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143
My computer is le broken. Again. It seems like my home computer and my work computer have some kind of secret relationship that allows them to synchronize their watches, or, I suppose, in this case, date/time properties, so that they break down at almost exactly the same time, thus causing me exponentially more grief than were they to do it, like, say, two weeks apart. Or even a month. A month would make me feel much less paranoid about my own computer-destroying karma.
My work computer caught a virus that will not go away. I don't know what this virus is doing besides repeatedly showing up on my virus scanner, and causing my computer to be verrrrry slow. The IT Guy doesn't seem to know either, and in fact, is not even sure that the slowness is due to the virus, and he has decided he must rebuild my computer just to be on the safe side. Which, is not that big a deal. It was a big deal last week when I was working on three different projects at once, but now they are all on hold and I am going on vacation in three days, so I don't care. It will be a pain to readjust all my settings to the way I like them, and reupload/download all the programs I need, but life is suffering. And this is pretty inoffensive, compared to, say, genocide. That is the funniest sentence I have read today. I am probably the only person in the whole world who has ever laughed at the word "genocide". I am not laughing at genocide itself, for those of you who do not get my sense of humour (which, in my experience, is most people, and which is why I am now overly defensive whenever I laugh at anything) and might be offended, but rather at the absurdity of comparing something so mundane and trivial to something so completely horrifying and evil.
(It's also pretty inoffensive compared to all these examples of mysogyny in every day life. I read through about 1/5 of the comments before I got so. Depressed. I had to stop. That was the unfunniest thing I have read today.)
Plus, at work, there will always be another computer I can use while mine is sick. And there will always be a computer expert on hand to at least pretend he knows how to fix whatever problem I am having. Not so at home. At home, my computer just woke up the other day and decided it did not want to work at all. Period. It just won't boot. From what I have been reading on the web, it appears the problem could be as simple as some wires or cables having gotten disconnected somehow. Or it could be as "simple" as my motherboard is fried. So excellent. My home computer always manages to outshine my work computer in the how-much-worse-can-I-make-this-for-Laura department.
Why do I never think to back anything up until I can't access it? Why do people never ask themselves hard questions until something really bad happens? Lets not discuss this further.
Yesterday I went to see Me And You And Everyone We Know and then drank some white sangria and got home Very Late. I wasn't supposed to do this; I was supposed to go straight home after work to put out the garbage and call my landlord so she can come pick up my rent cheque for this month and tell her that my oven is broken.
Whispered conversation that took place about 5 minutes into Me And You And Everyone We Know:
SG: Is this a Canadian movie?
Me: Uh, no. I don't think so.
SG: So, then, there is nothing to explain the weirdness?
Me: Well, it's an indie movie?
SG: I knew it! I knew there was something!
SG's favourite scene in the move was the goldfish scene, which apparently also went over big in Japan.
My favourite scene was the one where Peter and the girl from next door are lying on the floor in her room imagining her future house and family on the ceiling and he says that he would live up there if he could, if there were no gravity. I will not lie to you, I cried during this scene. I am probably the only person in the world who has ever been moved to tears over a girl in a movie imagining what she would say to her future daughter.
Then again, who knows. Maybe there is a whole section of the world's population who cry at scenes in movies where children dream about being loving parents and who laugh at people on the internet who compare things to genocide. Certainly, seeing inside the mind of Miranda July has made the things I have been led to believe are strange about myself seem very, very mundane.
Three days ago at my grandmother's birthday party we were eating corn on the cob with butter and salt. Someone said "Mmmm, fat and sodium!" and someone else (I think maybe my middle sister) said, "This corn is so good that you could eat it plain," and then Bubby, my grandmother, said, "What could be better with corn that butter and salt?!" and my little sister said, "Umeboshi!" and I said, "Oh, yes! Umeboshi!" And no one said anything for a while and everyone looked at my sister and I like we were completely crazy. And then my aunt said, "Umeboshi?" and my sister tried to explain that they are Japanese pickled plums and my aunt said that actually they are apricots but everyone calls them plums and she still thought it was weird that we ate them with corn. And inside my head I said, "Oh!"
And I realized that umeboshi on corn is another one of those things that seemed so ubiquitous in my childhood that I never noticed that no one outside my immediate family did them. I do not know where umeboshi on corn came from or why my whole family loves it so much but no one else I know has ever heard of it. My mother must have read about it in some macrobiotic cookbook or something. These are just the kinds of things that if you stopped to think them over, you would realize that, of course other people don't do this. But it just never occured to you to stop and think it over. Like the girl who ate chicken every single night of her childhood. Except, my case is much less spectacular than that girl's, because we only at corn on the cob a dozen times a year at most.
I guess my point is that within my circle of acquaintances, and by this I mean all people I have ever met in person, I am very weird. But compared to many of the people in the world I have never met, I am very, very ordinary. And I am always forgetting this and then remembering again. The umeboshi made me remember the former and YAMAEWK made me remember the latter.
Today I overheard a co-worker on the phone saying, "Some people do not trust The Man and trust Not The Man, and other people do not trust Not The Man and trust The Man, whereas I trust neither The Man nor Not The Man. [long pause] Mm. How are you?"
Also today my landlord called again and left another message about coming to pick up the rent. It irritates me that my landlord expects me to be home at her convenience. I was home every single night last week, but did she come by then? No. She came by this weekend when I was away at my grandmother's birthday party, and this week while I was at the movies. And then she calls and leaves me snotty messages as though this is my fault. I was about to call her when I got the second message (in which she says, "This is the second message I'm leaving you,") and I was so annoyed that I put down the phone again without calling. I hate renting.
Also today I have been reading Miranda July's YAMAEWK blog. My favourite parts are the posts by Brandon, especially how he signs them all '143', which, as he explains
Oh well, if ya didn't know 143 means I Love You but just a secret way to say it. I learned that from Mr. Rogers but he is dead now.
and
Well 143. Remember that means I love you. 1 for the letter I because it only has 1 letter, 4 for love because of 4 letters of the alphabet make up that word and you know you has only 3 letters so...
I highly recommend that you read all five of them.
There was thunder just now and the sky got very dark, but it hasn't started raining yet. I should go home before it starts. And eat supper. And I guess call my landlord.
Tomorrow you are all invited to come over to my apartment for The Martini Experiment.
After that I won't be reachable for a while because I will be on an island in Lake Champlain that is only reachable by taking a boat to another boat that takes you to island itself. So you can reach me if you do that, but otherwise not. And then if my computer is still broken after that I don't know what I'll do. Of course, you can always reach me by sending postcards to P.O. Box 70509, CP Park Extension, Montreal, QC, H3N 2Y9.
143!
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"The mind of the thoroughly well informed [person] is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, and everything priced above its proper value."
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