strange doings in the southland.
4.2 miles, at least 1 of which was walked. At 8am this morning it was 80 degrees. Clearly, I have to start waking up earlier. Way earlier.
Summer's here.
Mais oui.
They stopped by the house at 10 Sunday morning. I see by a quick perusal of this very journal that the last time we saw them was over a year ago, for dinner. Wow. Darin hadn't even moved down here yet (though we had bought the house). We gave them the basic house tour--they loved it--and then we went to brunch at Paty's.
We discussed a lot of computer things that I didn't understand and some that I did (the need for backing up, for instance). Ali talked about his job at Apple some--it's more than a little ironic that a guy who was a die-hard Nexter and hated the Mac now works at Apple, but that's Silicon Valley for you--and then he told me that at lunch one day he met a guy who knew me.
DIANE
Oh yeah, that's probably Keith
S________. He reads my journal.
ALI
No. He doesn't know you. He
started work at Apple after you
left. He only knows the journal.
Okay, that's a little weird. I don't know why I continue to find it so weird, having done this for two years and continually running into people who already know a whole bunch about me because of this journal. If I continue to put up pictures of myself, people are going to recognize me too.
Yeesh.
Last week I walked out of Pane Dolce and saw one of those fish on the back of a car. Only this was a new fish.
You know of the fish. First, there was the Christian fish: inside the body of the fish is either the word "Jesus" or "INRI."
Then came the Darwin fish: just like the Christian fish, only with feet and the word "Darwin" inside the body.
Now is the new fish: a larger fish bearing the word "Truth" swallows a smaller Darwin fish.
Fish wars on the backsides of American bumpers. Who says we have no public dialogue these days.
I stayed up late--too late, in fact--last night to watch All The President's Men, which I know I've seen pieces of but I've never watched the whole thing all the way through.
You know what? It's a good movie. (My faith in William Goldman's powers is restored.)
You know what else? It's a movie that does a reasonable job of explaining why Watergate was such a nightmare. Yes, I know things were simplified and left out, but this isn't history, it's interpretation of events. And the fact that such a movie was made a mere 2 years after Nixon resigned--when everybody still knew the story; they'd been living this national nightmare for years--is amazing. That Oliver Stone could tell such a coherent tale.
And you know what else? As Darin so accurately pointed out, the paranoia so aptly depicted in this movie has been lifted, wholesale, for The X-Files. Only in All The President's Men the conspiracy is scarier, because it really was our government, really was flesh-and-blood men who were doing this. Making space aliens the culprits just makes it easier on everyone.
A couple of people wrote me, on the same day last week, using the same subject line ("Going and going"), to tell me they were eligible for inclusion in my list of journals that have been going for a year. I duly added them. Congrats. Keeping an online journal for a year is impressive. When's the last time you did anything--anything not ruled by autonomic functioning, that is--for a year?
As I looked through the Year Old list though, I realized that it was terribly out of date--several of the journals had changed names, some had stopped (like Ophelia Z's), and I'm sure there are a ton out there that aren't on the list. I ran a BBedit extension that checks URLs for you, to see if the ones that were there were still good, and it found a few diaries that are no longer among the living.
But then I discovered that BBedit was finding pages that were still extant, even though the journals were toast, so I went through the whole thing by hand and weeded. There were a lot of journals on that page
There are many fewer now. The ones I took out I put at the bottom, in the "Journals that are no more" section. This made me kind of sad. I don't know why. Things change, people change, journals stop. One day I ain't going to be doing this either. (Don't faint.) But I'm one of these people who always wants to know, How did the story turn out?
So what happened? Did you find true love? Did you get the job of your dreams? Did you dump that a-hole and find someone who will treat you right? Did you wake up and smell the coffee already?
We don't get to find out. For ourselves, for anyone else.
Hey Ceej! Your, uh, cat, um, is, like, red. And he has a fuzzy tail.
This is not at all as easy as some of our compatriots make it look.
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Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com