Yesterday I told Darin that I wanted to add the phrase
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX">The man's a god.
I wonder if anyone else knows about his programming abilities.
(That was a joke.)
I also got together with CJ yesterday so that we could figure out what the heck I was doing wrong on a web page where people should have been able to download stuff...but it either wasn't working or the file that it was downloading was garbled.
CJ looked at the HTML code on the page I'd put together.
"Diane," she said, "let's talk about file types. And the difference between binary and Mac binary."
I got a crash course in .hqx and the differences in uploading between Fetch and Anarchie. I learned a lot in the few minutes I stole from her playing WarCraft II. I always learn a lot from CJ. After all, she is the one who got me started on making a web page; send complaints to her.
"How do you learn all this stuff?" I asked.
"Trial and error. You try something, and when it doesn't work, you try something else."
Oh, fine, the rigorous method. I was hoping there was a book or soemething.
This morning I woke up early and went out to the living room to get mail, see if there were any new journal entries, check out Suck -- the usual morning routine (of the electronically addicted, that is). When Darin finally woke up I asked him if he wanted to go get some breakfast.
Neither of us ate very much yesterday. I still wasn't particularly hungry, but I'd a terrible session of nausea (the kind associated with my hiatal hernia) last night at about midnight, after I hadn't eaten anything all day. I had a sandwich and made myself eat it. Having food in my stomach seemed to calm it down some.
We went to the pancake place for breakfast and read a newspaper. Darin, surprisingly, turned to the Sports section and read about the Giants beating the Braves again. I read about the latest findings on TWA Flight 800. When I showed Darin a paragraph that described a particularly horrible scenario about what might have happened, he said, "Why are you showing me that? I don't want to read that." I said, "Just imagine what that must have been like, to be a passenger on board." He said, "I don't want to imagine it."
Darin is completely sane and I am fantasy-prone. Probably also why I'm a writer and he isn't. He reads a newspaper story and decides that he isn't interested; I read a newspaper story and start imagining what it must be like to see the front section of your plane disappear and know that those damn flotation devices aren't going to do you a damn bit of good. I get totally lost in scenarios of my own making.
We talked some about what kind of apartment I'll be looking for in LA. I only need an acceptable place, I said. I need a little bit of security, air conditioning, and a parking place. Everything else is negotiable. (Okay, no cockroaches or mice -- on the other hand, maybe having to deal with those on a regular basis would cure me of my squeamishness.) I am not looking for a "home". My home is with Darin, and he won't be with me. So I need a place to sleep and type and not much more.
After dropping him off at work I drove back here, to Coffee Society, and told myself to write something-anything-the first dreck that came to mind before I could do anything else, like play Escape Velocity. Carrot and stick. I respond very well to exterior pressures and structures. I wish it weren't so, but you can't change your innate design, I guess.
There's a topic I want to write about in here but I can't because I'm afraid. I want to write about the nature of friendship and why I want to come up with new words for different types of friends, when the word "friend" isn't descriptive enough. I just wrote two paragraphs about it but deleted them. Now I'm sitting here trying to pick out something to say out of the morass in my mind.
I'm seeing the person who has sparked my thoughts on this subject tomorrow, for lunch. I realize that I am hesitant to mention The Paperwork, even though God knows I haven't been very circumspect with anyone else. I want to write about him in here and not have to deal with the consequences of what I say.
This friend and I have known one another for over 10 years now and there's a lot of bullshit that's gone on between us. A lot of the bullshit has stemmed from my making nice in order to avoid confrontation -- a tendency I'm trying to get over, by the way, because conflict is necessary sometimes. It's better than swallowing my anger and smiling, the way I have most of my life.