2000-11-30 - 8:14pm

On the internal soundtrack: "I'll Be There For You", again.

Poindexter, inexplicably, always stops by "Friends" reruns when he's flipping channels in the evening. He claims doesn't like the show. Maybe it's for me, since I like it sometimes. Or maybe he secretly likes it. Hm.

I have a little white scar between the knuckles of my ring & middle fingers on my left hand. I like it. I got it when I slipped with a screwdriver while working on the Volkswagen and gouged up a little flap of skin. Of course, me being the hypochondriac that I am, I got all panicky because of all the grease that was in the cut. However, I seem to have survived.

People are weird about scars. Some people are incredibly self-conscious about them and I've never understood this. Everybody likes Luke Perry's eyebrow scar, and Harrison Ford's little scar on his chin. I thought Tom Berenger was no less attractive when he was all scarred up in Platoon. There's a woman, Marla somebody, who was a model until her face got carved up in a mugging. I've seen pictures of her with the scars and she's still quite lovely.

For the most part, a scar is just a thin line on your skin, a little lighter or darker than the rest of it. So where do people get the idea that scars diminish their attractiveness?

Scars are stories. Ask somebody where they got their scar and you usually get a good story out of it. Luke Perry's came from an altercation with a soft drink machine, if I recall correctly. Poindexter has a freckle on his lip, which he insists is not a freckle, but rather a scar from something involving a school bus window. He has a brown freckle on his blue left eye, too, but I digress.

There's a problem with my 8-hour-night experiment. I believe it is unnatural to get up when it's dark out. But if we're being good, we go to bed at 10:30, meaning I'd have to get up at 6:30 with Poindexter. That is just disgusting. I have to persuade him to sleep 11-7 instead, since the sky is actually light by then.

Poindexter, fortunately, chose today to sleep in 'til 7, so I was able to get up when he did. We went to bed at 10:40. Not bad. Now if I could just quit fooling around so much in the morning. I get a hankering to clean the kitchen, or change my outfit three times, or spend too much time reading People magazine while I do my hair.

So, I talk about Poindexter a lot, don't I? Occasionally coworkers, or family, but mostly Poindexter.

I'm weird that way. Although I like people quite a bit, I am essentially a introvert, I think. I like being alone, I like talking to people when I first meet them, and I like talking to people I know really well, but the in-between part is hard.

I know people who have a large network of friends from the in-between part. My brother is one of those people. I wonder how he does it. The idea of having a large group of friends, none of whom I know especially well, is foreign to me.

If I don't know them that well, I consider them more of an acquaintance than a friend. And the people who I call "friends" became that way rather instantaneously, because we recognized pretty quickly that we shared something with each other that we don't share with many others (a kind of honesty/openness and a certain way of paying attention to things) and dispensed with any superficial getting-to-know-you business.

As it is, I've got my family, friends-who-are-family, one close friend who's in Japan, Poindexter, and some acquaintances in the area. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have a close girlfriend, but I don't usually feel like I'm particularly missing one.

I still haven't figured out what to call those people I talk to online. Some people are perfectly comfortable calling them friends, but I'm not. I even hesitate to say that I "know" them, since they are mostly words on a screen to me. Online acquaintances covers it pretty well, but it's a clumsy phrase.

We need, for American English, a new type of punctuation mark, for what I believe are called "tag phrases". I'd look it up, but my connection is down today.

Look at that sentence up there:

"So, I talk about Poindexter a lot, don't I?"

You can "ask" this "question" in two ways. One way would be for the "don't I" to be a genuine question, in which case the pitch of my voice would rise at the end of the sentence. The other way would be for the "don't I" to be essentially for soliciting agreement rather than posing a query. Since I'm stating a fact that I know, and being rather redundant with the "don't I", it comes out more like a declarative sentence.

I struggled with using the question mark. Since there's no question in my tone, I wanted to put a period. But technically it's correct to put a question mark, isn't it? (Tone goes up on that one.)

"So, I talk about Poindexter a lot, don't I."

That just looks like bad grammar.

If we had a new punctuation mark for sentences with a question format but declarative intent, I could have written that sentence exactly the way I meant it and I wouldn't be boring you to death with all this nitpicking.

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