tales from an ordinary world

1999-12-02

Droo was laughing his head off in the office. "It's y2k, I'm telling you !" he joked. Our box (where this webpage lives) had gone down the afternoon before, because of a loss of power in the building where it lives...Then this morning apparently Monash Clayton and Glen Waverley lost power for a while. We couldn't even buy an ice-cream in Chapel St last night - the shop said "closed, no power" or something like that. So we went to Globe and had some insanely huge pieces of cake. Mavis tried bringing home the huge slice (or whatever it was) of chocolate that was tacked onto the side of the cake. I think it melted by the time we got all the way back to toorak road...

I hear it's illegal to buy a gas mask in Seattle now. Scary.

Dang. So Mavis called me a little earlier, saying her laptop's broken. "The dog ate it" (well, it ate the power cord or something). Argh. I guess I'll have to find something else to do at night when I'm home, for a while :-/ It's funny how you fall into these little routines so easily, and so quickly. And it's especially...I dunno...disappointing ? Annoying ? Whatever. Because I'm at that intensely curious stage, where I want to know everything about my new friend. It's one of those things that keeps me going in life - wondering what makes people tick. What keeps them going. Why they wake up in the morning. What they want to do with their lives...I want to know all this about people. I'm not after the profound, award-winning tear-jerking answers. I just want to know. And the most important thing is that it comes from their hearts, and not their heads.

Now hold that thought - that least sentence up there. If that's so important to me, then consider what I tend to do when I'm Listening to a friend (by Listening, I mean, providing an ear to bend, when they need someone to talk to) - I tend to fall back on logic. Maybe not quite all the time, but do tend to counter their "what am I going to do ?"-type questions with a (fairly) logical answer. The heart versus the head. The eternal battle. But even when I am taking the side of logic, I still take in the emotion. It churns about inside me for days or weeks afterwards. Worrying about my friend's problems. And not, of course, in the same way that they worry about them, but in whatever way I perceive their problems. The weight of the world (or some imagined one) on my shoulders. Ouch.

Of course, I don't claim to be the only person like this. Far from it. You can tell who we are by that slightly pained slouch, hidden behind an attempted kind smile.

Yow. I feel like that guy in the toothbrush ad with the fliptop head. Open it up and pour all the words out...