Tag Archives: Nerdery

I took the advice of Hollyrhea (by the way, you people with your comments . . . I am just a blank canvas for your brainy brushtrokes), and I went a-huntin’ for adhesivelike things to fix my broken, nasty, Hobbity thumbnail. All the drug stores had were acres of Working Girl-y glue-on nails. Which reminds me of a lesbian cartoon:

From Kris Kovick’s What I Love about Lesbian Politics Is Arguing with People I Agree With. Now the phrase “check her nails” can be a part of your secret vocabulary, too! Rev up your gaydar!

My point — and I do have one — is that I finally went to a beauty supply store and found Crack Attacker. “Instant repair bandages for cracked and split nails.” I don’t even know how to make this funnier than it already is. Crack Attacker has attacked my crack so well that I’ve forgotten it’s even there, which is my test for how well something is working. Other things that I take for granted so they must be doing fine: my husband, my car, my cat, my tattoo, most of my body except for my knees occasionally, and all my invisible friends. Things that need constant hand-holding in a needy, low-self-esteem way: my computer, my hair, and my brain after reading the newspaper yesterday — I really don’t need to choke up anymore, thanks, I’ll go back to repressing my anger and fear into a nice little tumor, if you don’t mind.

I’ve been banished to a cold, windowless cell in Mac OS 10.2 upgrade hell. It took me twenty-four hours to reestablish my Internet connection (two calls to customer support and one technician stuffing himself under my desk — not sexy, really). All the expensive-to-replace software I borrowed from my old job (Quark, Photoshop, Microsoft Office) has vanished. I can’t seem to pick up mail, either, which makes me crazy, and to top it all off hundreds of e-mail addresses went poof.

But the desktop looks really neat!

I know a guy who’s a doctor who says that amnesia is nothing like you see on TV. No matter how much people forget — their children, their spouse, their address, their job — they always remember their name.

I love people whose Web personae involve the suffix “-pants.”

Joe’s computer recently generated these Mac Prose gems:

So vertiginous a tale replied, but his boat — loss against models — was my cloud.

The vocation is sound.

Before anybody was so grave a tsunami, to emerge was sin.

I don’t know about the first one, but the second one is like having a computer that makes fortune cookies. Bill, my old boss from Shakespeare & Co., had an I Ching program on his computer. It would play the sound of running water and tell you to meditate, then you’d hit the spacebar when you felt the moment was “right” and you’d get an I Ching reading. (Why weren’t we working?) Personally, I don’t think it’s any weirder than actually throwing the coins yourself or reading tarot cards or whatever. These divination methods have an uncanny way of describing the present, in my experience, though I wouldn’t depend on them to tell the future. Facade.com offers readings for free, including some really interesting stuff like bibliomancy (opening a page of the Bible at random and applying the first verse at the top of the left-hand page to your current situation), as well as runes and a virtual floaty pen that tilts to “yes” or “no” for those in need of a quick answer.