On Sunday, I finally closed the chapter on that guy I've been dating on and (mostly) off for several months. I'd come to the conclusion that we just weren't right for each other. But since we'd played phone tag all week, I'd not had the chance to tell him. But in the end today, I got through to him, and, in the briefest of conversations, ended it.

Sunday night was a bad one. I was barely asleep before I started to hear screams and grunts from next door (lounge singer and her boyfriend). I've gotten used to hearing their sex acts - it seems to come right through the heating grate, but never this late. The frustration of it fired up my mind again and I lay in bed thinking about how unsettled my life is, and yearning for some sort of simplicity.

Yet I'm contemplating making my life even more complex by interviewing for a challenging position at an Internet start-up. I know the main reason I'm going for that position: I don't want to be bored with my job. But I KNOW that I could eventually wrangle a job at my current company that would challenge me without it taking over my life like a job at a startup would be bound to. That pin-points another reason I'm interested in the job at the startup - if it suceeded, I could probably retire in a few years. That's a pretty compelling reason, but a big "if".

Besides tossing that around in my head while I lay staring out of the naked windows above my bed, and besides helplessly formulating responses to some obvious questions I'd face in the interview, I was also trying to figure out what to do about my apartment. My resentment just continues to build. With noise coming from all directions, I feel as if I'm being forced into a smaller and smaller space. I know full well that I'm more sensitive to noise than most people. I don't even know how I could actually find an apartment in this city that wouldn't be noisy. And the market is so tight - if I find a place, I'll almost certainly end up having to pay rent for two apartments for most of a month. And I haven't even figured out yet whether my landlord will agree to let me out of my lease before it expires in March. Maybe I should just tough it out - after all, amazingly, the startup I'm interviewing at has just moved to a building about 100 yards away from my apartment.

Having played out all the scenarios in my head, I felt no nearer to resolving any of them, and certainly no nearer to sleep. So I resumed reading Trollope's "The Prime Minister". It was exactly the wrong story to be reading right now. It had reached its blackest part, where one of the protagonists, Ferdinand Lopez, was at his greatest state of desperation. By two-thirty, as I read, Lopez had thrown himself to his death in front of an oncoming locomotive. Cheery reading at this time of night and for my state of mind.

Perhaps due to the poor night's sleep, I was in a fairly gloomy mood today. I found myself almost dreading the call for the interview which I expected in the afternoon. And after I'd driven home, and walked round the corner from my apartment to their office, my confidence felt at a very low ebb. Mid-way through the first interview I was chanting in my head "You've blown it, you've blown it ..." At the end of that same session, the guy asked me if there was anything I hadn't told him that may be relevant, so I told him that I didn't think I'd presented myself at all accurately due to nerves. He astounded me by saying that he thought I had a lot to offer the company! I think I need a perspective adjustment or something.

The second interview was to be the VP of Engineering, the guy I'd report to if I got the job. It's the first time I've been interviewed by a man wearing a skirt. This being San Francisco, you can't necessarily assume the guy is gay just because he's wearing a skirt. He struck me as being a lovely human being, and we seemed to strike up an immediate rapport. By the end of that session, my heart had recovered enormously, and I strode into the final interview feeling pretty confident. It's too early to say for sure, but they want me back for more interviews after I return from our headquarters in the south, so things are looking exciting. There are three guys who work there, out of thirty-two, who I worked closely with at my last job, and one of them is one of my best friends, James. All in all, you can say I left the place feeling good.