sometimes useful scum

i blame a lot of things on boys.

this scuffed-up machine? a male cousin.
this pirated operating system? exboyfriend.
my old cracked copy of Dreamweaver? a roommate's exboyfriend.
my brief flirtations with linux and ruby and perl? little brother.
the twenty-eight hundred music tracks on this computer? boys. trading incubus for pink floyd.

but clearly this is my life. this is my property and my responsibility, right? sure, that burned muse CD was a gift. you didn't steal anything. it's all those boys' fault.

i can blame and rationalize and look the other way, plead ignorance...

or i could do something about it. own up. get rid of all my music. come clean.

surely i'm not so tied to this pirated operating system.

no, i'm not. i'm just afraid. little brother built linux from scratch in two months. learned a lot. no OS piracy for him. yet when i got home last week he copied all ten gigabites of borrowed music tracks from my hard drive to his.

so much for clean consciences.

anyway i've been reading more seriously about this open source stuff. it's cool. it really is. why can't everything be open source? that'd be cool.

but would it be easier? building your own custom operating system... wow. that isn't supposed to be easy, is it? it's something you fight for and grow to deserve, isn't it? it isn't for everyone.

i guess that's the trade off. it's totally free, but frighteningly difficult.

hm. just like it costs you nothing to be born, but life is pain.