\t\t\t\tSuddenly I say good-bye to a host of things. A whirlwind of a day, all for
\nthe best interests of all involved.<\/p>\n
To start, I ended a 5 or 6 month relationship-type-thingie with someone
\nwho i know will be a friend for a long time to come. We had a good thing,
\nat times, but our lives, our lifestyles, our personalities, and our wants
\n& needs were simply too far apart to ever mesh. she seemed unhappy at
\nfirst, but later admitted that this was the right thing, and that there
\nwere just too many differences. I will never talk shit about her, as I
\nnever talk shit about any of my exes, and I hope she returns the courtesy.<\/p>\n
I later learend that my hottie ex who I dated for about a year and a half,
\nending in May of last year, is presently engaged, as of 2 weeks ago. I
\nam only happy for her, for she deserves only the best things,
\nand I only hope her man treats her with honor and respect. i am sad as
\nwell, not because I had any fantasies about rekindling our romance but
\nbecause I imagine that the cultural climate in which she lives will make
\nit impossible for us to maintain a friendship. In fact, tonight may have
\nbeen the last time we ever speak. I honestly believe that may be true. now
\nour chats include reference to things we can’t do or talk about because
\n“he wouldn’t like that” and such allusions to the man in her life. i had
\nno delusions about maintaining anything more than quirky friendship
\nthings, but it looks like those all have to end now.<\/p>\n
she will always be special to me for so many reasons. she is, was, and
\nalways will be the first truly nice girl i ever dated. nice girls, they
\nare not so common. she will also always be special to me because of our
\nconnection to sorabji.com, this web site, and my mess of other web
\nsites that have evolved from my first web pages in 1994. she was 13 years
\nold when she first discovered these pages. we had no meaningful
\ncommunication whatsoever until about 12 years later, and when i was 40 i
\ndated that beautiful girl who was 25 and who knew more things about my web
\nsites than i did. it was the connection to my past, and to her youth and
\ndare i say her years of growing up with these web pages that made our time
\nso interesting and quirky to us both.<\/p>\n
in time the cultural divide made things impossible, and in later times i
\nhad some existential moments of emptiness concerning race, creeds,
\nnationalities, and cultures which abut each other in this town.<\/p>\n
but that’s another story. i guess i note her engagement more than my own
\nending of a brief episode, and again, not for any notions of romance, but
\nbecause the friendship must end.<\/p>\n
another thing to which i say goodbye this night is this laptop computer on
\nwhich i type these words. it has been a trusty conduit since late 2008,
\nthough i bought the thing at great expense in late 2005. repeated calls to
\nDell, and numerous visits to this apartment by Dell techs and repair
\npeople failed to fix the problem of this piece of shit sounding like a
\nfucking vacuum cleaner any time i turned it on, and i don’t know when or
\nhow or what happened exactly to convince Dell that this thing was a piece
\nof shit but 3 years later, at the tail end of the warranty period, they
\nshipped the machine to the repair center and replaced pretty much
\neverything, mother board, hard drive, whatever those other cheap blobs of
\nplastic are called… and the thing worked great from then on, until
\nlately, when things are weird.<\/p>\n
but you see, part of the reason i ended it with the girl in the first
\nparagraph of this screed was that we decided to go to Vegas for a few
\nnights, on the occasion of her zero-ending birthday. everything
\nseemed go, we were talking about it with friends, when the next day she
\ndecided against it. she said it was too extravagant, it would be too hot
\nin the desert in August, and that only the infinitely wealthy just up and
\ngo to Vegas.<\/p>\n
basically, she didn’t want to go, which signalled to me that she just
\nwas not that much into me after all, but i had already taken a chunk of
\nmoney out of a mutual fund to have as a cushion for the excursion. we had
\nsaid we’d stay at the Aria but i was going to surprise her with the
\nBellagio, though evidently she thinks my money is bad, or thin, or that i
\nlive on food stamps, or something, because she just wouldn’t accept this
\ngift from me.<\/p>\n
the point being, not that this is interesting to anyone but myself, but
\nthat i had to do something with the chunk of money i got from the sale of
\nthat mutual fund (which was last Monday, by the way, the biggest trading
\nday of the year, whence i almost certainly took a sizable loss on the
\nsale, but that’s my problem, not anyone else’s). so i played the old shell
\ngame and moved the money around, waking up this morning to hit the buy
\nbutton on a phat new laptop, an ipod, some bose noise cancelling
\nheadphones, and some other shit, all of it 100% tax-deductible, possibly
\nbut probably not making up for the loss on the sale of that stupid mutual
\nfund.<\/p>\n
and so with a phat new laptop in the mail i bid farewell to this spindly,
\ncrinkly, wrinkly old Dell Inspiron 9300, sending it off to storage or at
\nleast to the closet. it still works, but it’s been twitchy, and the thing
\nwith its wrist indentations and coffee stains looks like a prop from
\na low-budget indie flick.<\/p>\n
the new laptop has a bigger screen, backlit keyboard, 1080p HD, and
\nobscure sexual favors. it seems strange to care about saying goodbye to a
\npiece of disposable technology like this Dell, but it has maintained a
\nconnection to my sentiments. i bought this Dell soon after my father died,
\nas a willful extravagance which i intended to bill to his estate, but
\nwhich i ended up paying for myself out of the money made from a completely
\nbogus web site development job.<\/p>\n
anyway, after the girlfriend, the ex-girlfriend, and the laptop i also say
\ngoodbye to AIM, which is kind of hard to believe, but evidently i am about
\nthe last person i know still using the dedicated, unintegrated AIM desktop
\nclient. time to move on, i suppose, or time to move out, but whatever the
\ncase on a day such as this i feel a little nostalgia for that feature-free
\npiece of once-ubiquitous software. i still use IRC at times, but AIM is
\nlooking like a dinosaur, even to me.<\/p>\n
and today i bade a vague farewell to my anonymity. a gentleman struck up a
\nperfectly legitimate conversation with me this afternoon, asking what i do
\nfor a living and why i use a netbook whilst sitting at a bar. conversation
\nspun this way and that and it turns out he tries to turn some coin
\nspitting out autoblogs, which i don’t really understand, but the principle
\nseems easy enough to fathom just from the name of the genre. sort of like
\nthe “automated content” option in PowerPoint, there are any number of ways
\nto spit out garbage content. with web sites the tactic is different
\nfrom PowerPoint in that drones hosted by hostnoc and amazonaws and any
\nnumber of other bad-bot-friendly hosting companies automagically
\nscrape nouns and nodes from legitimate web sites and coagulate them into
\nincomprehensible hematomata of keyword-frenzied text.<\/p>\n
in a nutshell, the guy i was talking to is the enemy of people like
\nmyself, whose livelihood is constanly being picked at by content scrapers
\nand harvesters.<\/p>\n
on the other hand, this fellow’s interest in my work started first from
\ncuriosity, then from the admission that he was making no money at the
\ncontent scam shell game. so i told him to look for one or the other of my
\nweb sites, trying to make it clear that there is nothing to be learned
\nfrom gazing on my properties, and everything to be learned by developing
\nyour own ideas and your own content, then monetizing it as appropriate. i
\nsaw his eyes light up a little bit when he saw that i had legitimate
\ncontent, and not scraped gobbledygook.<\/p>\n
it was a strange and naked encounter for me, who mostly imagines himself
\ninvisible, but who also always wondered what these content scraping
\nlinkfarmers look like. he wore a 70s-style “nyc” t-shirt.<\/p>\n
i said goodbye to other things this day. it all seemed like a
\nflummoxed parade. stomping through midtown manhattan delivering the
\nfollow-up break-up text messages, ignoring the stream of responses
\nfrom the new ex, and then retiring to these dismally familiar
\nquarters to find that i might be forcibly on a path to new places, new
\nthings, and new news.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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