wanderer

Roman Polanski was arrested in Zurich.  A year ago, I blogged him for the documentary film devoted to his life. As talented as he is, he suffered the shocking loss of wife being murdered, then the famous and infamous stature rape of a 13-year-old when he was 45. He pleaded guilty, then fled out of the US ever since. Wanted ever since. He married again, continued his directing career in France, won Oscar in 2004, has been traveling to Swiss free for over 20 years, suddenly he was detained at the airport customs. He is 78. (Why would I hold sympathy towards him, like I do to Mary Key Letourneau, a beautiful 5 children mother who had sex with her 13-year student boy when she was 34. She spent six and half years in jail. Got out last year, then guess what, she married the student and had new children with them. Is this stature rape a real 'true crime', or true love?)

There's more. Craig Fugerson, a Scottish bloke wandering in the US and became a US citizen. He is now an established talk show host. Not like his yelling style of monologue much, but his self-taught experience and shredness of grasping transient opportunity are nonetheless inspiring. Before being famous, he hated school and dropped at 16, was a constant drunkard, doing drugs...Look at him now, a smartass with a witty brain, wrote two books, directed two movies, best of all, solid fixture in the late late night show on the not-native American soil. And more. Eric Clapton. Drunkard, drug user, poached friend's wife (the famous song, layla, is the evidence.) Then his son died young, anther famous song. It is amazing how life can shape a person, or more precisely, how a person can shape his life.

Because there exist two kind of people, inner exhibitionist and bored, lazy, insipid  blogger. The world is changing, too. People are too lonely by nature, people are busy and too distracted to have the mood writing long paragraph, or skimming long paragraph, just some fillings are good enough, being that a burger, or a 140-word long nonsensical gibberish.

Here are some sketches of the people I saw lately.

1) From the hall way came a mid-age lady with light steps. She wore a lavender blouse and a long skirt with abstract pattern. Her hair was short and layered, some grey-n-pepper touch at the side burns and the edge. She expanded her face with a smile when there's eye contact. Her eyes are soft and meek, with the expectation of questions from people she faced.

2) Chris is medium built. He wears a polo shirt, a khaiki pants and a pair of loafer. His hair is short and well-trimmed, his face is opulent and free of wart. He speaks slowly, with a tone of authoritorian. But his words exhibit a friendly atmosphere during the conversation. For more than once, he plucks out his blackberry attached at his waist. In the end, he summes up the chat by saying affirmatively, 'Any questions, let me know.' then gets on his SUV and drives off.

3) Nancy seems smiling even she isn't. Her words are peculiar in that she doesn't pronounce the letter 'l', so she sounds like saying, 'Some people ike to plant a ot of f-owers in their back yard.' She is careful as she walks along, either due to her senior age or her profession. Her arms and hands are typical in old ladies, weathered with brown color and some peckles here and there. As she describes things, her hands wave that perfectly help outline what she wants to say.

4) He wandered down the street with curious eyes looking around the circumstance. He's got a spiky hairdo, obviously out of trendy influence somewhere. His face is impeccably smooth, the youthness and slight attire mismatch radiate a puff of fresh air.

5) 'Hi, Claire, it's me, Stefanie...' From behind came a woman's melliferous voice on the phone, 'Did you see Ann's facebook? Oh my Gosh, she's getting married, I was like, err....' She rolled her eyes and pouted her mouth, 'My first reaction was like, Oh my Gosh, She and Josh? This is so bizzare, so surreal, the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of in my life.' She slowed down her speech speed as if she was acting in a movie scene.

What I try to sketch. 1)a librarian, 2) a small business owner, 3) a realtor, 4) a Chinese New student, 5) a young woman talking on the phone.

I need to install a X-win32 on my PC to access the UNIX server. It is where my pain started. During the installation process, a small pop-up window shows that Java has updates for me to install, urging me to act right now because it provides faster, more efficient and more secure performance for my machine. So I clicked. When X window installation is done, I run it, nope, connection failed. tried it again, another window popped up, saying my X-Win32 9.4 has a higher version to upgrade. So I clicked that too. The machine was cranking and crunching for some long minutes and told me, 'Congratulations, your X-Win32 has been successfully upgraded and properly installed.'

With a little excitement, I clicked to run it again, and again it showed the same error message. Deperately I googled for some solution, hmm, maybe I shoud run VPN. So I did, this time the result is different, the error message became simpler, 'Fail to find the host.' WTF? With Java diligently working in the back, now my web browser is frozen. The hard-disk sign are constantly on, any icon on the desktop is unclickable. It is dead.

The universal solution is tun it off and turn it on. Only this time it seemed taking forever. 9:26am, log in; 9:30am, Windows are loading some crap; 9:34am, side bar showed up, and rightly showed the time on the clock again the frozen 9:30am on the lower right corner (you guessed right, it's Vista); 9:36am, wireless connection is hooked up; 9:38am, Norton is loaded; 9:45am, the notorious UAC prompt window finally showed up to let me allow the machine manufacturer to manage some of their product resources. This is usually a vitorious sign for me that the computer is finally ready for use. Not yet, The browser did load, but just showed the homepage, and not going anywhere. In a few minutes, everything is frozen again. I let out some profanity and hard pressed the power button and shut it down.

Sure I am not the only cynist who is crying out loud for the technology stupidity. The computing is like a living thing that has evolved into higher level of complexity and become fully loaded with whistles and bells, but less manageable. But we rely on it more, we nearly couldn't live without them. More often we are seeing the anxiety and frustration the advance of technology brings us, rather than the ease of work. We are tied with them. Life becomes complicated, which is not necessarily the good sign. Computer accidentally teaches us an emotional lesson: no matter how powerful and versatile a tool is, don't let it overtake you.