Changes

They happen all the time and they're everywhere around us, but some changes are bigger than others. Some are so small that it takes 30 years before you realize that nothing is the same at all anymore and you feel the magnitude of the change. Every once in a while though you do it consciously and deliberately. Yesterday I got a new computer desk. 17 years is a long time for a 20$ block of particle board to hold together, and my old desk has been with me more reliably than almost anything else I have owned in that entire timeframe, and I had it longer than I had people in my life who I considered to be incredibly important, and that's pretty impressive. I guess, maybe I'm alone in just not considering how long furniture is with you when you don't think about it very much.

I had a lot of anxiety. My new desk had some pretty big shoes to fill and some very specific needs to meet in order to relieve my anxiety over the major alteration. I was at Ikea yesterday when I found just about the most excellent desk possible, for me, with plenty of surface space, tower shelf, room for 2 monitors in parallel, my speakers fit nicer than they ever have on any desk I've had, and a really comfortable zone for my computer chair, keyboard and mouse. And it has cupholders too. So in another 17 years my next desk will have just that much more of a barrier to replace the old one.



As it happens, I also had to replace my phone last week. This happens more frequently, and it's always interesting finding out the little things that you dislike about your new phone. In what ways your new phone is dumb that you took for granted, despite all the ways that it's totally better. Sort of a non equivalence of change in quality. This one separates its internal memory into 1 gig application storage and 4 gigs phone storage, but it's all internal flash, and you can move some of your applications to the phone storage, but you can't actually store anything at all on the SD card that it lets you have installed, so it's like, why even let me plug an SD card in? All fascinating. I still like this phone, though. None of the problems are dealbreakers and it was only 40$. Also, it's a cool bright red color so it feels sort of non standard, very vibrant. In addition,



Yeah. That.

You scream burn the world, but the whole world burns too easy, and you're there in the ashes afterward and you don't know what to build so you build another house of tinder and twigs and even before it's halfway done you can just feel it, that it's just temporary and there's nothing anyone can do to make this world permanent. And you hate every bit of it because it's just made from things that were meant to burn, to catch fire, to spread, and break apart. And you put so much work into it that you love it dearly.

No matter what you make your house, your world, your life out of, I know you can feel it. It was meant to burn down and fall apart because there's nothing inside it that can last but love. Love is like fire, but...

But after everything is burned the fire burns out. Nothing but wisps of smoke and whispers of heat and a fine white ash.

And why did you burn everything to begin with?

Because you were in love and it was made to burn.