and i wonder what of this
will have meaning for you
when you've left it all behind
I guess I'll even wonder
if you meant it
at the time
   -ani difranco

20 Jul 98: The apartment is mine. All mine. After twenty-seven years of living with someone else to some degree, be it my family as a child (I did have my own room, thank goodness. Perhaps I'm a bit territorial, but I cannot fathom sharing a bedroom with someone. The rest of the house is OK, but I need *my* space. This should not be confused with the kind of "space" certain types are talking about when they're bolting out the door, leaving you without even that satisfaction of seeing it hit them in ass as they go.), my doormates at MIT (I had a single all four years, but it wasn't my hair that I kept seeing in the drain.), my roommates at my apartment, or the guests at the hotels where I spend a lot of my time these days, (And no, I do not have a job as a call girl, thank you very much.) I am home alone. It is a wonderful feeling. I can do whatever I what, whenever I want. Before y'all come over here and get arrested for peering into my windows, let me assure you that I am not sitting around the house naked sipping umbrella drinks; I ran out of umbrellas ;-)

To my old roommates who may be reading this -it's not that I didn't enjoy your company, 'cause I did, it's just that I like this better. I mean, it's not like I'm in any danger of dying of old age and my body is just going to rot for months before someone finds me because I don't have a roommate.

Speaking of dying, I always wonder why people think it'd be so great to die in their sleep. The way I look at it, if you're living alone, you run the risk of turning into a skeleton before someone notices you're dead (Yes, I know many, many people live alone and have friends or relatives in close enough contact that this doesn't happen very often, but the thought still disturbs me, especially since in my peer group I tend to be the one who initiates the bulk of the contact.) and if you are living with someone, that person gets stuck with the task of finding your dead body. This may be fine if they're a mortician or someone else used to interacting with the deceased, but I gotta think this isn't the most pleasant of tasks for the person still living. Imagine it, if you will. Say you're married to someone for years and one morning you wake up to find him/her lying in bed next to you dead. How is that a good way to go? Good for you, maybe. Seems like a pretty damn selfish way to go if you ask me.

I honestly don't know what set that off. Just something I think about from time to time.

The power blows...Damn, is it quiet without electricity. No TV, no stereo, no hum of fans, no computer. (I used the old fashioned pen and paper for this part and typed it in later. Mercifully, my computer is OK.) Nothing from the neighbors, either, as if they were shut off, too. Given my neighbors, this is particularly amazing, since kids tend to get a bit nutsy when the lights go out, and the parents of the ones next door don't need much prompting to yell at the kids. I guess they're already asleep, which is good, since it was well after 11pm when the power went out. All I can hear is the sound of blood coursing through my head. Is it always this noisy? It sounds like a swing that's in dire need of some WD-40. Really annoying. [When I retold this story to my co-worker Bryan, he asked me if the noise sounded like seagulls. I told him yeah and he was reminded of something he saw on Doogie Howser. Some guy came in complaining that he heard seagulls and Doogie diagnosed him with some rare brain problem called Seagull's something or another. I'm not particularly worried.]