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wean myself
Friday, August 24 2001
The sale of my condo closed today. You can all breathe easier now that I've returned to my punk rock roots and am officially no longer an owner of real estate. Owing to California sales taxes, I'm not getting anywhere near as much cash back as I thought I'd be getting (a slight difference in $300,000 manifests entirely in the proceeds!), but since there's nothing I can do about it, well, there's nothing I can do about it.
Out on the Sixth Avenue in Manhattan this afternoon, I wondered what sort of mayhem would ensue if someone equipped with a magic button suddenly made all knee-length black skirts sublimate into thin air. Perhaps there would be more gender-neutral chaos if someone went to a town like Waynesboro, Virginia and pushed a button making all light blue jeans disappear.
I was surfing the web just now and somehow ended up at a site called surfway.com. Just by going there, my browser's homepage was somehow changed to www.surfway.com. I'm sure this was just a helpful gesture on their part, since everyone would surely be happier if surfway.com was their homepage. After all, they have lots of helpful links under such categories as Gambling, Travel, Shopping, and People/Relationships. Nonetheless, I wanted to investigate what sort of website would take such an Napoleonic move against my computer. So I clicked on the link that said "privacy policy." This took me to their generic Apache 404 page, the page "was not found on this server." It might be fun to make a parody website full of helpful links and quicksand auto-launching page sequences and then offer to collect the surfer's social security number and credit card information on the privacy policy/complaint page.
In the evening the New York Liberty Women's Basketball team was down in North Carolina playing the Charlotte Sting and Gretchen had arranged a little dinner party for those among her friends who wanted to watch. She prepared the makings for a variety of quasi-Mexican dishes and salads and had bought a six pack of beer. At first our only guest was Kevin, one of Gretchen's Milwaukee friends who happened to be in town, but he only stayed briefly and left before the game started. He was soon replaced by David the Rabbi's sister Anna, who has just moved into David's old apartment less than a block away in Park Slope. Anna is a hardcore women's basketball fan, and she's also a dwarf, the first I've ever known personally.
Later we were joined by my old housemate John, who drove the Punch Buggy all the way from Hoboken to Brooklyn. He brought his wonderful dog Sam. The presence of a strange dog seemed to bring out Sally's jealous side. But Sam is so mellow and meek, she soon gave up on bullying him.
For my part, I was paying most of my attention to an ongoing installation of Mandrake Linux on my 550 MHz AMD K6 box. It was going unexpectedly well, except that Linux was failing to recognize my ethernet card. Perhaps I was paying too much attention to these things, because after the game was over John announced that he wanted to go home. This is pretty typical announcement for John to make, and usually at this point he just ups and leaves. But somehow I got him to stay a little longer and we surfed the hundreds of digital cable channels for a time. Meanwhile Gretchen and Anna had gone around the corner to Anna's place.
When Gretchen and Anna returned, it seemed for a moment that we were all going to go out to a bar, but then John said he didn't want to go out after all and that he was just going home. So he left, and so did Anna.
We sort of expected to be doing something a little more exciting tonight, but now here we were, Gretchen and me all alone on a Friday night, with nothing to do but drink a small bottle of champagne in celebration of the sale of my house. But this is what always seems to happen when one makes plans to hang out with John. It never was an issue back when John and I were living together, because we were sort of stuck with each other and whenever he unexpectedly decided to go home, he was just going to the place where I live. Now, though, when he decides he doesn't want to hang out anymore, it means he leaves, taking with him the social components we'd sought in his presence. [To accommodate this reality, Gretchen and I have established a new social rule: the plans that other people make with us now take priority over plans made with John, even if they are made after the ones made with John.]
Just before bed I swapped ethernet cards with Gretchen's machine and managed to get the Mandrake Linux machine communicating with the internet. This was very exciting for me; I've never had enough success with a Linux installation to do anything useful with it. But now here I am able to check my email, surf the web, and edit text files. That's 95% of what I use computers to do. I may wean myself off of Windows machines yet!
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