{"id":7519,"date":"2017-09-02T02:27:20","date_gmt":"2017-09-02T02:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=7519"},"modified":"2017-09-02T02:27:20","modified_gmt":"2017-09-02T02:27:20","slug":"discard-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2017\/09\/02\/discard-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Discard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\tDoing what I seldom do, which is discarding stuff I don&#8217;t need or forgot  I even had. Got all nostalgic about the boxes in which were shipped many  of the gadgets I&#8217;ve owned over the years. Packaging is seductive. Good  packaging, that is. Next step is to purge a few boxloads of those old  music magazines, the ones from the 1940s on.<\/p>\n<p>\nI got the PCMD100 after waiting here all day Tuesday for its  promised PRIORITY OVERNIGHT arrival. This time the delivery person did not  even try. A note in the online tracking said I was not present at 6:03pm.  How can they say that without having rung the doorbell? It\u2019s just a UPS  lie but I\u2019ll move on. I picked it up at the Strand Pharmacy.<\/p>\n<p>\nUnboxing the device I couldn\u2019t help but notice that it looked like it was  resting in a coffin. The sound of recordings on this thing seems  significantly better than the D50 right out of the box. I need to spend  more time with it, and I shall.<\/p>\n<p>\n&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\nAn old friend from the NYTimes called. I don\u2019t know if he\u2019s interested  in me or just wringing me for my ideas. Sounds like he anticipates moving  on from the Times, either voluntarily or not.<\/p>\n<p>\nI was not altogether understanding him but it sounds like he\u2019s considering  me as a personality profile or character study on the A&amp;E network  involving everything I have done with payphones over the years. He also  wants a confessional aspect to it all. That\u2019s weird because I guess I  never told him about Apology or how the culture there revolved around  payphones and the anonymity they were thought to provide.<\/p>\n<p>\nHe sounded depressed by much of the conversation. I told him about the  drinking and the ER and other bad shit that&#8217;s gone down. He sounded  depressed but not surprised. I think he was reading his questions from  notes he keeps on all his sources, to make it look like he actually  remembers all the things going on in my life when last we spoke maybe 4  years ago.<\/p>\n<p>\nI don\u2019t know where that\u2019s going but it was good to hear from him again. I  had wondered why he was absent from any new stories at the Times. He\u2019s on  book leave, writing about the piracy on the high seas that no government  seems able to control. It\u2019s going to be made into a movie starring \u2026 can\u2019t  think of his name, the dude from Titanic. Leonardo DiCaprio, who I saw in  passing is now banging Kate Winslet. Good for him, I guess. Like the rest  of us he of course already knew what she looked like naked.<\/p>\n<p>\n&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\nI spotted this woman I\u2019ve had a thing for for several months. I\u2019m am no  smooth operator by any estimate but assuming I had interest in even trying  there has been a fundamental problem: I cannot tell if she is 16 or 26.  She just has a youthful ambiguousness about her.  Interested enough to at least look it up I found, through the magic of  Facebook\u2019s unintended stalking tools, that she is most likely 20 or 21. I  figured this out by typing her first name and, without any other  bidding, it filled in her last name and up popped her picture. It  had to have helped that her first name is pretty distinctive, and that  Facebook defaults name searches to people they think are near you. I  knew her first name from seeing it on a store receipt.<\/p>\n<p>\nI guess her age by how she\u2019s a second year student at CUNY. 20 or 21 is too young for me. 26 is a stretch as well yet it might be  possible. But not 20 or 21. Not without some consummate magic, and  I think I\u2019m too old for that.<\/p>\n<p>\nShe exudes a great attitude about life, though. That\u2019s what had me  thinking things\u2026 That positive energy.<\/p>\n<p>\nWhat happened was I saw her ambling up 21st Street, toward 31st Avenue. I  had never seen her outside the context of the grocery store where she  works. She looked a lot different. Much better dressed and more adult  looking.<\/p>\n<p>\nAnyway, blahblahblah. I move on to having not even the remotest  prospects for romance. Yay.<\/p>\n<p>\n&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\nI worked some today and yesterday on getting .MOBI to mix it up and  get it on with the .COM, all of it moving over to Flaneur.NYC, a site I  first messed with 6 or 7 months ago and revisited this week. I like the  look but a lot of code and database cleanup is in order, as I discovered  today.<\/p>\n<p>\nTried to do authentic .MOBI today but the Wi\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Doing what I seldom do, which is discarding stuff I don&#8217;t need or forgot I even had. Got all nostalgic about the boxes in which were shipped many of the gadgets I&#8217;ve owned over the years. Packaging is seductive. Good packaging, that is. Next step is to purge a few boxloads of those old music [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-1Xh","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}