23 june 1998
missed signals
was that you in the fog?

Word for the day

Internecine
1 : marked by slaughter : DEADLY; especially : mutually destructive
2 : of, relating to, or involving conflict within a group <bitter internecine feuds>

Running news:
Slept in.


I went out to the airport last night to get Darin. I had other drivers banging on the window of my car and yelling at me to move, I had the cops threatening me with tickets. What I did not have was Darin.
    INT. DIANE'S CAR - NIGHT
    
    The phone RINGS.
    
            DARIN (ON PHONE)
        Where are you?
        
            DIANE
        Under the Northwest sign.
        
            DARIN (ON PHONE)
        So am I.
    
    Beat.
    
            DARIN (ON PHONE)
        We're at different terminals.

He was at Terminal 3, despite the fact that his ticket had said Terminal 2 and he landed at Terminal 2. His luggage landed at Terminal 3, so that's where he was.

Not a great way to start off our reunion. But it got better. Well, we went home and went to sleep, which we were both pretty interested in at that point.

Darin told me that my sister-in-law Lauren--

(Now, is she my sister-in-law if she's married to my brother-in-law? Wouldn't that mean that my brother-in-law is married to my sister-in-law and quite a few laws of God and man, even in states like Arkansas and Oklahoma, have been broken?)

--had to stop reading this journal. Not because I say anything about her (you've probably never seen her name before) but because she was getting too involved, tuning in every day as if to a soap opera. She had to quit cold-turkey.

"Wow," I said. "Imagine if I had one of those journals where there's continual sturm-und-drang."

"Imagine," Darin said.

There's more than enough sturm-und-drang out there if you need it. Internecine journal warfare is one of those things that is right up there with death-and-taxes. In the past, you had to wait until the person keeping the journal died before finding out that she was saying the same thing about you that you were saying about her.

Nowadays, you just have to wait for your modem to connect to your ISP's modem.

I point no fingers; I've done the internecine warfare thing.

(Haven't you always wanted to know what internecine meant? I've used it quite a bit and was never sure. Thank God for Webster's Online.)

Gus is right: these flare-ups make us seem more like a community. We're a group! We have factions! We have common goals and non-common ways of achieving them!

I think there's more to it than that. If others take note of the fight, then your fight is important, and if they're talking about the fight, they're talking about you. And getting others to talk about you is one of the main raisons d'etre of our society. Admit it; embrace your inner narcissism. It's just a wee bit about being the alpha male.

And as with everything else, if you can walk the walk, talk the talk. Go for it.

Since I had to go to Gus's journal to find pointers to the relevant entries to find out just what the fuck was going on, I am not in the center of things. I have, perhaps, become irrelevant.

Maybe Ceej and I could start something. But we'll have to wait 3 or 4 months, because these things come and go every 3 or 4 months. How 'bout it, Ceej?

Today I took the car into the dealer to get the verdammt "Check Engine" light turned off. Some problem with the O2 emissions. Oops.


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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
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