My new job is so tiring. I come home exhausted every night. I have so much to do and so many meetings to attend. It's such a change from my old job, but it's a good change.

The head of my department came over to my cube and said she was very happy with me so far. Her exact words were "it's like night and day between you and the person you're replacing." I hope her opinion doesn't change when it comes time for me to go permanent. I really like my direct boss; she is such a nice person. Everyone is so nice.

I had back to back meetings with these guys I met in a meeting last Thursday. They were helping me with a presentation for the head of my group. These guys were so sweet and nice and so helpful. The head of my group told me that the presentation was successful, and she got what she wanted.

I went to a vendor presentation at a hotel this morning. There were supposed to be nine people there, but only three of us showed up. Me and two guys from PBGH. From their site, "Founded in 1989, The Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH) is a non-profit coalition of major California employers that is nationally recognized for its efforts to improve the quality and availability of health care while moderating costs. "

These guys were really smart and from what I could gather, big wigs in the California healthcare scene. I felt like such a nobody being at the presentation with them. I didn't say anything the whole time. I'm still too dazed by my new job to feel comfortable. I wish my boss had come with me, but she was in a usability study this morning. She would loved shooting the breeze with these guys.

I sent my first analysis off to a VP this afternoon. My boss keeps telling me that my analysis is for this "high profile" project. I'm definitely working way too fast, and need to be more careful. After I sent the analysis off, I noticed that I had some table headings wrong. It's not a big mistake, but it's still a mistake and it just doesn't look good.

The analysis is sound, but now I feel like I'll get dinged because I messed the titles of my charts up. I'm so mad at myself. I should have just left it to the morning so I could review it again when I was fresh. I had my boss and this other manager review it, but nobody noticed it. It's not their job to notice it I guess, it's mine to make sure it's correct.

I hope the VP I sent it to isn't nitpicker and just doesn't notice it. I wonder what the chance is of that happening? I'll just have to be more careful next time, and not rush myself. It's better to be late in sending things off than to send things off with mistakes right?

A friend got free tickets to see a play that was the hit of the San Francisco Fringe Festival. It was supposed to be an absurdist musical, and the reviews said it was really funny. It wasn't all that amusing and it wasn't that great, but at least we didn't pay for it. The woman who is the owner of the theater was sitting next us, and I'm not even sure if she liked the play because she hardly laughed.

It's probably one of those plays that are good if you see it when the theatre is full, and everyone is a little rowdy and a little drunk. You end up laughing and enjoying it, only because everyone around is going crazy over it and so you get into it so you don't feel left out. It's like theater peer pressure. If everybody else is laughing, it must be funny right?

Then we went to Original Joe's to have some dinner. The food is italian dinner and old fashioned, but for a cheap price they serve you huge portions of food so you always feel like you've got your money's worth by eating there because you have enough for a meal for the next day.

As we were leaving the restaurant and turning on Eddy Street, we see these police cars on full siren driving down the street. Then we saw two cops running down the street. It was like a scene out of "Cops", and automatically I heard the "Cops" theme song in my head. "Bad boys. what you gonna do, what you gonna do when then come for you."

The theater and restaurant are in the bad part of town called the "Tenderloin". It's the red light district with hookers, seedy hotels, drug dealers galore, and assorted junkies and freaks hanging out on the street.

My friend didn't want to walk down Eddy, so we headed down Taylor and the scene there looked dicey as well. Then I suggested we go up a block to avoid the police melee. and she said no because the next street up was even worse because of the drug dealers.

Of course secretly, I wanted to go walk down Eddy Street and watch the cops do their thing because whenever I see cops on the street arresting people it makes me feel like I'm in a movie or in a police crime drama show on TV. I told my friend that the cops running like that made me feel like I was in a movie, and she said it wouldn't be a movie if we got caught in the crossfire of a gun battle.

But Eddy was the only safest street to walk through that night, so we waited to see what the police would do. There were four cop cars lined up on the left side of the street with their lights flashing, and the two cops whom we saw running down the street, were now returning in the direction they had come from.

So we cautiously proceeded down the street trying to be hyper alert for gun sightings and or gun shots. When we passed the two cops, I heard one of them say it was a code 4.

I was wondering if code 4 was MDK, or murder-death-kill, and then I annoyed my friend because I started chanting murder-death-kill, murder-death-kill. Then we saw two different cops running up the street, but by then we were a block away from Union Square and anxious to get home.

It's so weird to get back to the cable car turnaround at Union Square thinking there might a possible police shootout two to three blocks away. My friend talked about tourists getting lost and ending up in the Tenderloin. Will they feel like they're in an episode of "Cops", or maybe a movie or a police crime drama tv show?

Yes, stress, travelling and changing jobs is not good for my weight loss plan, but at least I've only gained 1/2 a pound. I've lost 10 pounds since February 4, but I have so much more to go.

It feels good that with all the new job stress I'm under that I'm not pigging out and self medicating myself by eating. I haven't been working out either, but I hope to remedy that next week. I want to work out at least three times next week after work, and spend an hour to 1.5 hours writing prior to going to the gym.

I'll leave work, find some place to hang out and write, then by the time I've done my daily writing hopefully the gym will be less crowded and I can go work out. It will be good to have my writing and exercise completed before I get home, so then I have the rest of the night free to relax or go straight to bed or even read a book.

I have not done any reading at all. When I'm stressed as I have been these last two months, I can't even read. Reading takes way too much effort when I'm freaking out. I am so far behind on my monthly reading plan, but once I get back into a routine and the job goes into permanent status I'm hoping to jam in some major reading time to get caught up. Then I'll be back on track with the number of books I'm supposed to be reading per month.

I went to my office half an hour earlier because of the protest, and the building was locked and surrounded by tons of police people in riot gear. They weren't very many protestors, but the building security people and the police were not letting anybody through.

My new boss called me and we met and sat in a coffee shop for about 20 minutes, and then tried again to get into our building. By around 9 am, they were letting people in again as long as you showed your badge ID. My new boss took myself and the guy I'm replacing out to lunch, and when we left the building the security was still tight and we weren't sure if they were going to let us out.

By the time we came back from lunch, it looked like all the protestors were gone. When I left work, the police barriers were still up and there were guards and a few police outside of the building just in case anything else happened.

There weren't very many protestors, but I guess enough to spook people out. I saw a bunch of protestors dressed in pink ballerina tutus, but I had no idea what they were doing. There such a feeling of violence in the air, something I've never experienced before in any protest I've ever been in here in San Francisco, back home in Hawaii, and even in Washington, DC. It just felt like people were waiting to hit something, somebody, anything.

When did protestors become so darn angry and violent? I've been in protests with over a quarter of million people in Washington DC, and I never felt the violence I felt on the streets of downtown San Francisco this morning.

At my writing class on Monday during a break, I was expressing some concern about the protests because I knew it would be just my third day at my new job and I didn't want to be late for work since I work hourly and needed the money. One of the women in class, who just assumed I had been in previous anti-war protests, told me lighten up because "didn't I remember how fun the anti-warprotests were last year?"

I just looked at her and didn't say anything. I was like so shocked and deeply offended that she just automatically assumed that all people in San Francisco feel the same way politically about everything, and that of course I would be at the anti-war protests. I would never make that kind of assumption about anyone, especially about political issues in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It's such an arrogant San Francisco Bay Area mindset to think that everyone thinks the same way politically. I think people here think that the rest of the country feels exactly the same way we do about political issues, or if they don't they should. It's such a fascist attitude to me to just assume that everyone thinks the same way about everything, and if they don't then they're either stupid or there is definitely something wrong with them.

I never expect anyone to have the same opinions I do, especially political opinions. Politics is so deeply personal, like religion and sex. And since everyone on this planet is unique, it makes perfect sense to me that every single person could have a totally different political opinion than mine.

My assumption, and it's probably a wrong one, is that every single person thinks deeply about politics and has informed opinions that are uniquely their own and no one else's. I think about politics very deeply and try to stay informed. I would never adopt or parrot a political opinion without studying and researching it first, just because my parents, my friend, my family, people I admire, and the media have that certain political opinion.

Politics is way too important to me for me to not think deeply about an issue and to look at an issue from all sides before forming my own individual and unique opinion.

I've only been at my new job three days, and I've already brought work home because I have a 9 am meeting on Monday that I need to prepare for. It's a good project for me because it's something I've done before so I kind of feel like I kind of know what I'm doing. I'm in familiar territory because the project involves clinical analysis, and that's been my main job for the last three years. This project is a little more involved, but at least I'm used to looking at clinical data.

My boss has never done clinical analysis, so I am on my own here but at least I feel qualified to actually do this project. My boss feels put out because the project was dumped in her lap from some VP, and it's an area she has no expertise in. It's kind of like the VP heard a new analyst was being hired, so she thought "great, let's see what the new analyst can do and if she really has healthcare experience and is worth the salary we're forking out for her."

OY!!! I've had a hard three day start to my new job. I feel like they expect me to hit the ground running, and I'm like sitting there wishing I could have a job where all I did was answer the telephone or some mindless activity like that.

The clinical analysis stuff I can do, the financial data modeling I'm not so sure of only because I haven't done any real finance work since 1997. Back then I built my own sales financial models, but I was used to doing finance work.

I did a search on Amazon.com and will probably buy some financial modeling books just to refresh myself. I think I'll feel more comfortable once I do some research. The guy who I'm replacing built a very robust financial model that I'm hoping will last for a couple of years before a new one has to be built.

I don't why the finance aspect of my job is freaking me out, because in my finance work life I used to prepare information to go in 10Qs, annual reports, shareholder reports, and quarterly earnings releases. I even worked on an IPO once, and had to sign SEC agreements not to divulge company secrets because I was considered an "insider" and could be held liable for "insider trading". What a laugh!

But that was years ago, and I'm just not used to doing that kind of work anymore.