Do you remember the "internet"?

This morning sometime around 4 or 5 AM I'm awake because of fighting sounds in the cage.  I waited the usual amount of time for the sparring to settle down, and then figured I'd go right back to sleep and they'd work out whatever little squabble this was.  Only it didn't stop.  It kept starting up again.  So I forced myself out of bed, rapped on the cage, told them to cut it out and went back to bed. 

It kept starting up again.  I was really frustrated (and sleep deprived) because this went on for hours.  I must have gotten up like three or four times to rap on the cage.

Finally, when I'm grudgingly up for the day, I'm checking in on them to make sure nobody was hurt or anything.  My heart skips a beat because I see a mouse in there that I NEVER BROUGHT HOME.  It's a wild brown mouse, smaller and younger than my own babies, but with enough bulge in his Levi's that I can decide pretty quickly that he's not welcome to stay with my girls.

So I'm chasing him around with little boxes, trying to get him moved into the carrier cage just long enough to decide if I should bring Mooshika home and give him the smaller cage.   You thought little pet mice were fast?  Wait until you try to catch a wild mouse.  He'll go from one end to the other and you'll never see how he got there.  They don't run, they fly.  They can leap great distances.  Wild mice develop skills that our caged mice never dream of.

I cornered him in the upper right corner of the cage, and he stuck his head and whole body through one of the half-inch squares and FLEW across the room -- well, more like catapulted himself, but seriously, he made an arc and easily went out five feet before he hit the floor.  And as fast as that, he vanished completely.

I have a feeling he'll be back, and I fear for both the virginity and the cleanliness of my babies.  >:(

I wonder if it's possible to legally have the space between my first and last name removed.

O1: "So what are you looking to do, just have one name that's just KeithHandy?"

KH: "No, my first name will still be 'Keith' and my last name will still be 'Handy', but I want there to never be a space between them."

O1: "Well the only way I can think of doing that would be to move your first name into your last name, or move your last name into your first name, so it would be just one name."

KH: "Why can't you just legally get rid of the space?"

O1: "The space doesn't have ... it doesn't exist, legally."

KH: "Then why does it show up on all my bills?"

O1: "That's the way bills are printed."

O2: "Couldn't he affix a 'backspace' to the beginning of his last name, so that before it prints the last name, it backs up over the space?"

O3: "That's kind of a hack, isn't it?  It's not guaranteed to always work."

O1: "You can't put a backspace in a name."

KH: "Guys, guys, don't get too worked up over that idea, I don't like it anyway.  I don't want to 'patch' my name to make it look like the space is removed, I want to legally take out the space for real."

O2: "Well see, sir, the problem is, the space isn't technically part of your name.  It's a kind of no-man's land, legally."

KH: "Well are you saying that no one really has a space between their first and last names?"

O2: "Well you're always going to see a space between people's first and last names, but it's not like there's a spot on the legal papers that says 'what character, if any, should appear between the names', because a space is considered to be the absence of a character, and it generally means this is where one name ends and the other begins."

KH: "Not always.  Sometimes people have a space in their first name."

O2: "True, true."

KH: "Well where does that space come from?  I mean, if they wanted that one legally removed, they could do it, right?"

O2: "Well, yeah.  Because it's part of the first name."

KH: "So you're saying the reason I can't remove the space is because it's not a 'part of' the first name."

O1: "Or last."

KH: "It's neither."

O1: "Correct."

O2: "Yes, correct."

KH: "Well if it's not part of my name, why do I always see it in there??"

O2: "Like I said, it's a generally accepted way of showing that the first name has ended and the last name is about to begin."

KH: "I realize that, but like I said, that's not always the case, now, is it?"

O1: "99% of the time it is."

KH: "Okay so what you guys are all telling me is because the space doesn't exist, I can't get rid of it."

O2: "It exists."

KH: "It does exist."

O2: "Yeah."

O1: "It's not something we would be responsible for, since we only would be able to help you with something that's considered part of the first name, part of the middle name, or part of the last name."

KH: "Well what is that space part of, seeing as how I need to find the people responsible for it?"

O3: "It's part of, uh, unwritten societal contract."

O2: "Ooh, nice answer!"

KH: "Societal contract to agree that between a first and last name there will always be a space."

O3: "You got it!"

KH: "And it's unwritten?"

O3: "Yep."

KH: "Sooooo ... "

O1: "So you're shit out of luck."

KH: "Gotcha."

O2: "So does that kind of help clarify things for you, sir?"

KH: "Yes, thank you."

O1: "Great.  Anything else we can help you with?"

KH: "No, I think ... oh wait, yes, there was something else I wanted to ask.  Can I legally change the color of my name to dark blue?"

I wish you wouldn't read this.  Er, I shouldn't even say that, because that's passive-aggressive, manipulative hint-dropping.

See, this is a private post.  But I don't believe in locks.  I feel like if I lock the post, then I'm forcing you not to read it, and I don't believe in using force on other people.  Your own lack of interest in what I'm writing should just happen naturally, and if your eyes don't naturally drift away, towards the hip, fast-flashing, wide-angle "check out the streets of New York" fashion montage screaming to escape the finite physical bounds of your TV set, then it probably just wasn't meant to be private.  I just have to be okay with that.  There's always the next one.

You're reading it, aren't you?  It's okay, really it is.  Sometimes people just read things for no reason.  It doesn't necessarily mean I'm not boring enough.  It could just mean that you're interested in boring posts.  Some people are, you know!  I just have to trust that as time goes on, I will naturally find the total obscurity that I rightfully deserve.

Maybe not even in my lifetime -- sometimes I think even posthumous obscurity would be good enough.  I don't have to get all worked up now, while I'm alive, and go through and lock down every blog post I've ever written, because time will lock them down for me.  I just need to believe in that, in my quiet center.

So go ahead, read, read, read.  It's probably character building for me.  But I'll show you in the end!  One day, you won't even know who I am!  I'll be a common household pause of silence between "who used up the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter?" and "there's an unopened container on the middle shelf".  And you won't even hear that pause over the sound of the teen daughter's funk-o-riffic text message ringtone, alerting her that her boyfriend is just as in love with her now as he was ten minutes ago.

I could stop writing now, but that would be like forcing you to stop reading.  And I just don't think that's cool.  I'm above that.  So I will continue this post ad infinitum, so that when (if) you stop reading, it will be by your own choice, and not by some tyrannical subversion of your free will.

I'll take a break here though.  Feel free to read whatever replies, ads, and links are underneath, as well as the status bar of your browser and the corporate logo on your monitor.  If there are no scraps of paper right in front of that, you can always skip to the underrated QWERTY dada flash-prose right under your fingers, and then on to whatever is on your T-shirt if you can read upside-down.  Please, please, PLEASE do not take the apparent conclusion of this post as some kind of mind game in which I'm trying to coerce you into not reading any more.  It's not like that.

I'm not like that.

Here's the thing: I have too many blogs. There is simply too much "Keith Handy" on the internet.

I have a Livejournal. And a (sooper seekrit) Blogger account. And a Newsvine account, where I host my Byte Me tech commentary blog. I have an Orkut account that I haven't logged into for months. I have a MySpace account, much to my chagrin (Damn you, Rupert Murdoch). I used to hang out on Plastic "doodie.com" back in the day, (so, is that officially defunct?) And now I have a Vox account.

It all feels a bit silly. And I'm willing to bet that a really lucrative field in the next 20 years 240 months is digging up cyberdirt people have left behind. Especially the ones running for office King Of The World. In fact, that's one of the reasons I (Keith, the person who is writing this) won't be running for office King Of The World. People will find out I'm a rather foul-mouthed attention whoreish know-it-all cheeky drunken bastard.
(I just leaked that about myself. How awesome is that.)

I'm of the opinion nearly everyone who wears a hat is guilty of cyberwhoredom at least eight times; there's at least one cameraphone shot or one webcam session that lives in infamy, one chat log, a handful boatload of incriminating emails. Dig? And you can never get all of them gone. That's a scary thing.

Anyway. That's my observation original train of thought for the evening. Run with it.

[On a completely separate note, slide on over to Unamerican homestarrunner.com and check out their awesome stickers. Ex: "Admit that goth is ridiculous." "Everybody to the limit!" They're a buck each $10 for a four pack. If nothing else, the very tongue-in-cheek Trogdor will make you chuckle. The site is a bit hinky; you have to scroll past the t-shirt designs to get to the stickers. And there are a lot of them. Go forth.]