I'd like to start this evening with a bit of first world rage.

"That rapscallion ran off with my monocle! Don't we have people to stop him?"

This evening, after a fit of cleaning (since parents are coming into town tomorrow with furniture, which means I should probably have a reasonably clean space in which to put said furniture, and, you know, I don't want them to think they failed miserably raising me to be a somewhat clean person. The fact that they're reading this probably shatters my clever ruse, but it's the thought that counts, right?), I logged into Facebook, as I am wont to do. And, hey, I wanted to read a story/look at a profile/stalk a person whom I've never met, so I opened a new tab.

What I found may shock you.

I, of course, am quite the denizen of Facebook chat. I've had some good sharing moments on there. I've made plans on there. I've learned things on there. I've arranged a secret rendezvous or two on there.

"I gnaw on the quilt made of the girl's mother and lick drops of water oozing from the concrete walls, clinging tightly to this secret rendezvous for one that no one can begrudge me now. However much I may resent the fact, 'tomorrow's newspaper' has stolen a march on me; and so, in the past called tomorrow, over and over I continue certainly to die." Yeah. It's that kind of book.

Anyway, despite the changes in Facebook, most of which I've resisted with the great manly firmness instilled within me by our nation's forefathers for about a week before I forget what the old way even looked like, I've quite enjoyed Facebook chat. It was a simple interface with a pretty simple layout. You type, you press enter, and you see your message displayed for you. No muss, no fuss.

And possibly no conversation, but why would you need that in Facebook chat?

See how simple that is? Nice black text on a white background, maybe an emoticon here and there. I mean, you could read at least a dozen lines at a time on that! That's basically this entire blog post up to here. (Note: Rob may not have an accurate grasp of how much he has written so far. He tends to think that each post is Homeric in length by word one hundred, and while it may feel that long when you're reading it, rest assured, Margaret Wise Brown wrote longer epics than this.)

Goodnight, Beauty. Goodnight, Terrible Beauty, and the deathless Goddess-- so she strikes our eyes.

You could have a meaningful conversation on there. You could talk about your day. You could explain a recipe or grip about a significant other (or ex-significant other). But most importantly, you could read what you were saying and didn't feel like a fucking twelve year old, like, bitching about, like, how Jimmy Gruber is, like, just to DIE for but, like, Mom and Dad are, like, so LAME. Don't they, like, comprehend that your love is, like, eternal and junk, because, like, he's so much more, like, mature than the other boys in your class because, like, he's twenty-four.

Tonight, though, that changed.

I went to that new tab that I mentioned a few hundred thousand words ago (like we said, absolutely NO sense of scale), and I saw something I had hoped to never have to see in real life.

They changed it to the goddamned iPhone text format.

It's become Speech Bubbles, Destroyer of Worlds.

Ugh. You can read about six lines on that. That's not a conversation anymore. That's a freaking soundbyte. Ugh.

But, like I said, give me a week or so and I'll probably be fine with it.

Anyhoo, good start with that. Not enough steam to finish out the post with it, but way to be upset about a change in Facebook. Very original.

Hey. No. I already admitted that I get pissy for about a week and then deal with it. We know, okay? Everyone gets a bit upset by it, because it's different and makes them relearn how to use some functionality on the site. Don't use that tone with me. You do the exact same thing.

"Got any pot?"

However, there was some substantial reason in the whole bit about me not having enough steam in the Facebook chat rant to carry it through to one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven (hence spelling out one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven (twice at this point) to inflate the word count a little bit, because Rob can't resist gaming the system). I DO think that I did pretty well in carrying it this far, though. With that interlude, let's talk about some of the amazing things Rob found while cleaning his room.

Well, for one thing, there were a lot of coins. My floor tends to accumulate coins like nobody's business, but sometimes they make it to the change drawer, where they wait until someone needs to feed a meter or something. The end result is usually a lot of pennies that may get used one day. Case in point, I just found twenty-three cents on the floor while I was unplugging the phone (since, you know, we don't pay for the land line, and we don't know its number, yet it probably adds a good twenty-three cents each month to our electric bill. I mean, obviously I've taken care of this month's with this monumental find, but what about next month? Who will go hungry then?).

But with mother lodes like these, and with a decent interest rate on savvy investments, one day I might be able to buy a candy bar from a vending machine.

For another, there were a lot of old birthday and Christmas cards. As one case showed, they weren't necessarily all for me. But, hey, that's why we can make multiple runs to CVS/Rite Aid/Safeway/Hallmark/The Card Store. Thankfully, that was just one case, but there were still about 15 cards and envelopes around the room.

One was the original monkey card, which will remain in the room until I find a better place for it.

There was a lot of unopened mail, too, though. Most of it was cell phone bills (which I pay online, so the paper statements aren't a huge thing, and I should probably go paperless, but what if I need to pay it and don't have internet?) and investment statements (because I wouldn't be able to interpret those anyway). Plus, there's a lot of random junk mail from various mailing lists (I recently got a letter from Pierce Brosnan about how he needed my help to save the whales) that I rarely get around to recycling.

Of course, it could have been a coded message about how he needed my help to save Wales, but that's a story for another time.

So, last Christmas, I'm dating a nice young lady, and for Christmas I get a gift card to a pretty solid cooking store in Charleston. It's part of a group that runs a few restaurants, so I mean, I could technically use it on food, but the cooking store is pretty great on its own. It's also in that part of town that is just too far to walk on a normal day but is too close to be worth driving. Usually, it means that I walk and realize about halfway there that I should have just driven.

Then I realize that I used my last ten dollars to pay for a bottle I'm not sure I even broke.

Fast forward to what I can only imagine is April. Possibly late March. I get a letter from this place. Now, since I was probably in the throes of study week or med school in general, I didn't take much notice. I figured that I had somehow ended up on one of these lists for this company and they're trying to let me know about a sale or some such of which I don't have time to take advantage.

Coincidentally enough, around this time is my birthday. So, that means presents, riiiiight?

No, mostly it means you're old now. No more presents for you, grandpa.

I actually get a chance to talk to my sister (a rare but meaningful occurrence), and she says she sent something my way for my birthday. Awesome! I wonder what it's going to be. The thing about my sister is that she has (if you'll pardon the wordplay, which you will, because this is my show and them's the rules) a gift for picking out really great presents. She almost invariably manages to surprise you with something you didn't know you wanted, but it's awesome nonetheless.

Well, weeks go by, and there's still no sign of this elusive mystery business from Sis. I figure that there was some sort of problem with the postal service (because I live at an address followed by a lettered apartment, which is sometimes just TOO MUCH for the postal service). Oh well. That's a shame, but I'll live.

If you call that living.

I mentioned this in passing to my folks a few weeks ago, along with my "The Post Office is incompetent" theory (no longer a hypothesis, because it has held up under repeated experimentation). There was much "Oh well"ing followed by the drinking of fine whiskeys (or whiskies, because fuck yeah, Scotland).

Does not do it justice.

Well, as most of y'all have figured out, I finally opened that envelope from the cooking place today. It had a card and a gift card from my sister for my birthday.

So, a.) Thanks, Sis! You continue to be the greatest sibling ever, and I apologize for the lateness of my thanks. You've stuck up for me when I've needed it (often in impressively epic ways, and usually with a good one-liner), and that has always meant a lot to me.

b.) Rob. Open your fucking mail.