Lara I.

Ok so one day a few years ago when I still lived with Daniel he was doing something in the corner behind his computer, like with the guts of it or something, and he asked me to pick up his phone and make a phone call for him. Fine. So at the time he had his phone programed to dial on voice command, and so he told me what to say to get it to call. He liked it that way cause he said it made him feel Star Trek-ish to say "call Jay" and the phone would call her. Also fine.

Except for the phone wouldn't recognize my voice! I had to give up and dial her from, you know, pushing buttons and the like.

This just furthers the theory that I talk funny. I don't think I sound different. There's no reason why I should sound different - I used to have a little bit of a stutter but the older I get the less it happens - I speak, as far as I can tell, exactly the same as everyone else. I have no type of speech impediment. Just, voice recognition stuff can't even hear me. It doesn't even process that I'm speaking!

I went to Philly yesterday, back to my old 'hood, to visit a friend that lived down the street from us. He had just gotten home from the hospital - he got shot, oh, sometimes last fall, and he had been in the hospital ever since. It's a pretty sad story - he is basically going to need someone to take care of him for the rest of his life. He's not, like, my bestest friend ever, but we lived on the same block, and we'd hang out pretty often, you know, have a few beers together, order take out, sit on the porch, you know, all that EOL stuff.

( I wish this was a cute story but really it's just regular old life )

So we sat on the porch. The back porch, the one where they built the ramp. (Not even the same house - he's staying with his parents, they live in a different part of the neighborhood) Couple other peeps from down the street came over with a couple pizzas. We drank some beers. Well, I drank my beer from one hand and held my friend's beer for him and tried my damnedest not to spill it when I tilted it back. The first nurse left early, the night nurse arrived late. We went inside. We locked the door so the nurse would have to knock. We watched some weird freak-nasty porn. This was the routine back in the day, see, when we lived down the street from each other and my friend could hold his own beer. Yes, freak-nasty porn, and on that big TV, too. But it wasn't a single thing like old times. It wasn't a bit like old times.