May 18 1998, Monday

J

erry Springer interviewed a 600 pound woman before a studio audience this morning. Her family was doing a piss poor job of acting as they woodenly shouted insults and obscenities at her. It was a freak show, plain and simple. Maybe next time he'll track down a two-headed redneck with a bearded lesbian daughter.

I

  spent much of my valuable time today in UVA's Olssen Hall catching up on self-imposed Internet responsibilities. It's times like today when the ergonomics of that place really get to ticking me off. The air conditioning runs full blast, blowing on me and all the other underdressed people, a completely unnecessary waste of fossil fuels. Then there's the height of the tables; it's a subtle thing, but they seem calculated to inflict carpal tunnel syndrome. And the edges of the desks (which cut across your wrists as you type) are like razor blades.

The Olssen Hall Macintoshes are PowerMacs running at 66 MHz, kind of slow in this day and age, but they're what I use to get my work online. The trouble is the hobbleware used to prevent - god forbid - viruses, software piracy, and lost files. As the machines boot up, they go out on the local network and retrieve files, restore various settings and such. This network fandango has always taken a long time, but now there's some glitch in the system and it takes about a half hour for them to boot up. Sometimes I just give up and use the PCs, which have none of these problems, though they are not superiour hardware. Perhaps UVA is just another angle of the big anti-Apple conspiracy.

I hadn't been online in a few days, and there was lots of real mail to go through. This one online journal person, Shelly, says she printed out the complete archives of the musings as a stack of paper fifteen inches tall. Doing so cost almost a hundred dollars in supplies; lucky thing she could do it at work.

T

he air is filled with the fragrance of flowers all of a sudden: May flowers, flowers high in the trees. Meanwhile, elsewhere in those trees, Wilbur the Cockatiel never decided to come back home and we've given up on him. Deya walks around with her little white rat on her shoulder in Wilbur's place, but it's just not the same.

In the evening it was Potato Night over at Wacky Jen's, but I was busy and didn't go. Deya tells me that a lot of money came for Johnny Boom Boom and he bought several bottles of booze. Deya and I were worried they'd all come over to Kappa Mutha Fucka to drink it and cause problems. This place is a disaster, impossible to keep clean with all the people hanging out and drinking all day.

But it's all going to end, my friends. The lease on this house runs out at 5pm on May 26th. At that point I'll be even more free than Wilbur the Cockatiel. I'll be staying at Nancy Firedrake's place in Maryland for the first third of June, house sitting while she's on vacation. But then it will probably be time for a road trip, all by myself, just me against the world. If you want me to swing by, send+me+your+phone+number,+driving+instructions+and+some+kind+of+address.

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