Too Long

My will to blog seems, slowly, to be dying. Oh well.

Three things:

One: Wednesday is the two-year anniversary of my apartment building burning up. I had a scare last week: I woke up in the middle of the night to a smoke alarm going off, and my room filled with what appeared to be smoke. I opened the door from my bedroom out into my apartment and I couldn't see a thing—The whole room was filled with white. I was confused, didn't know what to do, wondered if the whole building was going up, and if I should try to go down the stairs or out the fire escape, what to grab, what to take ... then my mind starting piecing stuff together—the wet, the loud hissing noise; it wasn't a fire. The cap on the radiator in my living room had blown off, and the radiator was gushing steam into my apartment. So I ran downstairs and got my super and he shut off the boiler and we opened the windows and let the steam escape and eventually the pressure died and the gushing stopped and the next day he fixed it and none of my stuff was ruined. A bit of a scare, though. 1am smoke alarm wake-up calls aren't fun.

Two: Not sure if others of you have discovered this, but Gmail's search function can really ambush you. The problem? Nothing goes away, ever. So today, when I searched for the seemingly innocuous word "GPA," trying to discover if I'd written what my college GPA was anywhere in an email, Gmail dredged up an exchange between myself and an old girlfriend of mine, one who I'm not entirely over. Which of course led to me reading that email, and then more, and dots of water in my eyes. "Jesus Christ," I said, kind of having to laugh at it.

Three: Last week a friend of mine who's recently been experiencing some romantic relationship-based psychic pain related to me what his friend once told him about the pain of break-ups and lost loves. "The pain doesn't ever get any smaller," my friend's friend said. "You just get further away from it."

I like that, and I think it's very true. Only problem is when Gmail, in a flash on an unfairly cold March afternoon, finds some old bit of ocean-lost pain and holds up a funhouse passenger-side mirror to it: "Objects in the mirror appear closer than they actually are." And this will just go on, for the rest of your life—Think about it: If you stick with Gmail, theoretically you could be searching for some word 20 years down the road and instantly be tossed back into that old upheaval.