A new life?
I have been on an emotional downslide ever since my parents' visit back in June. All the disappointments of them being so late for the two days of visiting and then seeing first hand the toll the aging process has taken was just the beginning.
Then came the doctor's report of the permanent damage to my diaphragm. The damage is apparently a result of my asthma, and mainly affects my ability to expel air. I can get it in, just not out. Strange. I guess I will never be a great trumpet player now.
I am typing this letter on a computer. It is an IBM with a 10 Gig hard drive. Only 128 meg of ram though so I will have to suffer some.
Today is my first day in my own little office. It is a storeroom on the way to the staff bathroom but for now it is all mine.
I installed Windows XP Home edition on this machine. It had Windows 98 and would not take the upgrade path so I did the new install. It wiped out the software on the disk so today I was able to reinstall the entire Microsoft Office, minus the parts that relate to the Internet.
I do not know how long I will have this job but for the short term there should be a 100% improvement in my letter writing. Little red squiggly lines, little green ones, so much help and boy do I need it.
I feel the clock ticking and hope I can deliver the goods on this programming gig before the vagaries of prison life come around and bite me in the tail. For the time being it would appear at least no one else wants this job, nor am I doing anything that someone else got tossed off of.
It is 4:30 now and while the officers are here till about 8:30 I am not sure how long they will let me stay. They are not the usual PM staff and that is a good thing. Hopefully now that I no longer have to work in their office, they will not mind me coming down. Of course this means I am going to immerse myself in programming but I really need to get a self taught crash course in Access so I can show daily progress.
I am sitting here typing this letter to you and feeling like a human being for once. I really do live in conditions of deprivation. Yes, I know there are people dying all over this world but for a minute I am realizing that I was born to do this stuff. And man did I fuck up the lives of the ones I love and put myself in the hellhole.
Now here is hoping I can use this extremely unique position to springboard myself into a new life.