I have made a little discovery. I'm ashamed that recently I've been questioning how come I love Nicci so much, and that if I feel the same for her as I did a year ago.

I got my answer today, when she missed showing up (or is at least taking her longer) at the time she said she could log in. I suppose I still love her way too much as the clock ticks by only deepens the hollowness I'm feeling at her not showing up.

So, it's not that I love her any less... it's just that I learned to endure her absence.

Even your silence is a promise

And I break my head trying to think about plots... I've found the answer!

Nicci is finally being transferred to the Air Force, starting tomorrow. Yet all is not well. She came back hurt, and I not mean wounded, but hurt. I can never know what she experienced in her latest mission, but it looks like it affected her greatly. And I, as always, worry about her. She is withdrawn, and I had to coax a night of chatting out of her, dragging her from a friend's home via SMS whining. I'm glad I did, else I would not have been able to talk to her for the entire week.

She didn't even say goodbye when she went to her barracks today, and that hurts. Part of the hurt is that she doesn't trust me to understand, and another infuriating part is the same song about how I deserve something better than her. Can't she understand that if I wanted something else, I'd be looking for it? I don't stay with her out of pity, but because I truly love her.

Do all women have so low self-esteem or only the ones I go out with?

I wish she could love herself as much as I love her. Her pain is my pain, and it hurts me to see her like that. I hope that flying will bring her some resolution, it is her lifelong dream and I hope that it will be all that she was waiting for.

I will probably move to England to work. I have no idea when, if it will be this year, the next, or further, but the fact is that the possiblity is open. I would be in the same timezone as Nicci, and only a small strip of water would separate us, instead of a whole ocean. She would only need to say the word, and I would hop to the fastest transport to Germany to be with her. But she must want that first...

I hate leaving her feeling like that, but she went to sleep and my only communication with her is the cellphone and, come tomorrow, that might be gone too, if her service is not roaming. She speaks of flying on broken wings because she cannot be what I deserve... and I wish she allowed me to call her to set her mind at ease, or that things were different and I could just shut her up with a kiss or a hug when she started speaking like that but, alas, a caveat of Internet relationships is that you can never have that option.

My hopes are hanging from her fulfiling her dream and liking it. I cannot do much else from so far away.

I'm turning into a cry-baby... or more likely, somewhere, somewhen I lost most of the shielding around my emotions and I find many more things getting to me than before.

Case in point: I bought the soundtrack for "Black Hawk Down". While I still have many reservations about watching the movie, most of them a refusal to watch a propaganda film about how much we should thank the U.S. for butting their nose where it doesn't belong. Another one is that Nicci is again on the field, a couple of months before her new training was supposed to begin, and she was sent away again.

I'm afraid that this movie is going to punch me hard.

I bought the CD anyway because I love Hans Zimmer's work, and he hasn't disappointed me yet; this CD is fantastic, and I might just go see the movie to see what Ridley Scott did to be underlined by this music.

But while listening to the track with Lisa Gerard in vocals I was reading the CD's jacket, and my mind suddenly wandered to the subject of the movie, to the soldiers who had to fight through enemy lines to return home. I hate international U.S. politics and their meddling hollier-than-thou position, but I can't stop thinking about how the politicians are using their young in their wars, how each soldier, as unjust as his war might be, is a person with a family waiting for him. My throat closed up with the music, with the memories of Nicci going MIA last year, and thinking how many people have been in my position, but their aftermath was much different than mine: their loved ones did not return.

So, I'm bringing a lot of tissues when I go to see "Black Hawk Down", because I'm sure I'm going to cry for the people that see their lives destroyed by the bloodthirst of petty leaders from both sides of all conflicts.

I once told Nicci that she had saved me from an emotional apathy I was falling into. And boy, is this correct! I'm crying for U.S. soldiers, dammit! Oh, the irony......

How can I miss so much something I've never had?

How can I long for the sound of a voice I have never heard?

How much can I stand this? How much until I'm drained? How much longer must I be content with so little?

I'm having that nagging, annoying premonitory feeling again. Or I don't know if it is, which makes it more annoying still. I'm feeling a bit irritable, uncomfortable, etc. the same feeling, or one very alike, to the ones I have when something happens. I'm not sure if I should attribute it to my rather mentally exhausting week of writing a 64-pages sourcebook as an emergency because the original author failed to deliver, or because something happened to Nicci, who is away on an exercise, and hasn't answered my messages to her cel, like she has the previous days.

It's not fair.

So, here's another addition to my collection of miseries (I think that this blog will be devoted to record my miserable moments). Problem is... I don't know how to write about it now that I have the blog window open... well, Nicci's going out on exercise this week, so I won't be seeing her this weekend. Though "see" is completely metaphorical... it means only that she'll be paying more attention to me on ICQ than she can on SMS.

Though, my rant for today has less to do with her than with frustration... so I'll be general and appropriately vague... sometimes its tiring being the good guy; I have very large reserves of good will, energy and emotional resources, but they sometimes hit the red line, and that's when I start thinking about myself a little more. I'm not selfish, but when in the red line, I start looking for fuel, because selflessness is very expensive to keep running and I sometimes need things to be done for me.

It's not too much to ask, eh? A bit of self-interest in-between periods of martyr-like patience and understanding...

And I can't talk about it because I promised not to, and even if I torture myself by mulling it over, when the opportunity presents itself I'm too ecstatic to even think it was bothering me before.

Funny, how I always feel a warm emptyness when she says goodbye to go to sleep...

The Geek Hierarchy. I see that I've been climbing up slowly to a less geeky position :).

Hmmm... judging from my posts, it could be believed that my life is one tragedy after another; . I guess that being happy makes me forget to write into this blog, so by checking the space between logs... I could say I've been pretty happy lately.

Or maybe it's because I've been incredibly busy. And being busy makes me happy? ;P Go figure. The thing is that I'm working now, and working feels good, specially in the kickass job I have ^_^. Of course, I'm back with my bad habit of agreeing to do more stuff than the day has hours to do them in...

On the cryptic "only I will understand" vein... monsters populate this world; monsters who destroy and devour precious things. I feel it my duty to nurture back into health some of those precious things or at least the ones that are precious to me.

It sounds simplistic, but that's all I dare to write, since thanks to Erich, this blog now shows up in a Google search! :P Though I might be unfair in blaming Erich and it's Blogger that is at fault, or Google's bots are really powerful.

The terrible thing I did is behind me, and all seems to be well now. I wish I could wax poetic about my reasons and to what it is that I did... but see above. There are secrets that are not meant to be uploaded. No matter how secure we think a server is.

I fear I've done something terrible.

Or else I'm being paranoid. Nicci didn't come online today, and I'm deeply afraid that she might have been hurt by something I did last night, long after we had parted ways yesterday. Or, like on some other times, her absence today could be attributed to more mundane causes; she's in Moscow with her parents, and thus she can't use her cel to warn me of any technical problems. Or that she was too tired to log in...

But I'm fairly sure that she read her mail, and thus getting the little bomb that may have had unforeseen consequences. Or maybe Yahoo played a cruel trick on me and is making me imagine all kinds of stuff.

Whatever the cause, her absence today hurts, and it's worse because it may have been my fault.

Not even my sister giving me a Strider figure from Burger King's LotR promotion has lifted the dark shadow hovering over my mood.

I feel like a ghost.

I asked for a revelation and got more than I bargained for.

And never have I felt so insubstantial... so... ineffective. I sense the presence of the living yet I cannot touch them; they would rather keep my existance in the realm of the imaginary, or the ethereal because of fear of what my real existance would mean for them.

When I go back to this and read it, I will understand, others will not, and that is just as well.

I am a ghost, with no physical existance but driven by emotions.

I really should do more exercise. Even if from vacation from kendo. -And- I must get myself a new chair, one with proper back support. I say this because now that my job consists of mainly sitting down all day in front of my own computer, instead of one provided by an employer, and the chair I bought wasn't exactly meant to be sat on for more than 4-5 hours at a time.

I want to avoid back problems.

So, time has prevented me to post my New Year resolutions, mainly becais when you write for a living, you tend to forget to write other things, or to put it mildly to waste words that would be used somewhere else :), So, for this year, this is part a resolutions and a to do list:

*) Get myself registered in the National Author's Registry
*) Get car insurance
*) Exercise every morning, try to rise early by going to bed not-as-late
*) Buy a no-break
*) Get a Wacom pad and an optical mouse
*) New chair, see above.
*) Learn more German, perhaps some Japanese too.
*) Save money, keep my account at five digits starting march (after I pay debts, and it's pesos digits)
*) Maybe, maybe go to Germany for Oktoberfest, though beer is merely a secondary interest in going :)
*) Normalize my tax situation
*) Get my car fixed.