Two Sides of the Same Coin

My internship project is over. I took too long to design the thing and now lead times would take too long. My manager suggests that I just document what I have so that I can hand it off to the next intern or co-op. He seemed rather disappointed in the whole situation. I kept a straight face during it. My mentor on the other hand took a different approach. He thinks that there is still time with enough finagling with contractors and such. He’s setting himself up for disappointment. Both kept saying the same thing. That the point was for me to “add value” to the company. Yes I should get a good experience, but most important I should “add value”. I think they are trying to come to terms that I was simply a bad investment. My manager is working toward accepting that, sadly. My mentor seems to be in denial. Either way I feel empty.

Friday I went drinking at a barcade. I was playing Galaga like I always do first. I was on my last life. Stage 21. Hadn’t played in about 6 weeks. So naturally I make a bet with myself. If I can clear 21 and get to 22, I’ll call her on her birthday. It was a sure bet. I was rusty. Down to my last life. The highest I’ve ever gotten was like 25 or 26. There just was no way. I was going to slip. I got to 23. I know how it’s going to play out. I call. Get sent to voicemail instantly. Leave a 10 sec message. That’s it. Nothing will come of it. Just re opening old scars and make it worse for myself for the next however long. I drank a lot that night. 5 whiskey sours. I made the bad move of eating a greasy burger and fries, so I sobered up pretty quickly. The food absorbed the alcohol. Was pretty much sober by the time I boarded the train home.

Weekend was hell. Worked pretty much all day Saturday at the lab. Got hardly anything done like usual. Then I went home and something happened. I’ll talk about that later. Sunday same thing work half a day. Got a bit more done. Felt ok by the end. Went to play cards in the local comic shop. Was supposed to be fun. Unfortunately I got in a pod with a fucking jackass with an OP deck. Full 3 hours of just getting steamrolled by dumbass infinite combos and having all my cool cards get blown up before they get a chance to do anything. We started to dogpile on him, but that only seemed to piss him off and he started being more of a dick. Fuck that prick. Hope he gets hit by a bus.

Now what I really wanted to talk about. Saturday night I was so tired. Of all of it. So incredibly tired. I just wanted to drink. Drink and forget everything. Feel nothing. Went through two thirds of a bottle of Jack Daniels and two really strong beers. Completely wasted. Couldn’t see straight. Blacked out for some parts of it. At one part I look at myself in the mirror and say “Your nothing.” I start to laugh. Like really really laugh. Like I heard the funniest joke ever told. Everything was so god damn funny. I try to quite myself down. Neighbors complained about noise before. But I couldn’t stop. I bend and sway and push my face up against the mirror. All I could think was that nothing mattered. And it was so god damn funny. There’s only one time in my life I’ve ever felt that good. When I was manic. That powerful, confident feeling it gave me felt as good as sex (I assume, I’m a virgin). But it felt so good. Everything mattered and I was at the center of it all. But with drinking, nothing mattered and I was nobody. Two sides of the same coin. The best feelings I ever had. Then everything gets fuzzy. At some point I was in the bath tub with a mixture of vomit and bath water. Don’t remember how I got in there. Don’t remember getting out.

Here’s my tattoo I got.

Means a lot of different things to me. That’s they way I want tattoos I get to be. First one is obvious. The null symbol means I’m nothing. A nobody. Empty. The plus and minus remind me of my disease. My bipolar. Another way to look at it is that there’s good and there’s bad. Two of something. Like the coins I love to flip. In a way if you add plus and minus you get nothing. So all the good and all the bad end up adding to nothing. A more hopeful interpretation is that in the mirror it looks like a reverse null symbol. Which has no real meaning. It’s just a symbol they have in unicode. It doesn’t have an official meaning, but some could say that it means the opposite of empty, so something or even everything. I’m really happy I got it.