technical difficulties
Saturday 28 April 2007 | I like a cookie
Who was it who said, “A day when you work is a good day”—O’Keeffe? Woolf? Some other woman with an F in her last name? In contemporaneity, I propose an amendation: “A day when your DSL connection works is a good day.”
I spent an hour or so on the phone this morning with Earthlink’s “Raymond” (Ramesh?) going over the same things again and again. No, there is no stable sync light. Yes, the modem is as far from the computer as it can possibly be. Yes, I have tried a different cable. Yes, I have tried plugging the cable directly into the jack without the splitter. No, there is still no stable sync light. No, there is no PPoE active light. —Et cetera. Now I await a call from them in which someone will allegedly test the phone line itself. I tried supplicating Qwest but they could offer me no hookup until Earthlink removes me from their roster. “That would mean I have no connection for a while,” I remarked experimentally. The Southwestern-friendly middle-aged-sounding Qwest lady agreed that this was the case. Of course, I rarely have any connection now, so what’s the difference?
Also, Qwest won’t support my modem, which may be a useless piece of shite, in which case I will slyly get Earthlink to replace it before quitting their shores. In the meantime, I only seem able to connect in the middle of the night, and thus, now 6:15 am, it may be too late. I apologize for seeming so inert. I write and save the files, I just haven’t been posting, because posting requires looking over and over again at the teeth-gritting orange Earthlink screen that tells you nothing is working, as if you didn’t already know this.
Enough with the kvetching already. I’m somehow online, so I might as well share a tidbit of dialogue, and maybe even try to cough up a belated Friday Refrain. Tidbit first, from last night at the Vietnamese restaurant near the Brujo’s home.
The Brujo [winding noodles around his fork]: And when we live together in Phoenix—
Unnarrator [interrupts]: —Tempe.
Brujo [continues unperturbed]: —we’ll just sit around on the sofa complaining about how hot it is and watching movies.
Un: And eating ice cream. In our boxers.
Brujo: Actually we should start watching a lot of movies now.
Un: Why?
Brujo [pleased with his idea]: So that when we live together, neither of us can say, “All we do since we moved in together is watch movies.”
And in other amusements, whilst sleepless on Abilify (while Rozerem and Ambien seem useless) yesterday morning, I turned around the second corrected draft of the Dying Book to Herself. I offer visual proof of my labors; perhaps she won’t have too many more changes (we said optimistically), and the third draft will be the last. Ha ha! Ha ha! Ha ha! —Et cetera.
I have, by the way, nothing bad to say about Abilify, despite its reasonably debilitating you-will-never-ever-sleep-again side effect. In the last two weeks I have effortlessly and spontaneously taken showers, washed dishes, vacuumed the carpet, watered the plants and lugged them outside every day for sun, stopped eating every carb in arm’s reach and, perhaps most significantly, on Tuesday I took a walk. By myself. Without prodding. So this little blue oval atypical apparently does something for me. Or maybe it’s just almost May and I’m emerging from my sluggish winter psychomotor retardation? Maybe I’m hypomanic? Or am I just relieved not to have to drag myself around like a dead weight? Maybe sleep is overrated.
But high-speed Internet definitely isn’t. As I told more than one email correspondent today, if I can’t get my DSL connection working I may throw away my modem in favor of a tin can and a very long piece of string. I know you’re on the edge of your virtual seats; I’ll keep you (as it were) posted.
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