The Thing About LJ

I think I may have figured out why, exactly, I'm with LJ--other than the fact that he's absolutely fine as hell. (That's a nice bonus, I'll admit.)



When I'm with LJ, for the first time in my life, what I know doesn't matter at all. My knowledge--the information I've accumulated all my life--is absolutely without value, entirely useless. Unless it affects his immediate life directly, he's completely uninterested; I can come home pissed off about work, get two sentences into the details, and realize that he hasn't the vaguest foggy clue of what I'm talking about, nor does he particularly want to. Even if he wanted to know, what good would it do him? If I taught him, for example, how to make a patch cable for Ethernet--what could he do with that knowledge in his life? What good would that do him, out on the block?



And what he knows, the facts and gleanings that make up the minutiae of his daily life, the life of the block--while I find them fascinating--are of no real, practical use to me either. I can't take what he knows and apply it to anything in my day-to-day life; I can't go to work carrying something he told me and use it to my advantage out there. My knowledge is applicable to my world; his knowledge is applicable to his, and never the twain shall meet.



Here's the thing, though: to me, that's a GOOD thing. I mean, I love him, for one thing; for another, I have made it a point, throughout my life, to collect various bits of information that have nothing to do with my daily existence. It's kinda like the people who hoard stuff in their homes, and when they die they have to be dug out from all the stuff they collected--that's how I am with information. I just haven't found any "useless"--to me--information that I don't like.



JP and I knew all the same things. That was exquisite, wonderful, amazing, and even more so when one of us came out with something the other DIDN'T know. Neither of us were threatened by the thought of the other one being smarter--we were just proud of each other, constantly (well, except when he would wear those pink-and-black-and-blue spandex bike shorts, but even then I was still in complete awe of him. We forgive the awful fashion choices of the ones we love...)



CR, by contrast, couldn't STAND it that I knew things he didn't know, and he would just discount anything HE knew in envy of what I knew. And he knew a LOT--his knowledge of music, for example, was absolutely without peer--but he just never knew how to value himself, and so he needed to chase his little pieces of cyberspace ass all over creation to try to assign himself some value.



LJ is sorta the best of both worlds--we don't have that brain-envy thing going on, but there's also little or no redundancy in what we know, either. It works out well for both of us.



(He gave me a scare today--to say the VERY least. I snaked a half-day off work, mainly so I could go get the alarm system on the 'Ho looked at--and so I got home around 2:30. I walked in the front door and there, on the computer screen, was his IM buddy-list and a big ol' IM window with a pic of some female. He was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear the buzzsaw snore coming from upstairs. I wouldn't normally be so bold as to read his IMs, but I just wasn't in the mood for bullshit today, and so I read the first sentence: "Thanks for the compliment!!" I stood in the living room with smoke coming out of my ears for a few minutes, then sprang into action. I took a sheet of paper and drew an IM box, and filled it in thusly:



"TO: (his screename)

FROM: Some female from that long list you forgot to shut off because you didn't know your 'girl' was coming home early



SomeFemale: Hey, don't you think it might be a good idea to go talk to Gladys? She's upstairs in the bedroom, and she's really upset...."



I taped it to the screen and went upstairs. He was asleep in the spare room, and I just walked right by.



Not five minutes later, he came in, yawning, note in hand: "What the hell is THIS?" he asked--not pissed, just utterly perplexed.



"Well, when I came in there was an IM from some female saying 'Thanks for the compliment...'"



"Yeah! That was from dude, he was on the computer earlier! 'Member? he doesn't have an account so he uses MINE!"



Well, we've run into this problem before--Raj uses LJs account to chat up females--but I also know LJ DOES still check his personals (as do I!) so I didn't think about the possibility of it being Raj. But I wouldn't put it past Raj to forget--LJ, on the other hand, tends not to be that kind of sloppy.



A couple minutes later, LJ comes back in, laughing. "Dude just called and he said he had left for a minute to go do something, and he was coming back in a minute. He said 'I saw the truck parked outside and I just kept going...I knew it probably wasn't a good time to come back and finish what I was doing.'"



Needless to say, Raj may have eaten his last piece of lasagna in THIS house!! But at least it wasn't LJ.)