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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| ...currently addicted to my lovely, lovely sudoku widget.
good fun. 1/100th of the time and resources committment of a game of sims. | | |
| fooey on hotmaili keep an old hotmail account. it used to be my main one, back in the early days of my internet life, and was a bit of a gangster situation because it was just my-name-at-hotmail, which clearly signified that i was ahead of the curve with getting email addresses, wasn't i? no "my-name-plus-zip-code" or "name-plus-year-of-graduation" hotmail address for me, dammit. i am vanguard nerd. i am O.G. emailer. who runs this hotmail world, beeyotch? honeychild does.
over time, of course, it became clogged with spam and useless, and besides in the interim i had gotten a yahoo address (way more storage; i used it to sign up to mailing lists i'd likely never read), built my own website and had my own domain-based address (way more fancy, even almost professional; it became my main address) and even most recently, gotten a gmail account (another moment of not being able to resist the uber nerdy chic since i got it super early when it was invite-only) (and yes, i know this matters to no one other than me, and only in that secret cyber place in my heart that is vain about my tech prowess. but don't worry because really, that's not what matters. it's how you USE it.)
so, the hotmail had become mainly a place to let myspace send its constant friend request emails, and it sat there collecting mailing lists i no longer read but feel nostalgic enough about to not unsubscribe from.
it also housed like, 10 years or so of my early internet communication history. if i ever wanted to chronicle the trajectory of certain relationships, revisit correspondence between myself and my sister when one or the other of us was living abroad, refresh for myself just exactly why my various exes are just that - i was secure in the knowledge that the historical effluvia was archived there for my personal posterity.
and then.
i go to login one time to doublecheck an amazon order status, and those bastards had dismantled my account! there was a screen where i had to reactivate it, and they tried to play like it was just some routine maintenance shit b/c i hadn't logged in in 30 days or whatever... and so i click the button that said, "yeah, assholes, i DO want this account, what kind of jerks are you guys anyway?"
and when i get in, i see that the entire history was wiped clean.
brand new.
inbox at zero.
spitwads. | | |
| time traveling my clock has been all backwards, all week.
after days of sleeping 4-10ish am, i collapsed last night at about 7 or so. slept until 2. had about an hour with the hubster being inexplicably giddy in love with me and then he fell asleep. i tried to work for a little while but then the siren song of his sleepingness called me and i joined him in bed. i was naked. he was warm. i wasn't tired at all, and so i read... a novel i'd bought months ago at the overstock/remainders bookstore and never gotten into, although i'd tried. it's called the time traveler's wife and at some point i'd gotten past what was, to me, an underwhelming opening and gotten myself hooked. it turned out to be kind of science-fictiony in a leguinian sort of way - in that an impossible situation is assumed, and then left out of the mix almost entirely while the story actually concentrates on how this impossibility would effect the people in the story.
this one is a love story. it's about a couple, the man of which has a genetic disorder which causes him to become chronologically displaced now and then. forward, backward. and the kinds of relationships he has with his wife, his friends, his doctor, his family, and his own past as a result. it was neat.
by the end of it, early this morning, i was sobbing quietly in the bed beside my sleeping husband, watching his closed eyes like they held secrets, inhaling the aroma of his skin like it was an eternal balm. (if he woke up, he would have found me as giddy about him as he was about me, after my nap. what is it, about watching your beloved sleep?)
the book ended with the husband's death, with the elderly wife waiting for her husband, 40 years dead, to show up visiting one last time, from a time somewhere in his past. i was thinking about mortality, about loss, about the incredible presence of my husband here, and now. i have read or been told, that statistically men whose wives die typically don't last for too many more years; while women whose husbands die often enter into another flowering stage of their lives, take up hang gliding or what have you. of course, this is gross generalization. but that it was said, made me wonder. what takes the husbands? loneliness? loss? the horror of having to do their own laundry? women, it is also said, may be more practiced at handling pain. we learn from cramps when we are barely out of childhood that it will come and it will go, that its arrival and departure are equally consistent, that it can be borne.
i am painfully happy, and have been, with this man, for - oh wow, coming up on 8 yrs now. our 7th wedding anniversary is happening sometime this month as a matter of fact; in late july sometime it will be the 8th year since we met. my contentment is blinding. i am aware that no such state is eternal, that death will take us each, all, eventually. that in the meantime there is also the risk of complacency. betrayal. dissatisfaction. these second set of risks are not something i feel or believe as real, but i understand as potentials i feel i must acknowledge, like nuclear war or the sun exploding, because it is possible on a theoretical level. till death do us part, but 50% of the time, no, it happens sooner. it's sad, to see the marriages of our friends falling apart around us. people's ill-matchedness, disparate expectations, unfortunate choices, coming to horrific conclusions left and right. there is hopefulness, too, in the face of it. people get married just as often as they get divorced. it all seems like a blur around us, like roses blooming, dying, around the sequoia tree that our relationship feels like in comparison. people's wonderment, watching us, is heartbreaking.
i took myself downstairs and began to work, with a woody allen movie on in the background, letting its emotional nihilism lull me out of my sharpened state of vulnerability.
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| a brilliant black and white moth followed me inside today. i had gone out onto the back porch with a citronella candle to read a bit and smoke the last of the clove cigarettes that margie left me. i was drinking the glass of water i'd poured and forgotten to take outside with me when i saw it. it fluttered for a long loopy moment, looking grey and blurred with speed, then alighted on the ceiling, totally still, highlighting its rectangularity, its wingspan, its stark patterning and poise for me to see. for all i know, it is still there.
where do stranded moths go to die? i notice them fluttering, see them flirting with the lightbulbs, pity them banging themselves against windows or mirrors in misguided attempts to get outdoors. i hardly ever see them dead. do they make it outside again? how? do they commit hari-kari down the toilets? do they crawl, defeated, into dark corners to decompose with dry dignity? are they caught by the spiders that i do not kill?
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| wowza.today i logged in for the first time in over eighteen months. on a whim. and to make a comment on THRYIO's blog. also a whim. on another whim (hey, it was a whimsical kind of night) i looked at my homepage, and saw the following message:
Hi honeychild! It's been 1798 (wow, that's a big number) days since you joined Xanga... won't you support us by going Premium?
wow, i said to myself. (and then wrote down)
that is a big number indeed.
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