Solitaire
Letters to no one are hard letters to write. No One can be lousy at prompting you speak on a topic, to disagree or concur or elaborate with you the next day, to say "You're only looking at this from one perspective. Look at it this way." It's hard to hold a conversation with No One. Which is what this journal feels like sometimes - letters to Nemo.
I've always thought that a one-sided epistolary novel would be a wonderful thing. I love the idea of having to infer what the other side of the letter-writing is saying. The most hilarious jokes are the ones that are not told outright. Do you remember Calvin and Hobbes? Remember The Noodle Incident? Remember how it was never spelled out, and never happened in any of the strips? Which made it all the more hilarious? Kind of like that. Except it's the whole other half of the story that's left to interpretation and inferential reading.
The thing about this journal is that it's no-sided. To me, it feels like I'm writing letters. (I notice a difference in myself from a few years ago. When doing a menial task, I'm writing in my head. I used to be writing a novel. Now I write letters.) It's hard to come up with stuff on my own. There isn't another half of the letters, the corresponding ones - they don't exist. Nemo's not too good at replying to his mail. This isn't the one sided look at things - it's the no-sided look at them. There isn't another half to infer.
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I have been spending exorbitant amounts of time online. I fully realize that this will not be possible next year. (Have I told this journal about my new years day? I must have. New Years Day is August 30th. I'm always, oh always, waiting for the calendar to revolve around me.) I also realize, though, that I'm probably spending so much time online because my home situation has been mildly unpleasant and stressful.
My eyes are quite swollen from staring at the computer screen. My typing has gone markedly downhill. The computer itself has been a frustration lately - software has been up and breaking, the scanner has been screwing up, and everything is so slow. The computer grinds and spits, tick tick ticks its way through photo editing, or just up and says "I've had it! Take your nefarious multi-tasking ways elsewhere! I'm not responding anymore!"
I'm itching to take my multi-tasking ways to the shiny new Dell that is hooked up in the living room. Before it is anything else (shiny, new, fast fast oh really goddamn fast) it is mine. My Own Computer. No sharing of space. No gunking it up with programs I didn't want or need or use. No one with the even vaguest right to snoop through my files, my correspondences, my pictures, my stuff.
I regret that it is hooked up, though. The new Dell has no modem, and so it's rendered useless to me right now. Essentially everything I use on a computer has to do with the internet. Even when I'm not connected - I'm editing photographs for their eventual placement on the internet, I'm writing letters to people who I know through the internet, I'm writing letters to No One for the journal.
Since I don't use it, my mother and my brother use it. Solitaire and Starcraft, respectively. At first, the Starcraft bothered me more. It was a more direct invasion of my space. He actually had to install that blasted game. It was my mother that got to me, though.
I stretched out on the white couch, five feet away from the computer but completely in the darkness. Some days The Rack, (you know - torture device?) sounds inviting. As though my spinal cord has been compacted and smushed short all day long, I only want to be stretched out in either direction. So I stretched, recumbent on the white couch, five feet from the computer.
My mother walked in, talking to herself, oblivious to me. "This heat is no good for my blood pressure," she said. She tapped at the mouse. The screen flicked on. Then she saw me, and I pleasantly snickered at her for talking to herself.
"You're so lucky you aren't addicted to solitaire," she said.
"I hate solitaire." I really do. I mean that.
"You're so unlucky you're addicted to." She paused. "Whatever it is you do." She meant online.
I wouldn't stand for that. I couldn't talk back or clarify (How dare she compare my time online to solitaire? How dare she call me unlucky? How dare she call it a fucking addiction? How dare she assume that it isn't because of her that I'm online for as long as I am?) but I wouldn't stay and listen to talk like that. I left the couch and stalked off. And sobbed into a phone with my girlfriend on the other end.
Out of this house out of this house out of this house, I can't wait to get out of this house.
2000-08-11, Solitaire
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