The day's plans of meeting a friend of a friend and seeing a Broadway show were scuttled by the star of the show having to back out at the last minute due to a small injury. As the friend of a friend had come to the city to see Orville Peck more than he'd come to see Cabaret, we decided that he'd be better off refunding the tickets.

I knew the neighborhood a little bit, so I took us four blocks north and one block west to go from the city people visit to the city people live in, going from having a bite and some coffee at a tourist destination to doing the same at a local coffee and sandwich place. He ordered a gabagool sandwich and a pink iced chai latte, and I just had a pink latte. Afterwards, we went to a record store and he found a vinyl Ney Matogrosso album, which was a surprise because he's apparently hard to find in the US on pretty much any format, but especially vinyl.

Not long after, we went our separate ways, him to Brooklyn and the friends he was staying with and me to my apartment to finish folding laundry and cook some lunches for the coming week. I could fixate on the misfortune, or I could look at how we managed to made the best of things.

In chatting about arbitrary divisions into two groups and applying that to the internet, we came up with the binaries of good internet and bad internet, and young internet and old internet. I then suggested algorithmic internet and end-user internet, and I stand by that. I often say I only use social media on my computer where I have a full keyboard, big screen, mouse, and browser extensions, all of which help me curate my experience - while it's not perfect, I'm still largely in control of things. I haven't ceded ground to an app or control to a set of suggestions. I'll often see complaints but rarely what's being complained about, which gives me both a skewed view of what's going on and satisfaction in being so well-curated I barely glimpse what's being touted as a widespread problem.

Keeping the internet on a computer, where it belongs, fixes a lot of problems before they start.

Also of note today was someone on my floor moving out and I got some fancy imported Korean sea salt they weren't going to bother hauling around with them. I don't know how fancy it is, but it tastes quite nice. I'm thinking I'll use it in soup.

The day's major accomplishment was getting some hand-holding for my hard drive problem and getting the man on the other end to laugh a bit when I said I knew enough to get myself into trouble but not how to get out of it. Hopefully I can get my act together enough to send it out for repairs in a day or two.

The secondary accomplishments were taking the stairs to the gym, and making an attempt to reach out when I felt myself going down a spiral.

I went to a master's program's commencement ceremony at the Apollo Theater today, and while I left after two hours and didn't see it end, based on how those first two hours and the setup went, I doubt anyone blasted any James Brown.

What a wasted opportunity.

I'm glad I went, though, for all its wasted opportunities and long-winded metaphor-straining speeches and a prerecorded speech from a chancellor that included a plug to sign up for the alumni association while detailing its many features. My sister in law E. and older brother J. seemed happy about it, and I'll know I was willing to make an effort to show up.

In trying to tidy my closet and the dresses I've got in there, I'm now seeing how many "nice" dresses I have that cover a fairly wide variety of situations. It's nice to see that the ones I bought well over a decade ago are still largely holding up well.

In other news, while my sister in law E. and my brother J. are planning on going to Cancún, I somehow doubt they're at all interested in visiting the Chicxulub crater. Some people just don't know how to have a good time.