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february 22, 2001.This sucks. Last night I tried to download a new version of Cute FTP so that I can get my silly entries out to my 3 adoring fans...and my computer crashed. And refused to reboot. And refused to reboot. And refused to reboot. I really don't want to think about reformatting my disk drive - a hell of a lot of school stuff is on that hard drive, irreplaceable stuff. Not to mention a couple of chapters of the Boy's novel. Oh Christ, I never even thought about that last night. At least my husband isn't usually the scream-and-blame type. Unlike my parents, that is. There are so many stupid things in a computer to go wrong. I got lulled by the apparent simplicity of this new computer age and this is my return. Fuck.
Guy At Bar A Little Too Into Stevie Ray Vaughan: I laughed out loud when I read this...although the sad thing is that I knew most of those biographical details already. Yeah.
"Dad, start making sense or we'll put you in a home!" Tonight I went to 2 senior citizens' homes to assist at Vespers. Very very very new experience for me, on several levels. For instance: no matter how nicely they're decorated, nursing homes smell like hospitals. This isn't a revelation for most people, I know. I'm one of the statistically few North Americans who hasn't seen their kin bundled off to a home: one and a half sets of grandparents died mentally and physically able until the end, the other set is still chain-smoking and refusing to wear seatbelts. (It's kind of strange when you're in your mid-twenties and your three-score & fifteen grandparents are living a riskier life than you are. Time to go smoke hash from the car's cigarette lighter.) The nursing homes in this town are linked and quite ingenious in design. One complex is for elderly people who just need a little help remembering their medication and so forth (people who don't have any serious problems staying alive; people who, in a saner age, would be living with their adult children as a valued member of the family.) The other complex is for the people who are considerably less able - confined to wheelchairs, generally unresponsive, etc. 7 weeks of inclusion philosophy has taught me not to assume that any of these characteristics mean that the people shouldn't be valued - thought-crime! thought-crime! - but it certainly makes you wonder what exactly they're getting out of the Vespers experience. The Boy's highschool band once played a local hospital, and he found himself wondering how many people would leave if they weren't in full body casts. Anyhoo. It was an unsettling night for me, because I didn't know how to act. I didn't know when to go forward and help them to find hymns. I didn't know what to think of the man who hummed gutturally with every breath. I didn't know the hymns, yet I felt obligated to blare along with Rev. Robyn since nobody else was singing. And then there are my general personality weaknesses: I'm really bad at starting small talk with strangers, which is a definite hindrance in these situations. I wonder if they interpreted my embarrassed silence as snobbish endurance - you know, mentally wishing for more glamorous ways to show my devotion to the Lord. I hope not, because that was the furthest thing from my mind. I went because my committee asked me to, and because it's something I should do. Really, what kind of person refuses to go to a nursing home? I knew that it would be hard. I guess I thought of it as a character-building exercise. Well. Next time I'll do better. And yet, I do not have Preacher's problems. When he administers communion in nursing homes, he sometimes has to consume partially chewed wafers given to people too out of it to swallow. ewwwwww. Like I said, he has a range of problems that I've never dreamed of. |
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