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shell of awkwardness
Friday, March 27 2009
I was at Woodbourne today, this time with the help of Jed, the liaison for the college-prison partnership I work for. As I went around assigning BIOS passwords, he went around deleting questionable images from some of the workstations. Most perplexing of all was where the picture of Jennifer Lopez had come from. Supposedly there was also some nazi material, but that might have been part of Encarta, Bill Gates' answer to Wikipedia.
At some point I realized that all the BIOS passwords I'd added were having the unwanted effect of causing the computer to demand the admin password in order to be booted at all. (Later tonight I would realize that this was the effect of another BIOS setting called "security mode." As much as I know about computers, I'm still learning basic things every time I have to interact with the damn things.)
I stayed hours after Jed left, and at some point a bunch of guys in business suits and mustaches showed up and stood around chatting in a technologically illiterate way. One of them tried to ask me what I was doing, and I said it was too complicated to try to explain. I hadn't had any lunch and the last thing I wanted to do was try to explain computer esoterica to someone incapable of identifying a power cord.
This evening Gretchen and I attended a private birthday party for our friend Kirsty (one of Woodstock's many photogenic vegan Buddhists) held at the Garden Café. Kirsty and friends took over the entire restaurant, though everyone paid for their meals in massive instance of Dutch treat (not to be confused with a Dutch oven or a Dutch auction). Most of the usual suspects in Woodstock's vegan subculture showed up, including the ubiquitous Andy Glick.
When we first arrived, Gretchen was standing around talking to someone and everyone else was hugging out their hellos. It seemed gauche to sit at a table, but there didn't seem like there was anything else to do. So I left for a few minutes, going down to the parking lot to let the dogs run around. Eleanor almost committed suicide by leaping in front of Jenny Brown's truck when she rolled in from Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. At some point in the meal, I did manage to crawl out of the shell of awkwardness that seemed to have solidified around me, a consequence of so many unpleasant hours battling computers in the area's prisons.
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