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11 A 33 (Harry Potter's birthday!) - 11:26 a.m. Interesting times...Later, from jail, Well. Now that I've had an object lesson in why one should always compose these things outside the diaryland text window (or, at least, save them to something else so one doesn't lose ten minutes' work down the memory hole forever when Diaryland tells one that it won't let one post, not that I'm, you know, COMPLETELY FUCKING BITTER or anything), let's see how much of it I can reconstruct from memory. Given that I couldn't quite construct the original events from memory right after they happened to me, this should be more fun than anyone should be legally obliged to have. So. Went out to get my hair cut. Got back, showered the trimmings off me, and got on the phone to my credit card company's magazine subscription office about two magazine subscriptions I could have sworn I'd cancelled, but which nonetheless showed up on my latest bill. Wound up talking to a machine [2], a machine which never gave me permission to talk to a human. I got one subscription cancelled okay, but not (as far as I could tell) the other. Oh, I cancelled all future billing, but it said I'd continue to receive Spin through next year. When I finally got to talk to a human -- well, I wound up having to call the credit card company's customer service department to get to talk to a live human. She was very polite, probably more so than I deserved (given my agitated condition), and she said that the magazine continuing through next year did not mean that the unwanted charge had not been cancelled. Confused the shit out of me, but there you are. "...we could always send a telegram to the Right People." Actually, a lot of things confuse the shit out of me. The world, for one. As I don't think I've mentioned, I seem to have Asperger's Syndrome, the specific form of autism found in geeks. For the first time, when I became agitated and couldn't discuss the magazine matter coherently with my kindly gray-haired mother, she threatened me with a disability judgment. Perhaps now CB understands why I felt so blithe about mentioning even bits of her mental state to my parents; they've seen my mental state, and they love me anyway. Perhaps, too, she now believes, no matter what she told Larissa the other night, that I'm serious when I say it's going to take a lot more than she, or even the one that's living her now [3], can do to alienate me. I've read her at her worst -- the breakdown, several suicide attempts -- and I'm still here. Because here is all I know how to be, for her. Especially now that we both know what we mean to each other. -30- [1] When I've calmed down again, I'll tell you about my local barber shop. I already got calmed down enough to write this the first time, but finding that all my work had been flushed quickly dispelled that calm. [2] Literally "talking to a machine"; it had voice recognition software. [3] A guru called Da Free John, cited by Robert Anton Wilson in his book Prometheus � last time, on The Slack Shack - our next inciting exstallment 
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