Matt and I are up late tonight. We procrastinated today so now we are up late. He is working on some time estimates that his boss needs tomorrow morning. I have a possible interview for an Oracle developer position, so I’m up late refreshing my Oracle knowledge. I installed Oracle on my machine, and now I’m installing the Application Server on Matt’s little server. Then I have to play around with Reports and Forms 6i, but I probably won’t do that tonight– too late.

I think I would be able to do the job I want to interview for, but I don’t think they will hire me. I don’t have all the experience they want in my pocket already. I only have about half of it. But, after loading this stuff on the machines and reading over stuff on Oracle’s technet site, I don’t think the job is beyond me– I’ll just have a learning curve. But I don’t think they want a learning curve. We’ll see. I’m talking to the recruiter again tomorrow.

I heard once that men don’t say “I think”, that they are much more definitive with their statements. So then I tried to strip “I think” from my conversation, but I couldn’t. It sounded too forceful, and I wasn’t always sure of my statements. I didn’t want the listener to think it was definitive if there was a chance that it wasn’t. But that’s where men differ– even if it’s not absolute, they will still state it as absolute whereas women won’t. Or that’s what I heard.

So anyways, I tried to change my habits (and found the new habits uncomfortable so went back to the original ones) because I didn’t want to seem unsure. My friend, Cindy, did a similar thing. She read that men will take up both armrests on a plane, and women will give them up. Since she read that, she always takes up the armrests.

So here’s the conclusion to that thought: why do some women try to change their habits to be more like men? And do some men change their habits to be more like women? I guess it’s not so much a conclusion as questions sent out into the universe. When I was younger, my desire to be as strong as men drove me to be quite a tomboy. Men seemed to have all the power when I was that age. Then, as I grew up and wanted men to be attracted to me, I found out that many of them like feminine women, not tomboys. I found the strength of men, but at the cost of my own femininity. Now that I’m in my 30s, I’ve realized that men and women each have their own strength. I’ve also been hanging out with the feminine side of myself a lot more lately too. It’s been fun.

So I once again noticed how many journals there are out there, and once again it freaked me out. I felt very small in a very large world. I look into the infinity of the night sky and I don’t feel that, but surfing personal websites and realizing how many of me exist– it just really freaks me out.

I also am glad I’m no longer a young geek. The pressure is tremendous to be cool (in geek terms). To work with cutting edge technology, to speak in a hip manner, to be witty. I’m glad I’m not there anymore. As I start tending plants and caring for my husband, and fall into very ungeek habits, I feel relieved to be out of the circle. I could never compete. I never had the passion that my friends did for computers and programming. I liked it… a lot. But I didn’t program freeware for Mac PDAs in my spare time or disect other people’s code to figure out some nifty thing that it did.

Matt has finished writing his document and wants me to proof it before he sends it to his boss. Nite, all.