Tuesday, 12 August 2003 | Living alone

You can have people over whenever you like; you're not going to disturb anyone. Listen to whatever you want, on repeat, if that's your thing. Decorate the place with your own cheap furniture and wall art, and decorate the floor with clothing when you're feeling lazy. Wash the dishes, or not; everything will remain as you left it. (No one is going to surprise you with a sink full or dirty [or full of clean].) Take a shower with the door open. Manipulate the temperature as you wish. Your phone conversations will be completely private, and the call is always for you. Or you can choose not to talk at all.

Use most of your strength to open that can of tomato sauce, ignoring your pesky, screaming wrist. Carry all of your groceries up the stairs, clean up after yourself, change that light bulb, and pay all of the bills. Exterminate that giant roach. (Fortunately, you pay a lot more attention to the first paragraph.)

...

The people in the Human League CD I'm listening to at the moment are not people at all. They are from the eighties and they are electronic, invisible specks on a CD that are translated to my ear by lasers. In fact, everyone from decades past (even decades I lived through, like the eighties) are decidedly alien. So far away, full of different fashion, world events, perspectives. Of course, somewhere I know that people (on the whole) are stubbornly the same, but the part of me that remains fascinated with the past is unconvinced. My standards for movies take a dive when the movies are at least 15 years old, because there's so much more to watch.