jesus saves, vishnu recycles.

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dateline: oZburg

23 august 1996 10:57 p.m.

So, how many of you have I lost to Hare? In case I'm not making myself clear, I'm gloating again: Macs rule. I mean, what's a virus? Okay, so I did have a run in with a virus just before I left SLIS. But it was Microsoft's fault. A momentary lapse of sanity inspired the higher-ups to try to upgrade to MSWord 6. (That reminds me... I got mail this week from a diarist who uses a sig boasting of a "Microsoft-free" computer... someday I will attain that level of purity). It only took two weeks before the Macs were crawling with "Concept," the only virus I've seen all year. Thing is, like most Mac bugs, this sucker didn't do much other than annoy the shit out of everyone. It turned every document into a template, which at worst made for some pretty confused folks in a packed lab. The Web Heals All. We downloaded a macro-virus-killing macro, ran it on all the machines, and voila, normalcy restored. After we uninstalled Word 6. Time shift. It's almost midnight. Right when I was going to whine about having a mind-numbingly boring day, my mom calls telling me she needs me to pick her up. She's been in an accident, she tells me. It was a strain to keep from getting hysterical, 'til I stopped asking stupid questions and let her explain. Absurdly, her statements were perfectly punctuated with the 'ding' of the bell at the service station she was calling from. She bumped another car on the freeway, nothing serious at all. Pulled over, apologized, then shrugged off the bitty scratch. The other lady drove off, but then mom's car wouldn't start. It was dark, she said, and she was too scared to open her door for fear of a passing bus tearing it off or something. Right before she panics, a "totally nice" cop stops and calls a tow-truck. The next thing she knows, she's at a Chevron in Kalihi -- not the friendliest neighborhood. So I make a dent of my own squeezing out of my spot (I don't know whether tourists or locals are worse at parallel parking) got lost in a neighborhood I used to have nightmares of being killed in, listened to a smelly mechanic explain a fuse to me like I was a ridiculously tall 5-year-old, and burned half a tank of gas racing up to Mililani to deliver mom... and about five tons of groceries she'd neglected to mention. ("Big car," someone once observed. "How many gallons to the mile?") So, mom and I caught up a little. I subjected her to her first "X Files" -- she covered her eyes at least seven times, and it wasn't really that gory an episode. I was soundly fed "real" food, even forced to consume vegetable matter. Dinner was topped off with some melted Dove bars. Finally, I got twenty bucks jammed into my pocket for "whatever," and headed home. I got a speeding ticket. Worse, I got nabbed by the airport, a curved stretch of highway so well known for lurking cops that most traffic instinctively slows down going into it. My speedometer doesn't work. No, really. Not well at least. When I'm going any faster than 35 or so, the little needle starts wiggling. And I don't mean a faint jiggle, or an occasional twitch. I'm talking nothing short of a wag, each sway accompanied by a stacatto squeak (and I know what's wrong, I'm just too lazy to do anything about it). So, when I'm driving, I don't know exactly how fast I'm going. Instead, the gauge gives me a general range. I guesstimate. So, no, I didn't know I was going 67 miles per hour. But, I did know that I was somewhere between 62 and 73... Now I'm sitting here wondering. Wondering if the stern, red-eyed cop that got me, the cop who looked weirded out when he saw my license (and old address and last name), was the same "totally nice" cop that saved mommy. He wasn't that nice. I had some better adjectives for him. I registered. Thirteen credits, for an unjustified $1,210. Classes every day, but none after 12:30 in the afternoon so I can keep some decent hours at the hospital. No classes I'm sure I'm going to keep, either, except Hawaiian. I bumped into Wayne, my one-time rope trainer, at the bookstore. The psycho's taking Latin. I'll gladly get into any good argument over the future of the Hawaiian language. Is the recent revival just a fad or a serious turnaround for the study of the native culture? Hard to say. Latin is another story. Now that's a dead language. (Before I get flamed: I know Latin is vital to study the classics and to understand the roots of most languages. But Wayne said he's just taking it because it meets only three times a week instead of five.) And now, Hawaii OnLine keeps dropping my connection. I'm giving up, as of 2:11 a.m. on what is now Saturday, on trying put this up. Gods, I miss my (free) webspace at satanic.org. If only I could help 'em get it into anything faster than that overworked 486...