10 March, 1996 10:53:04 PM It's just been one of those weeks, I guess. Tonight, I got home about 5 hours later than expected, and had to postpone doing some things, and other things I'll just forget about altogether. And so it goes. It's times like these when I'm actually glad that I have no family or wife or kids to come home to, because I'd make such rotten company, and they would probably be giving me the dreaded Silent Treatment right about now. I had a cat for a while. I got a cat so I could create the illusion for myself that there was some "thing" to which I was coming home. But the cat got away, and I'd always felt bad about keeping that crazy thing in this tiny apartment. There are many ways by which you can get out of this apartment, and many other ways by which you can get trapped. Knowing how people would respond to this sulking of mine is the very reason I keep it all to myself. That monitor situation is finally resolved. I got a new one and the thang is a beaut. You can see a close-up of my eyeball. It's an .avi video, 200-something k, and is inspired by these, and also by Man Ray. Been reading stuff by George Bernard Shaw. I've been looking for a copy of "Why She Would Not" for months now, but with no luck. I finally gave in and bought something of his which is always in stock. "Major Barbara." It seems very rich. On page 1 of his introduction, however, he uses the phrase "by dint of." Any time I see that phrase in print I think of something my 10th grade English teacher said. He said "You will encounter the word 'dint' no more than 5 times in your entire life." He was very funny about it, and went on to say that the word itself was almost useless, and that it never appears anywhere except SAT tests. For a few years after that I kept track of the times I encountered that word. I wrote down the occurrence in a notebook, and after I had accumulated 5 citations of the word (this was in the middle of my freshman year of college) I fired off a long and cantankerous letter to that English teacher informing him of my findings; I included complete citations, right down to the line number of the pages they were on, and I asked him if this was it. was I done with life, having encountered the word "dint" more than 5 times? He never wrote back, and I never heard from him again. There were other things in that letter, but I can't recall what, and I'm too tired to make much of it right now.