis amigos (Hugo Cervantes, se podría decir que es mi mejor amigo de todos los tiempos con buen porcentaje de estar en lo correcto) me ha estado mandando mensajes, de la manera que el sabe que me gustan: mentando madres, pero a la vez con cierto cariño sutil declarando que me quiere. Es agradable sentir que tan siquiera algo no ha cambiado, pero el cambio es inevitable, hasta del que no se quiere que suceda ... ya saben adonde me estoy dirigiendo...

Es extraño: lo platiqué con mi madre hace poco (sí, me llevo muy bien con mi mamá en ese sentido, no soy muy dado a tener muchos confidentes en ese tema), y me ayudó... usualmente platicarlo ayuda. Aun así me siento raro, algo que sé que no debería estar sucediendo, debo seguir con mi vida, pero hay algo que no se deja ir; ojalá que este tiempo cercana a ella me proporcione de algo que permita que esa parte de mi que quiere algo más de esa relación (si la pudieramos llamar así, porque francamente ya se ha reducido a... pues... nada) dejarlo ir, franca y sinceramente... verla y no sentir nada, solo un bonito recuerdo, como ella al parecer se siente hacia mí...

No soy dado a pedir suerte, porque usualmente cuando se desea hay algo de la situación que se puede controlar... me gusta que me deseen éxito, porque implica que hay algo de control de mi parte, de alguna forma le pide al subconciente a estar alerta (y, francamente, me he dado cuenta que desear buena suerte a alguien le trae mala suerte, jeje)......... en este caso, supongo que ese deseo es apto: He decidido no controlar absolutamente nada de mi visita. Si algo tiene que suceder, que suceda; si quiero que suceda algo (como ver a algún amigo, etc.) voy a hacer lo posible que suceda, si no sucede, me va a doler y dejaré que me duela, ya me cansé de estarme protegiendo, que se me mate de una vez, ya tendré mucho tiempo para sanar en Inglaterra, pero no me iré sin un "tal vez" o un "si hubiera" en mi cabeza antes de irme. Prefiero el dolor de ver qué sucede a la agonía de no saberlo.

¡Se cuidan! Y nos vemos en Juárez.

Eating my words...

Apparently the British Embassy in Mexico just sucks when answering the phones, because, when I went and personally delivered my documents for my student visa, the person (which I knew, from her voice, that she was the same person that "assisted" me on the phone) was very kind, chatty, and patient. She even comment me about my name and asked me if I knew it's meaning, which I do (but that's a subject for a whole other post... mmm... maybe the next one, haven't done a big one in a long time); she asked me if I knew it's mayan meaning, which I didn't (I'm writing this around five days after the encounter and haven't found information about it's mayan meaning... weird). She went on that her son has this weird name which is in french, and that it has evolved to just "Roy".

There were two other soon-to-be british students in front of me who were abruptly called back to their seats because of incomplete documentation (one of them came with a printout of an email of acceptance of the Alban Scholarship, which, frankly, would've been a very obvious red flag when reading the outline and instructions in the webpage and printouts taped to the outside and inner office walls... the other one didn't even bother to fill out the application form... no wonder the british lady was so fed up when I called her). When I was called forth after, having being a witness of the all-familiar wrath of this red-tape-experienced old lady, I was ready to pee in my pants, but was pleasantly surprised by her attitude... I would like to credit that to the fact that I did a little subtle but, in my opinion, enjoyable joke in my encounter "well, ma'am, keeping with the M.O. here, I too am here for a student visa" (I never said it was a good one, jeje); but maybe because I prepared myself (thanks largely to my mom and her paperwork), few questions were asked because I've already had the rest answered by phone previously. The lady probably thought "finally, someone with everything complete"; she even offered to do it in 24 hours (not the published 48) seeing that my permanent address was in Chihuahua (19-hour bus-ride), which I kindly denied "I'm living in Queretaro right now" (3-hour bus-ride) "so there's no need to hury things that don't need to be huried"; she grinned.

So, yes: I'm officially eating my own words... A piece of advise (mmm... Matrix... I'm so watching it after finishing up this post): if you're going to apply for a student visa for the U.K. here in Mexico, prepare yourself before hand (read their webpage, it's very complete, it even comes with a map explaining how to get there, which I gave to the cab drivers that picked me up in the airport; both of them told me that the map helped a lot and that very few cab drivers know how to get there), if you have any questions about anything that's not on their website call them and, remember, be very patient (the lady there is very stressed out), when your turn is up try to start out with a joke and end with some kind remark, the lady there will be very pleasant if you show her that you've done your homework... oh, and change your name to something with a mayan meaning, it apparently helps =)

Bored, cold and british...

Installing XCode 2.3 (java documentation indexation takes way too long)...

Doing it out in the open, where (thanks to the Weather widget in my dashboard) its 22 °C, and that with only a T-Shirt on (jeje, well, with pants too... yeah, for some persons that know me that actually needs to be instated) is very very cold... well for me... crybaby, I know.

... British Embassy in Mexico sucks!!! "You have doubts? How come?? We've explained everything in our webpage!!!" Uhmmm...

• what happens if I don't have some information that's needed in the AV1 form (like a fax number) "Oh, well, just put NA" (not on the webpage)
• i'm thinking of doing a PhD after the masters, do i put down the length of my studies including the PhD or do i extend my visa stay after finishing the masters? "just put down the length of the masters and extended after" (not on the webpage)
• it says here that i enlist any properties that are at my name, do i put on my car? is that accepted? "whatever....." (well, that's the only answer that i agree that it shouldn't be on the webpage because of it's rudeness)

yeah, so... yeah... bored... and cold... with a british twist... get the title? huh? HUH?? =) © <- for ishbel, i'm splitting the copyright profits with her

Apple Restored

Last friday I had a slight upset... my PowerBook's hard drive went haywire. I tried to use the Install DVD's Disk Utility program to no avail: it couldn't even see the hard drive, let alone fix it.

I tried several other ways to fix it: tried using a boot CD I created using some utilities that are out there, booted into Ubuntu for PowerPC Live CD to try to see the hard drive (maybe fix it from there; no dice), tried the command + S keys at startup but there was no reaction, also command + V to at least see what's going on but still no reaction... the hard drive was just plain dead.

Suspecting that it needed to be replaced, I didn't want to spend the money to later realize that the problem wasn't the hard drive. A friend volunteered his Mac for me to take out it's hard drive and use it to replace mine. I have found a beautiful website that provides service manuals for all kinds of Apple-related products. And beautiful, detailed, manuals at that. I've never encountered these types of manuals before, and am very proud of whoever made them because they certainly saved me a lot of time for this task.

After about an hour of opening both laptops, and replacing hard drives, the expected thing happenned: my laptop worked with the other hard drive. Oh well! I have to admit that I don't treat my PowerBook very nicely (a lot of bumps here and there), and I usually work hearing upbeat music fantasizing about drumming the song hitting my fingers on the table in which the laptop is sitting on; both of these factors may have caused the death of the hard drive.

It may not be the first time I say this but we seriously need an Apple Store here in Mexico: all the Apple service providers here in Queretaro suck! (won't say the name: no free publicty for them) It took four days for the hard drive to get here, when they promised me that it was going to be only two and, because my laptop is where I do all of my work, I had to stay put and unproductive through out that time; don't even mention the attitude with which they attended me: very insulting.

Anyway, thank God for my parents and their last-year's-summer gift: an external firewire hard drive in which I kept a not so organized backup of my things. Yes, I lost some files, but they were for personal matters not important stuff: mainly saved games of Ghost Recon and Black and White, and I was working on arranging my iTunes library with all the correct albums (right now I only have corrected most artist and song names) and their cover art; I probably lost two days of what I invested in that. My library has more than 2600 songs, so there's really no comparison between the fact of losing the cover and album information of around a third of my songs, to losing my whole library.

I also was impressed (and releaved) in how easy it was to actually get back on my feet after replacing my hard drive: I was literally working again in a three-hour time period, including the time to replace the hard drive which I did myself (Lord knows how much those goddams service providers would've charge me for that!).

I don't know if it's my imagination, but I feel the computer a little more responsive... the RPM of the new hard drive is the same as the dead one so it's not that. Probably because I had so much junk that I had installed but never really erased correctly. Specially the fact that I installed some server applications some time back when I wanted to make my laptop a NetBoot server... didn't worked, don't ask me why. Some services kept bringing themselves up (like bootpd) and I was too busy to find out how to kill them off for good.

I'm also much more appreciative of my PBG4. I was using a spare computer here in the office that had only 48 Mb of RAM and Windows 98 SE, so you could imagine my frustration. Now with Mac OS X Tiger and 1 Gb of RAM I'm back home, and I'm planning to hit my thigh instead of the table while I go on through my fantasy drumming.