The Summer Clip Show

Preface - this piece lacks cohesion because I kept trying to write this, and writing parts, and putting it off, an bleh. So it's the night before I go back to school and I should be packing but dammit, this has to go up. Tonight. Quality be damned.

The thing is, I'm still not entirely sure what's going on, or what happened.

I just don't know.

This is what I do know.

I was in Austin, I was working for this great little company, living in this happy house with ben, going out for donuts all the time with bryan, and generally loving life.

Then, I went in to work on Monday and we were on the front page of CNet.

Then, at the end of the day Lane carefully explained to me that an investment deal had fallen through, and that deepleap was broke.

"But it's not over, Courtney and Tempy and I are all going to be working basically full time to get funding. It's just for the time being..."

Blah blah blah.

I get into ben's car, and he starts driving back to our house.

"So. It's over."

"Yup."

I don't smoke or drink, but I smoke and drank that night.

And ben feels bad that nobody told me that the company was ONE DEAL AWAY FROM DEATH, and so does bryan, and lane doesn't seem to get it, but fine. Right. I mean, I'm just an employee, it's not like they were obligated to tell me the financial situation of the company. Sure, I am employee number one, and I think I can safely call these people my friends, but nope, never mentioned that there might even be a teensy little possibility the company was going to run out of money and my employment would be terminated.

And yes, there are risks involved when working for a startup, but geez. I mean, I signed on for a 3 month summer job, I kind of figured they'd last that long.

But it's stupid and selfish and petty to even worry about that. It's stupid.

deepleap is dying a horrible death, I shouldn't be hung on stupid petty details, I remember.

At least now I don't have to worry about whether to take a year off and work for them, you know, that's not really an issue weighing on my mind anymore.

It's not fun to see the hopes and dreams of people you care about get shot to pieces.

Well, of course, obviously, it's not fun, no shit it's not fun, it sucks.

But what do I do? I leave.

I ditch out on Ben and Bryan. I run away. Leave Austin, back home to the safety of Lincolnwood, IL and mommy and daddy for a month before I run back to the safety and security of college.

Some friend, I know.

It's just, it was just too depressing to stay there. I couldn't deal with it.

I'm just an unemployed college student on summer break living off of his parents. My life revolves around watching Sailor Moon. I'm pathetic.

I'm at home, it's 4:30pm. I got up for Sailor Moon but fell asleep again. I'm still in bed, my mom wakes me up because I have a phone call. It's Hammad, my buddy from back in the Old Skool, not just Niles West high school, I mean, we go back to the Old Old Skool - Lincoln Hall Middle School.

"Hey, Sarah's in town. Would you be interested in meeting up with us for dinner or something?"

Sarah? Sarah Koo?

Sure, I haven't seen Sarah in forever, but that'd be great. Because Sarah's great, and I think the world of her, even though she didn't go to prom with me, becuase, really, that was an awfully long time ago and yeah. Sarah! It'll be great to see Sarah again.

So Sarah, Hammad, and of course Laura, Hammad's significant other of over three years, and I head out to the Cheesecake Factory.

And it's great, right, to see all these really brilliant people I went to school with for years and years, and hear what they're doing now.

"Yeah, my research at Northwestern in biochemistry went pretty well this summer. I'm the author of two patents on a process to grow and mature genetic material from follicles, and I have a meeting next week with the head of oby-gyny." Hammad is really smart.

"I'm doing research that is so important and complicated you can't even begin to comprehend it, adam." Ok, she didn't actually say that, Laura doesn't really talk all that much. Laura is a genius. Also, beautiful. She got into every elite school in the country, all the ones I got rejected to. Except for Stanford, her lone rejection letter in a heaping pile of Ivy acceptance packages. I bought her a Stanford shirt for her birthday right after we graduated. I think she hates me, although Hammad claims otherwise. She was doing research at Northwestern too this summer, but you know, she probably could've been working for the Pentagon or something, this was just so she could spend more with Hammad.

"Well, my debut at Carnegie Hall was just really draining at the end of last year. But yeah, I mean, touring Europe this summer was such an amazing experience." Sarah is a world class cellist. Also, very beautiful.

"My company died." Adam is Charlie Brown. Also, never gets the girl.

Sure I could say something like, "I was working on this fascinating web application that was one of the first to tap into the possibilities of a semantic web by tying together disparate pieces of information and services on the web and providing them in a useful, contextual way. But there were some "issues" on the business side, and we ran out of money and the company died a premature death," but it just doesn't sound as good.

"It wasn't your company," Connie reassures me again and again as I chat with her with my evil ad-infested AOL AIm client, and yeah, I know, it wasn't really my company, I didn't own it, I didn't found it, but I cared about it. It's not like this was just some stupid summer job at some soul-less megacorporation. I was even entertaining the idea of taking a year off of school to stay and continue working.

Really, I'm pathetic. Fucking pathetic.

No. I'm not pathetic, dammit. I'm going to do something with this month of time I have. Something, good, something great and wonderful that will help people and yeah.

And then there's three computers in my room, and they're all networked together, and there's cords and hubs and monitors all over the place and I'm writing perl scripts and maybe, if I just spend one more sleepless night, it'll be something great, I keep telling myself.

Have to keep coding and coding and then code some more.

So I made most of organizine in a little over two weeks, although it's not done yet and hasn't launched. But soon, soon, once one of the three independent efforts to produce an interface actually comes through, it will launch, and it will be good. I really think it'll be good, and either way, at least there's something I can point to and say, yeah, I did that this summer. This is how I spent my summer vacation. I did something.

And maybe it'll actually help people tell their stories and create great things and blah blah blah all that happy fuzzy stuff.

So too much time has passed, and I still haven't finished or published this. I'm going back to school tomorrow, and I'm frantically packing away, and Andrea messages me and says, "also: I am moving my whole page over to organizine. I love you."

And that's great. That's all I really wanted. I'm using it, my friends are using it, and we like it. And so even if everybody else hates it and nobody ever uses it, I'll consider it a success, because that's all I really wanted to do was to create a little thing to make it easier for me and my friends to update our sites.

Hopefully other people will feel the same way and do great stuff with it too. I hope.

God, this is such a disjointed mess. I've been meaning to edit and fix this thing for weeks, and bleh. I should just scratch this and write some funny "hahahah" piece about all the voicemail I got this summer. Next time. Hopefully.

I've just found it very hard to write about this last month, I'm confused, I'm disillusioned, and instead of really dealing with it I just threw myself into another project, which is good because I think this project turned out really well, but it's bad to leave things unexamined and not really deal with it.

It's just, I started out the summer disillusioned and confused, but for one of the few times i my life very optimistic. For a while everything seemed to make sense for me, and I was working on stuff I liked, with people I liked, in a place I liked. I had finally sort of found a niche where I wasn't just in some miserable state. And it really was a great summer, and I learned a lot of invaluable lessons, and most importantly I formed some friendships with some great people.

And years from now, that's what I'll remember, not the abrupt ending and death of deepleap.

Also, hot chix pool party.

So yeah, now I'm even more confused and disillusioned about what the hell I'm going to do with my life and business and dot coms and everything. But I'm 20 and in college, that's ok. I keep having these similar conversations with Craig and Le about how they're freaking out because they don't care about school, and they don't know what they're doing with their lives or if they'll ever find anything that will make them happy, and all they see are these boring, dreary futures of unfulfilling jobs and loveless marriages and what not and so they feel like just sort of giving up and they're depressed and such. And I feel that way too a lot, and it scares me, but we're young. It's ok that we don't have it all figured out yet. We're not supposed to have it all figured out yet, what fun would that be?