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1999-12-23 - 22:35:54
hi, my name is billy ray. welcome to dogsolitude.
my girlfriend said i should do this. i guess she's right.
I was gonna do the no caps thing, but not only was it too pretentious (I am not e.e. cummings!), but I'm too used to typing with caps.
She says that diaryland is a "scene". That it's part of some new Internet "scene". Eh.
I guess I wanna do it for a couple of reasons. One, they say writing how you feel helps you to organize your thoughts and work through difficulties. So there's a reason.
The other reason is, well, my girlfriend (though that hardly seems an adequate descriptor for our relationship), she has a page here, and, well, I read hers every day, practically. I guess it sort of gives me an insight into how she's feeling. I guess rather than sit around the house after work complaining about how work sucks, she sorta gets it out online.
Hmmm, could Diaryland become a sort of couples therapy? Better patent that Andrew, before Amazon does!
About me:
I work for a small, but prestigious Midwestern university.
I'm a geek wannabe. That is, I live and breath computers, technology, science fiction, comics. But I'm not deep enough into to any of them to warrant a pocket protector.
In high school I was an underacheiver, but boy I could blast 'em on those standardized tests. I didn't like the smart kids, wasn't a jock. I was what in our parlance at the time was referred to as a "burn out" The thing is, to some degree, I had a certain amount of contempt for my "freak" breathren. I thought they were for the most part, pretty dumb.
I've read science fiction since I could read anything at all. I got that from my mom. I used to read her cast off paperback sci-fi novels.
But when I joined the "Science Fiction Club" in high school, I thought the other kids were nerds (which they probably were). They had that typical hostile nerd attention to minutiae, typified by a rabid verbal attack should you miss some important detail IN ANYTHING (that they knew about). You may be familiar with this behavior on USENET. It's called (Dr. Evil impersonation) "flaming"
So anyway, I thought great, here I can talk to these guys about all those great concepts that get discussed in Sci-fi novels. We can loan each other books (here's some forshadowing).
So about the third meeting, I bring back the book I had borrowed from "Sally".
"You cracked the binding!", she said.
"Huh?"
"Look at the creases here on the spine of the book!", she shows the book to the others.
You shoulda seen 'em. Did I really have leprosy?
"You can never borrow one of my books again", Sally said, "You should bend back the pages when you read a paperback book."
(Dr. Evil impersonation) Riiiggghht.
A paperback book!!? Look, I'm as much a bibliophile as the next guy, but I'm not gonna treat a paperback novel with much respect. They're designed to be portable immersive worlds. How can I immerse myself if I'm worried about getting my Italian loafers wet?
That little incident, and an episode in which we gathered out on the tennis courts for an impromptu performance of Scarborough Fair ended that little association, I can tell you! Future (and for all I knew, current at the time, and probably currently) Star Trek conventioneers, AND BAND NERDS!? Yikes.
Well, enough about me now. There's ever so much to tell, and not much time right now.
Tomorrow it's off to the hinterlands of Northern Ohio for a Mid-western family Christmas celebration.
Bye-bye now. Happy Holidays.
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So, how do you like them apples?