STAYING CONNECTED

This blogger is old enough to remember when personal computers were only a dream. Same with cell-phones. Not that life was any better then, but it was different. The tail-end of the bell-bottom era. Quite frankly I do not remember those days with any great affection, though I will stoutly defend the glory of that bygone gilded age.

I still do not have a cell-phone. There is a landline to the phone underneath the table in the television room, which my equally Luddite apartment mate and I share.

The only calls I get are either for her, or people asking me for money.


"Please sir, the Peruvian Saw-toothed Butterfly only needs forty dollars to survive. If you don't contribute now, it will go extinct!"


Further conversation establishes that "butterfly" is a gross misnomer. It is actually more like a mutant piranha with wings. Or a clever stratagem to pay rent on an office near Modesto, modest salaries for five full time staff, and a very handsome emolument for a qualified director or not-for-profit socialite opportunist working in the charitable field.
Saw-toothed is apt, however.
And hungry.

My piles bleed for the Peruvian Saw-toothed Butterfly.
I will send it my thoughts and prayers.

In the past twelve months, I have received four phonecalls to me personally. One from my aunt in Canada. Two from my bank. And one from work.
My apartment mate receives a couple of calls a week from her sort-of-ex boyfriend. Sometimes she tells him not to call for a while. Not that she hates or dislikes him, or on the other hand still gets along with him. But they are both Asperger, much more than me, so they occasionally need someone they understand to talk to, and they think rather similarly. No offense to any Aspy's reading this, but it's like listening to two hyper-intelligent oysters describing the last bit of gravel they suctioned.

[My affliction is somewhat different. When certain people -- a very large number, in fact, make conversation, the thought running through my head is "please shut up". These are often very nice people, probably quite likable, charming even, to normal folks ("neuro typicals"), but anything more than a minute or two of their company does something.]

Neither her nor I have much of a social life, but we hardly use the telephone as a substitute. She has slightly more social-traction than I do -- that being aforementioned gravel talk, plus local living relatives -- but I doubt that either of us need much more than we get.

We're okay.





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