Romantic

Friday 6/25/21

Have spent the morning on the phone with the host site trying to get one of these site issues fixed--that being the search engine with the blog. What happens now is that if you search, say, "Beatles," it brings up limited results. The Beatles have probably been mentioned hundreds of times on the blog, but at the moment you get twelve results. What is supposed to happen is a given search on a term pulls up every time that term has been used, both in the title of the blogs and the blog fields--that is, the actual content of the blogs. This is crucial, of course, for the war I am in. Not searching on the Beatles, obviously. But for all of the other names. And of course you want people to be able to type in "Johnny Dollar" or "fiction" or whatever it is and find what they want. This journalistic record is massive. As is mentioned on the front page of the site, it's longer than Thoreau's journals, Pepys' diaries, or Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and it's only three years old. (With 287 short stories, among other things, being written within those same three years.)

I'm a romantic. I don't think there are many romantics in the world. There never has been. There are less now. One of the people working on the problem today was an Irish woman. She was smart and funny and had the accent and I don't know--she sounded beautiful, too, though I couldn't see her. My guess is she was about thirty. She was the most charming person I've interacted with in a while. I know she's probably married and lives in Galway or Cork--though I guess she could live in Cleveland or wherever--and I very much wanted to get to know her. In some capacity. But you can't really be like, "hey, this is weird, but would you like to talk sometime?" And she probably just wants to do her job and get on to the next problem with the next person.

But I also believe in a kind of magic, I guess. Of the unlikely meeting. And then I find myself wishing I'd hear from that person again, like with some note to this journal she started reading, but I also know that she'll most likely never be at this site again--or certainly not at this point in my life--though I still think in terms of things like this. She was funny. And she laughed--gently, kindly--at me when I was at a complete loss when she asked me to do basic things. "Can you open a new search field?" for instance.

Being a romantic entails various things. A sense of wonder. A sense of vulnerability and a willing vulnerability. Does one necessarily have to be lonely? I don't think so. One has to be open. To small miracles, but miracles nonetheless. You see it in the films of Powell and Pressburger, like A Canterbury Tale, that I've been discussing. This is all silly. It's not fruitful talk. The issue is that dozens of site things are not working, and solutions/fixes are not coming.

I'm still on hold.