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first warm day in months
Friday, April 27 2001
On the large windows of the first floor kitchen at my workplace someone has left unmistakable grease prints from touching the glass with the tip of his nose. Whoever left these prints is about an inch and a half taller than me and has left three or so identical prints, each of the same diameter, the same height above the floor, and each centered horizontally on their respective panes of glass.
My poor housemate John! Somehow he found himself recruited by "Farley's People" (Farley being the hapless son of a gnomish Texas billionaire) to babysit Farley in the aftermath of a tonsillectomy. "Farley's People" are, it turns out, a group of therapists and such in Orange County who attend to Farley's every need, or more often, find ways to delegate such attending to unsuspecting friends. Because of "Farley's People," Farley's infancy has persisted well into his 20's. He's never had to work an honest day in his life or, for that matter, pay a single bill. The other day one of "Farley's People" called Fernando, gleaned some essential intelligence, and then, without ever contacting Farley, called John to thank him for agreeing to spend his Friday night with Farley after his surgery. John, of course, hadn't volunteered for any such task, but because he didn't have any excuse prepared, he ended up roped into driving an hour on the freeway down to Orange County to hang out with Farley all night. It should be remembered that John's relationship to Farley is almost entirely professional; he serves as Farley's "life/educational skills coach" on certain fixed days each week, and though John often has to deal with Farley's chronic multi-hour tardiness, for the most part there isn't much "boundary crossing." But this babysitting mission, on the other hand, was presented to John as something he was supposed to do as a friend, that is, unpaid. The only consolation was the fact that Farley now had access to large quantities of painkillers, the sorts of things one brings on to bring about a killer wig-out. If John was going to have to suffer through an entire Friday night with a 26 year old infant, he might as well not have to endure it in pain.
Meanwhile, I continued setting up my new NT box. Unfortunately, though, I experienced something of a setback when I absentmindedly double-clicked on a file called "creative.exe" situated on my desktop. It turns out that creative.exe is a virus, a stupid thing that puts lots of trash files on the C: drive, all of them saying, in their file names, something in broken English about the greatness of LINUX. At one time in the recent past I actually knew that the file was a virus, something which had come via an email attachment, and I'd saved it so I could study it some time in the future. But of course I'd forgotten all about it and now I'd bumbled into infecting my freshly-built computer. It was one of those Homer Simpson "Doh!" sort of moments. Just for my peace of mind I decided to reformat and re-install the entire C: drive, a process that kept me up well into the wee hours. Somewhere in the middle of this I had another long phone conversation with Gretchen.
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