AUSTIN, Texas, August 20, 2005 — We are all sleeping in, sort of (me, dog, himself). It isn't that late, just shy of eight. The dog wants her food. We all get up. I dress in workout clothes, get some coffee. I finish my journal for yesterday, flip around on the computer doing who knows what, I get to the gym around ten and sweat a lot doing fifty minutes on the bike. I soak through two towels. This phrase leapt into my head this morning: "Being comfortable in your own skin." Odd phrase that. Typing it into Google is interesting. A quick assessment is that a few references are to nudity and skin care and most are that spiritual sense of being

comfortable with who you are. Phrases like that pop up for me, not directly from what I hear and read, just from my internal dialog. Maybe this one came from looking at old journals, reading the writing of a slightly (well, maybe more than slightly) uncomfortable former self.

When I turned over to get out of bed this morning and kicked off the sheet, I had a feeling that my body was tighter and more muscular than it actually is. (Being prone keeps things from sagging for one thing!) This mood continued, though, when I was upright. It almost made me do a better job with the weights at the club (in the interest of retaining this feeling) only I got distracted by time and newspapers. I didn't just walk out of the club after my bike ride, though. I got out a mat and a bar and some twenty pound dumbbells. I did some situps, some side leg raises, some lunges. I took brief breaks to read a few paragraphs from the papers or get another drink of water. I sat a time limit. I would leave the club at 11:35. And I did.

But, getting back to that phrase, "comfortable in your own skin." They (whoever) say "own" skin. That seems redundant. So I was sort of thinking about how my body felt today, how I needed to be thinner but I did feel muscular, but I'm not really talking about the strictly physical thing anyway. I'm just talking about that comfort level of you being there and me being here and the world around one being tractable somehow, from one's own point of view. It's knowing one's place and being able to interact with everything else from there. Most people have it. The kid at the club who kicked off his topsiders and entered a racketball court to play,giving me a friendly "Hello, how are you?" as I rolled up an exercise mat. He has it. His friend, properly shod, who shot a glance over his shoulder at me and scowled? Probably not. The woman who asked me if I was ready for 'my tennis season' (I'm a sub for the club teams) and who looked nonplused when I told her I'd be gone two and a half weeks during the fall? She's got it. All those wonderful actors in the Zach production we see tonight are comfortable enough to leave their own space and inhabit another place for a couple of hours.

I go home at that precise time I set. I figure I'll have some cereal and yogurt but FFP heated up the fish stew. I have that and one slice of provolone cheese. I write a little bit, continue sorting through the old journals which is mildly depressing. I have them scattered on the floor, though, and need to get them put away.

I get a shower. We have made friends with a woman who is executive director and founder of a literary non-profit called Badgerdog Literary Publishing. The kids in some of the programs are having a reading from an anthology they are publishing. We go downtown around two to check this out. The kids range wildly in ages and subject matter. But they are clearly in love with words and writing has become something special for them. The very youngest, a third grader, is extremely self-possessed. Comfortable in her own skin, I guess. A lot of them are nervous in front of the big crowd of adults. One imagines that their writing is better read or when listening to them in their small classes.

We head home and have a sandwich. We are going to Zach tonight.

I do a few things on the computer. Including looking at the Basic program I got to fool around with. I notice John Bailey who inspired me to get it has already lost interest in returning to the creation of programs. He and I rely on those younger folks out there to continue to turn out Windows and WEB programs for us to use to write and display photos and explore the world and buy and sell online. (Well, he sells, I don't.) There is a certain amount of a creative outlet in programming but it is not the same as words and pictures, for me. The really creative pieces in programming are lightly sprinkled among days and months of syntax and design drudgery and battles with supporting programs and their bugs (the OS, the database, etc.). With writing and taking pictures and the modern content helpers one can buy for the PC, it's a bit of drudgery scattered among mostly creative fun. Still I'm having fun learning to use the little program. I must say that I find it more to my liking than the Visual Basic that I took a course in earlier in my retirement. That object-oriented stuff makes sense to me but I prefer the old school way of looking at programs as the primary artifact, not hiding the syntax and control in that fancy way.

By the way, among the old journals and daily diaries in the box I drug out of the closet, were notes from 1990 when I was helping create one of the programs that helped fund my retirement. These contain details of work that I was doing and others were doing to take a prototype and build a program with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, hopefully designing it and documenting it (internally and externally) to be maintained and to handle many possible conditions and errors. Some of the notes, of course, mean nothing to me now. They contain short names (compiler restriction) for modules and control blocks that were perfectly meaningful to me then and, even now, I sort of remember. It is amazingly difficult to stay organized when writing programs. During this period a key person resigned. The notes suddenly reflect the chaos that ensued as some of us tried to take over an existing product and its customers and problems and, at the same time, tried to continue creating the other product. I always look back at that time and wonder what would have happened if that person had stayed with us on that project. A sea change of different outcomes would have been spawned by that one difference. But enough about that. Every little thing changes everything else. And, back to programming, every little thing you code can make a difference in some obscure case in the future with the right set of variables.

I shake myself away from the computer for a while to eat a snack (a package of peanut butter and cheese crackers) and watch AFF films.

Zach is presenting a play. Shear Madness is a piece that involves the audience (even to the point of changing the course of the play with a vote). The basic piece is also enhanced with lines relevant to the Austin location. (I especially like the leaked conversation from a supply room where the suspects are held while a detective interviews them one at a time. All about street names in Austin and stuff like that.) The characters start entering when the audience is still settling (with loud music over) and stay on during the intermission basically trying to tamper with 'witnesses' to a crime that took place off stage but had to be committed by one of the characters during that time. It sounds more serious than it is. It is a hilarious comedy. Himself says he didn't think he'd laughed that much in a long time at a play.

It is the official opening and there are champagne and snacks after but it is crowded and FFP already said he wanted to go somewhere and eat something. I had two Shiner Bocks during the show. We decide on Billy's on Burnet which is a hop and a skip from our house. It's after ten now but they are open late. The place is, in fact, buzzing with pool players and drinkers. We get some vegie burgers, fries and fried green tomatoes. And pints of Guinness. I am stuffed when we leave. I have been eating too much.

At home, I watch the end of a documentary I'm reviewing for AFF and watch a short narrative and start another but I can't stay awake. I join himself and the dog in bed.