Jason Pettus | poetry | Jane the geek

Jane the geek

This was written for the show "THE SCARY PART: Chicago writers talk about bad breakups," sponsored by Fengi and Quimby's Bookstore.

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MAIN SUBJECT THREAD: MY WORST BREAKUP
Jane used to say that conversing with me was like participating in a threaded public bulletin board system on the internet. She claimed that after the conversation was over she would be able to envision it in front of her and see a perfect hierarchial structure, watching me jump from subject to subject in an intuitive way while still hopping from topic to topic almost randomly.

RE: WHO IS JANE?
Jane is. . .Jane. Is Jane. It's impossible to describe Jane in any other way than a self-referential one, because there's no proper metaphor that adequately explains her.

RE(2): JANE JANE JANE
Jane's a geek. Jane taught herself Linux one summer because it sounded interesting. Jane owns one of the original 1984 Macintoshes with all the developers' signatures etched into the inside casing. She named it "Sylvia" and keeps her diary on it. In fact, Jane went to Macworld Expo in '91 just to sleep with one of the original developers, just so she could say that she had "insanely great" sex. Jane is a geek.

RE: HOW JANE AND I MET
At a lesbian strip club, of course. It's a long story so don't even ask.

RE(2): WHY WERE YOU AT A LESBIAN STRIP CLUB?
When I was younger I used to have a bunch of lesbian friends through the punk rock scene who used to love to drag me to this kind of shit to try to embarrass me. But really, that's not the point of my story.

RE: HOW JANE AND I MET
Jane walked up to me on the dance floor and said, "Did you know that when you multiply Pi with itself and add my birthday in hexadecimal form, you get the same number as the CD-ROM code for the album 'Burn Don't Freeze?'" Then she kissed me.

RE(2): DID I MENTION THAT JANE IS CRAZY?
Jane is manic-depressive. Jane has Attention Deficit Disorder. Jane's been on medication since she was four. Jane's been going to therapy since she was six.

RE(3): JANE'S OBSESSIONS
Jane is obsessed with two things -- the mathematical equation Pi and the all-girl punk-rock band Sleater-Kinney. And believe me, when I say she's obsessed, I mean she's OBSESSED.

RE: HOW JANE AND I MET
So Jane kisses me and then says, "What did you get on your ACT?" And I say 29 and she says, "Perfect. I can sleep with you now."

RE(2): OH YEAH, ANOTHER OBSESSION
Jane will only sleep with people who got a 29 on their ACT. Not a point more, not a point less.

RE: WHO IS JANE?
Man, I don't know who Jane is. It's impossible for me to answer that question.

RE(2): WHY BI-POLAR PEOPLE ARE SEXY
Jane could be the most generous, unselfish, loving person I've ever known when she wanted to. There were times when she would easily give all of herself, every tiny little bit, to help another human being. Sometimes that was me, sometimes that was some homeless punk kid at Belmont and Clark who needed a meal and a pack of cigarettes.

RE(3): DID I MENTION THAT JANE IS KINKY?
Jane had this recurring sexual fantasy where she was trapped in a small enclosed space and forced to give oral sex. There was this crawlspace in the apartment I was living in at the time, between the oven and the refrigerator, maybe...oh, this wide. Jane used to have me undress her and put her in the crawlspace, then force her down on her knees and put my penis in her mouth.

RE(4): MORALITY ARGUMENTS
I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying it was sexy.

RE: WHO IS JANE?
Jane's the only woman I know who can get sexually aroused over a new piece of FTP freeware. Jane's the only woman I know who's actually been institutionalized for mental imbalance. Jane's the only woman I know who enjoys pornography more than me. Jane's the only

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MAIN SUBJECT THREAD: MY WORST BREAKUP
Jane had a computer metaphor for every part of our relationship. We weren't a "couple," we were the sole two members of the newsgroup "alt.sex.digmeout." We didn't go out on dates, we had online sessions. Instead of asking me to spend the night, Jane would ask if I'd like to expand my internet connection from 56K to TCP/IP.

RE: JANE AND COMPUTER METAPHORS
When I first asked Jane how old she was, she told me she was currently at version 26.2. A couple of weeks into our relationship Jane got a haircut, and she was suddenly upgraded to version 26.3. Jane's coding was really remarkable. It was completely degradable -- if you browsed her with Netscape 5, she'd load up all the Java and CSS and Shockwave and all those other bells and whistles. But you could browse her with fuckin' Mosaic 1.0 and still get a clean, smart, interesting site.

RE(2): JANE AND COMPUTER METAPHORS AND DATING
Dating Jane was like logging on to her through Telnet. It was all content and no WYSIWIG bullshit whatsoever.

RE(3): JANE AND COMPUTER METAPHORS AND MENTAL ILLNESS
Jane never considered herself crazy. She just assumed that her hard drive had been infected with a virus and that one day she would eventually find the correct software to fix the problem. Sometimes when Jane was having one of her episodes, she'd hug me tightly and cry on my shoulder and tell me that I was her own personal beta version of Norton Utilities. It was nice. I felt like one of those cool defragmentizing programs that will put all the little pieces of your hard drive's code back together to keep it from crashing.

RE: WHO IS JANE?
Jane is a very, very disturbed little girl. Jane is the most complicated woman I've ever met. Jane is crazy. Jane is sane. Jane is Jane is Jane.

MAIN SUBJECT THREAD: MY WORST BREAKUP
One day I got a phone call from Jane and I said hi and she said hi and I said Should I come over and she said Yes, but not to my apartment and I said Where should I meet you? and she said Come over to Cook County Hospital, I've been institutionalized again.

RE: JANE AND HOSPITALS
Jane hated the new-age movement. To her therapy wasn't a solution but rather something to occupy her time while she kept looking for that perfect debugging software that would finally clean up her system. She refused to call mental hospitals anything other than "institutions," which is why she always referred to outpatient visits as "institutionalizations."

MAIN SUBJECT THREAD: MY WORST BREAKUP
So I got to the hospital and there was Jane. Jane had thick bandages wrapped around her wrists. I asked Jane how she was feeling. She said she felt like she had only 4 megs of RAM installed in her system and had been trying to run Photoshop 7.0 all day. I knew what she meant.

RE: GEEKS AND SUICIDE
My processor has frozen up before too. Hasn't everyone's? I zapped the PRAM, I rebuilt the Desktop, I ran a diagnostic -- nothing helped. Sometimes all of us just reach the point in our lives where we have to say fuck it and simply archive all our files and completely reload the system software from scratch.

RE(2): THE PROBLEM WITH THIS
Sometimes your old software will become completely corrupted from the process and you have no choice but to just throw it away.

MAIN SUBJECT THREAD: MY WORST BREAKUP
Jane said We need to talk. Jane said that she's a Motorola 68020 processor and that I'm a G3. They're made by the same company but they just don't mix. Jane said that she's a SCSI port and that I'm a USB plug. I said, "Yes, but they make converters for that now." Jane just held her wrists in the air and said, "Yeah, but Microcenter closed early tonight."

RE: DO YOU MISS HER?

RE:(REPOST) DO YOU MISS HER?

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MAIN SUBJECT THREAD: MY WORST BREAKUP
Jane lives in San Francisco now. She works for Sega. Jane makes $96,000 a year and owns almost half a million in stock options. I'm told she still drives her Saturn because she wants to stay in touch with the little people. Jane was on the development team for Sega Dreamcast 1.0. When you load in the game "Tomb Raider 3" and, right at the main screen, hit "B-A-A-B-C-B-A left arrow right arrow left arrow," a photo of Jane will appear on the screen. Jane's wearing a Sleater-Kinney t-shirt and flashing the gang symbol for Pi that she invented, which consists of three fingers down, one thumb sideways, and four fingers down. A message appears below her photo. It says, "Many thanks to Norton Utilities. I couldnt've done it without you." In the computer industry, this is known as an Easter Egg.

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