Another nearly sleepless night on the ingenious combination mattress/box spring. For the first time, I noticed there was no fitted sheet over the mattress, it being covered only by a standard sheet that stopped three-quarters of the way from the head of the bed, with nothing more than bare vinyl beyond it. Once again was too uncomfortable to fall asleep until the wee hours of the morning, a major factor in falling right back asleep after my alarm (the starting chime from the MacBook Pro) sounded.

Luckily, in a rare instance of foresight, I’d set my phone to emit a grating, repetitive ringtone fifteen minutes after the MBP powered up, and it performed its job admirably, brutally scattering what few Oneiroi had managed to find me in the night. Breakfast was again very filling and tasty. Attended a superb seminar on development and publication of IT service catalogs, then broke for lunch during which barbecued cheeseburgers and hot dogs were in abundance. The Japanese were still playing Duck Duck Goose in the College Eight plaza.

Checked out of the dormitory, and attended a nearly worthless seminar from Berkeley on the first-year student technology experience (“we found our students use lots of technology and want access to it all the time!”). Left UCSC and made a quick stop at a dumpy little donut/ice cream shop to satisfy my sudden craving for a vanilla milkshake. Though I balked a bit at the price ($3.49) given the portion size, it turned out to be the best goddamn vanilla milkshake I think I’ve ever had, replete with bean flecks and a very faint banana undertone from whatever sort of vanilla was in the ice cream.

Kicked back and let my colleague struggle through some relatively light San Jose rush hour traffic and got home at about 6:00 pm, ending my coastal mountain sojourn. Made a beeline for the soft, familiar, comfortable bed and promptly threw my carcass upon it. Many contented sighs ensued. Good to be back home.

Awakened by my bleating cell phone at a quarter to seven, I threw on enough clothing to be presentable and shambled down to the dining commons for a hearty breakfast, smug in the thought that the majority of my colleagues, having elected to lodge in a motel instead of the dorms, were choking down a crappy breakfast of cold toast and warm orange juice. After finishing, stepped outside into the fog and watched a small herd of deer nibbling away at the lawn.

With not much sleep under my belt, I struggled to stay awake enough to listen to folks from each UC campus discuss their current IT projects, and saw some awards handed out recognizing cleverness in last year’s endeavors. A much-welcome intermission followed, during which banana-nut muffins of surpassing tastiness was served; went back into the lecture hall wide awake, but was subjected to a rambling discourse about webcasting in higher education given by some young Google hotshot (looking very much the part in jeans, blazer, and a simple dress shirt) with the unlikely name of Obadiah Tarzan Greenberg (!).

Lunch followed: club sandwiches with ample bacon, fruit, and your run-of-the-mill bitter, weedy spring mix with some passable but not quite identifiable dressing of an Italianate bent. Listened with satisfaction as my colleagues described their lackluster breakfast with bitter contempt. Non sequiturs were provided after lunch by groups of Japanese exchange students playing Red Rover and Duck Duck Goose in their strange moon language. Discussed our department’s incident tracking system with some woman from Irvine, at the request of a Davis colleague, and then delved into the seminars. My nose for picking the right seminars was apparently off: the two I’d selected as most applicable to my job and department turned out to be relative clunkers, and the one B-list I attended only because everything else seemed even less relevant turned out to be extremely interesting.

The lack of sleep catching up to me, I forsook the dinner trip to the local boardwalk in favor of the very exciting alternative of passing out in my room. Truth be told, I’d actually been looking forward to indulging in a bit of inertia sans kids, cats, or interruptions of any kind. Took a shower in the lukewarm mist that passes for hot water here and dried off with the 60-grit towels thoughtfully provided by the staff, fabric so rough I looked sunburned after scrubbing my face with one. Flopped into bed and got caught up on Homestar Runner. Just another wild night in a college town with yours truly.

On the road to Santa Cruz to attend the University of California Computing Services Conference. I know, I know; going to Santa Cruz in the summer. Life sucks sometimes, but somebody’s got to suck it up and do the dirty work. On the way, stopped at the Dutch Goose, an old local hangout for one of my colleauges. Excellent burgers, though the promised dingy atmosphere (which harkened back to the famously dank Boll Weevils of my callow San Diego youth) had apparently been long since scrubbed clean.

Met several other colleagues from my campus on the College Eight dining commons grounds, overlooking the coast, and had a decent Hawai’ian-themed dinner. As we gobbled it down we all marveled at the outstanding view, something that is simply nowhere to be found on the bucolic but decidedly flat northern California plain on which our home base sits. Went back to crash in my dorm room, where I found all the board-like flatness I could have hoped for in the rigid, uncomfortable mattress and flimsy pillow. Nearly had to check to make sure the mattress was actually there.

Turned in to the sounds of EVERY SINGLE SOUND in the entire dormitory building. If this is what college life was like, I guess I’m not so sorry I missed it way back when, though of course I would have been less dependent on the creature comforts I’ve grown accustomed to in my old age, so maybe that would have evened things out. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some sleep on this blanket-covered table.

Early on, today was sort of looking like it might turn out badly. Some people in another department have been dicks this week, causing us no end of grief and aggravation. I’m a bit behind on a project I was supposed to have finished yesterday. There was no reason to expect today to be any different or less stressful, and, to top it off, we had to attend a divisionwide meeting called by our überboss, the Vice Provost. I figured it would be another boring org meeting, dull, gray icing on our bitter cake of loathing, though breakfast was promised. “Try and have a good day”, my wife offered, as I left for work.

I shrugged, trying to come up with something that might concievably lighten my mood. “I will”, I finally replied, “as long as there’s bacon.” Expecting nothing more than mediocre donuts and coffee, though, I didn’t hold out much hope for deliverance through gustatory delight.

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Over the weekend I got another message from Mario. He sounded sad. I’d never heard a New Yorker sound sad before. “Hey, Thomas, just tryin’ to catch up witchu, see how you doin’, talk to you soon, Michael… okloveyougodblessbyebye.” Poor guy. All he wanted to do was talk to his buddy Thomas. Or maybe Michael.

“Wait, who’s Michael?” I thought. Maybe Mario’s senile, and that’s why he keeps leaving messages on my phone even though my voice mail greeting clearly state my name, which of course doesn’t sound even remotely close to either Thomas or Michael. “I guess that would explain it”, I mused, reflecting on his earlier confusion. Hopefully Thomas will eventually get back to Mario and straighten the whole thing out.

Then last night an new, unfamiliar number rang my phone. I let it roll over into voice mail. It turned out to be Andrea, apparently Thomas’s boss, letting him know his shift that night had been cancelled, and he didn’t have to come in to work. This changed the paradigm, Mario’s verbal slip notwithstanding; it’s not Mario being an idiot, it’s whoever this Thomas bastard is. Considering that I’ve had this phone number for the last three years or so, and am only just now getting calls for Thomas, it’s unlikely I’m using a recycled number. Even more astounding, however, is the fact that two different people are completely ignoring the non-Thomasian voice mail greeting and blithely filling in scraps of Thomas’s life story on my cell phone.

I wonder if this will get any more interesting before ol’ Tommy finally wises up. Perhaps I’ll be unwittingly drawn into some web of international intrigue, accidentally overhearing “too much”, and will have an adventure involving expensive cars, automatic weapons, and suitcases full of gold. Or this is possibly just the beginning of some bizarre supernatural journey into terror that will ultimately find me in an abandoned house, desperately trying to locate Thomas’s long-dead corpse and return it to his ancestral burial plot before the clock strikes midnight and the Thirteenth Tomb is opened, opening the gateway between Hell and Earth.

Instead, I’ll probably just have to start wading through mundane messages about grocery lists, shift changes, and listening to Mario, feeling alone and unloved, finally break down in tears, but hey, you never know.

Many people oppose continuing our costly occupation of Iraq. The vociferous and shrinking few who continue to support it often tar their opponents with defeatism, blind partisanship, or worse, usually lumping them all together as some sort of ill-defined bunch of flag-burning hippies, full of barely-veiled yearning for an American defeat.

What these irate apologists fail to recognize is that the bulk of the American people against Iraq’s further occupation are not quailing at casualty lists, plotting surrender to Osama’s ilk, or participating in some sinister liberal conspiracy to topple the Presidency. Rather, they have reached the logical conclusion that ending our occupation seems to be the only course of action they can advocate.

Simply put, the President and his éminence grise, Mr. Cheney, have consistently failed to deliver victory, stubbornly clinging to obtuse, ineffective tactics. The President and his Cabinet have bungled the occupation, yet refuse to do much more than play whack-a-mole, as with the current “surge” we hear so much about these days. Suggestions for nuance in our policies, much less direct change, are icily dismissed as usurpations of a sacrosanct executive perogative of leadership.

In the face of this obdurate ineptitude, is it any wonder the American people are fed up with the occupation? They want victory, and since the President seems woefully unable to provide it, the electorate is increasingly tempted to simply yank the whole rug out from under him. I can’t say as I blame them one bit.