Personal

It’s raining again. That’s almost once every day this week.

My old house was a row home like this one is, but it was a slightly wider house and had a sizeable front porch/ The porch had an actual roof over it, not just a corrugated awning. For some reason Philadelphia had a lot of brief hail storms in the spring of my Junior year of high school, and as soon as i heard the hollow pelting of ice on the roof i would grab my notepad and a pencil and sit just inside my front door. Hail seemed to always come down at a slant, and it would reach far into the porch leaving me untouched by a margin of no more than a yard. I would just sit there until the hail stopped and melted away, writing. I want to have a porch again.

I realize that Netscape4 is a bit outdated at this point, but a very significant market share still utilizes it and i think it’s rather obnoxious to write a site that doesn’t support it at all. The two things that notably cause trouble are floating frames and style sheets. My two favourite frames sites are faery ring and the incomparable sky puddles. The former is compatible with Netscape, but stunning in MSIEX. Sky Puddles, however, is rather unreadable in Netscape, which means i use MSIEX at least three times every week to view it. The worst offender of all had been prolific.org, which was using shtml and just came up as a blank background on Netscape. For a whole week i figured that the woman behind it was on vacation, but when i saw her on the Power Blogger list the other day i investigated in MSIEX and found a whole site there! However, now this issue seems to have been fixed and i am merrily reading the page.

Meanwhile, did i unintentionally pillage the torrez.org‘s P.B. layout? I don’t think i did, but i feel more and more guilty every time i see his crisp white tables with their black borders. I took the table/border code from my old scribble layout, and i got the sidebar idea from Ezis. God knows i linked to Torrez plenty already, but please just go read his site again to appease my guilty conscience.

Does that story seem a little shallow to you? It does to me, but, of course, i lived through it so i know exactly how shallow it was. What fails to come through in the retelling of it is that was the first time something almost worked out. I was done having crushes on those beauty queen bitches who wouldn’t give me the time of day, and i thought i was mature enough to date someone. Of course, that wasn’t true, because i couldn’t take her off of my pedestal or climb up there myself. Still, the first time your heart gets broken for real isn’t any fun. And you’d think i’d know better by now…

fuck it. If people can’t deal with me using their names they can kindly ask me to replace them with a pseudonym. I promise not to slander anyone too bad (other than Viktor).

One of the most crucial crushes of my life came in the beginning of Sophomore year of high school. Her name was Juliana, and she was just cool. She was newly a Freshman, but had gone to Masterman for junior high as well, so i had seen her around the year before. She had amazing style, incredible taste in music, she was mature, and beautiful. I fell head over heels immediately, as is my course in life. She may have been oblivious at first, but soon she must have known since my every week hung precariously upon the one period where we both attended the same meeting.

Through some wrangling by my dedicated friends Juliana was invited to our friend’s massive yearly Halloween party (you’ll come to see that the week leading up to Halloween is rather crucial in my romantic life). I dressed simple as a doctor rather than as the stunning prostitute i was the year before, and set off to charm Juliana. I did a decent job, and in one heartstopping moment she admitted that she might actually go out with me

It was all downhill from there. Her evil evil evil meddling friend Emma poked and prodded at my fragile psyche until i awkwardly asked Juliana out the next week. Emma also managed to make sure Juliana didn’t meet me where we said we would, and accompanied us the whole night. The get together was aborted when Emma dragged Juliana away with her onto a bus. I was miserably let down, and promptly went home and cried to Gina on the phone. There were no other ‘dates.’

So there you go, the first of many huge let downs in my (non-existent) romantic life. Juliana and i went on to be fairly good friends, and she attended both a David Bowie concert and the Junior Prom with me. She just left town to go to college.

I still dislike Emma.

wow, i finally sat down and finished the legendary site map. Gasp in awe of my ultra-clunk use of html! And, now that i’ve worked on my site a bit, i can get back to wasting time in here.