S.KRAUSE

Bitter Banalities

It was a dark and cloudy Saturday: And I was sitting in my apartment for lack of anything better to do. I did very little last night, due to Kim's car being hit in a hit-and-run. As a side note: 100, 105, 123—the bad bowling scores from a few weeks ago.

Today's activities included numerous chats on ICQ. While this is not noteworthy in any particular way, I felt that—given that I am pretty bored right now—I would post a bit of information regarding these chats.

First I was contact by “Sally” (57562882) again, who is from Ireland. I had (accidentally) deleted her from my contact list, and had to re-add her. Yesterday I managed to clean up my contact list a bit—I had a bunch of people on there whom I have not spoken to for quite a while. While chatting with Sally, I managed to update my FAQ a bit (just added links to the table of contents) and add a few entries to the Favorites page. All in all, a productive as well as a enjoyable chat.

At the same time as I was chatting with Sally, I was contacted by “Serendipity” (63854672), a 19-year old rower from Johannesburg, South Africa. I chat with very few people from South Africa; more from New Zealand and Australia, and the majority are Canadians and Americans. Sometimes more of the former. I just find this amusing because I used to have quite a few friends from S.A. Ah, how times change.

Serendipity eventually found her way onto my contact list. Two other people contacted me today on ICQ; “Alison” (65047363) and “blondegirl” (19953306). The former simply said “hi” and asked “ok, where are you from” before asking for a chat session. So be it. Needless to say, our chat did not last long. This 25-year old bank-something-or-other from CT enjoys watching TV and movies, and traveling (something she has not really done much, due to lack of money and time). Her favorite music is alternative and techno dance music, and she is really into Depeche Mode. Enough of Alison. “blondgirl,” a 20-year old college student from “bum fuck egypt” goes to school at Western Illinois University and lives in an all-girls dorm with her best friend, who was signified as ‘bf’, but should not be confused with ‘boy friend’. Her bf needed to get off her lazy ass; she was taking a nap “for god knows what reason,” and “blondegirl” wanted to eat and decide on a movie to watch.

During all of this, I also managed to get an old paper for Berghahn HTML-ized. Good for me. A few words were exchanged with Mr. Manies earlier in the day; Merryl popped online for a few seconds, but promptly left without saying hello. I have kept enough ICQ chats and message logs as text files that I really need to go through and figure out what to archive, and how. Perhaps that will be my next task for this evening.

—February 26, 2000

Katie: [May 12, 1986 - March 7, 2000]

—March 7, 2000

Side-splitting laughter: On Friday evening Di provided Kim and me with an opportunity for laughter; the result was a headache, since we laughed so hard. As Di made her approach, she dropped her ball behind her; she is right-handed and it ended up in the far gutter of the lane to our left. Having almost no momentum, it took 10–15 seconds to reach its destination.

Earlier in the evening Laura, Jürgen and Kristin (Jürgen's wife) were also with us. My results were not particularly remarkable: 102, 104, 120, 101. I started out with a few horrible balls, and in one game I threw gutter balls three frames in a row. However, in the 3rd game, I managed to finish with a spare, a strike and another spare.

We eventually made our way home; I got online to check email and news, but got caught up in a conversation with someone I had only seen a few times online. I had long since deleted her from my contact list, so receiving a message from her was a bit of a surprise; the topic of the conversation was interesting, though: the movive “The Matrix.” She had just seen it and wished to discuss it because, as she said, “well i just saw it tonight and i don't think i ‘understood’ it. i think it has to do a lot with [sic] buddism, eh?” (yes, this conversation partner lives in Canada). Recounting this long conversation is not the point of this entry (since I happen to have that chat saved elsewhere), so suffice it to say that I did not get to bed until after 2:30. So it was that I stayed in bed until about 11am, and missed this weekend's mini-conference at the Kade.

I have had a variety of other mildly interesting ICQ chats and conversations recently. One was just strange; strange enough that I will quote parts of it here now:

Anyway, on to other things. Yesterday was a busy day. After getting up, I went shopping; I was long overdue in buying groceries. Plus, I had to buy some things for dinner, since Christoph was coming over in the evening. In the afternoon I spent quite a bit of time online, but I also got some work done. In any case, Christofph showed up, I cooked dinner and we played Doom and Doom II until ... well ... I got to bed at about 9am this morning.

The result was that I did not get up until after 1pm. Springing forward also cost me an hour. Since then, I have gotten some work done, at least. I have also got two short to do lists completed; one for tonight, and one for the rest of the week. Off to work.

—April 2, 2000