I was yelling at my computer late last night. "All…
I was yelling at my computer late last night. “All I want you to do is work,” I ranted at the large beige box. “Surely the employment of hundreds of thousands of people, all working on the same thing over a decade, would result in something that would just fucking work, but no!” I was trying to install a fairly common Adobe product, but crash after crash left my room impaled with blue screen induced atmosphere. I gave up some time around 3 a.m. It was useless. I know that my computer could hear my raving, though, because one of those little “golden chests” popped up on my amazon.com page, and Lo! it was a special offer on a large steak knife. I think mapquest.com was trying to show directions to Bill Gates’ house, too.
This morning, for the first time, I considered switching to a Mac. I know it’s expensive, that I couldn’t play games on it, that it’s hard to upgrade, but really, I would so appreciate just having a computer that just. works. I would keep my PC, especially considering the money I’ve invested in it so far, but having a Mac dedicated to editing digital footage would be oh-so nice. It’s mighty tempting, I have to say. I’ve always worked on PCs, ever since my first IBM XT clone with 640K of memory in college. I was raised on the things, and the only time I ever worked on a Mac was when laying out pages at the newspaper. Mighty tempting also from an aesthetic perspective. I’d have to move into a larger apartment just to fit the thing in.
Smallpox Boy is still waltzing about the office. I know I’m not the only one here who never got any childhood diseases. If I catch anything from him at this point, he’s going out the window first (that is if I can get past the Vampires), and then this company’s going to give me a few months off with full pay, or everyone gets infected, I don’t care how. I’ll send it in a memo if I have to. I don’t know how much more of this job I can take in any case; I really need to find something else, preferably part-time editing work that pays enough to live on. Everyone says I should just teach English, but I’d rather save that for a last resort. Hopefully there will be something better available, like working at a betelnut stand (although I really don’t have the legs for it) or driving a taxi. Last night at after another radio interview we were sitting around chatting with the recording engineer, and he seemed to think I should trade as heavily as I could on the whiteness of my skin to acquire free housing, transportation, and even a wife. Funny guy.
It was raining quite hard this afternoon. The smell of lightning in the air was quite refreshing. I sat at a table outside at Warner Village and just watched it. It’s quite a sight, especially after so many months of drought. The forecast for tomorrow is more distressingly boring work while listening to the girl in the next cubicle clip her nails for so long she must have several dozen hands, and possibly some more rain.
I’m meeting Seamus and Dean after work at the martial arts store, where I plan to buy some more swords, not only a replacement Tai-chi sword for the one I broke, but some double-handed curved swords as well. No, I’m not off to Redmond; Seamus is going to teach us some double-sword techniques to go with the Five Animal styles.
