As I write this, Juan Ignacio is being a nuisance and trying to get his mother’s attention, while she’s enjoying a rare moment of relaxation and watching a film I recommended on the VCR. I notice Ignacio has been brought up not to accept his mother’s relaxing, having fun, or even being ill; when she does any of these things, he gets more demanding than usual, complaining and sulking intolerably. There’s an unhealthy equilibrium in this household and how it functions, the product of a set of habits or patterns of behavior that don’t do anyone any good. These patterns have been adopted gradually through “chance and necessity,” and the idea of altering even one of them leads to unease, nervousness, or even a crisis in any of the original members of the family unit.

September 28

I ought to get ahold of some phrases for practicing letters with “stems,” the sort of thing I used when I was learning to type. “European port,” “I’d like a table,” “quite a squint,” “tomato ketchup,” “fool’s gold.” But monotonous activities like that are so tedious. I’d rather make slower progress—a few steps forward, a few steps back—and often let my writing get smaller or more misshapen as my hand races wildly across the page in pursuit of my thoughts. Because I can’t stand repetitive, routine tasks, and—in writing, if not in life—want my experiences to be somehow new, unexpected, adventurous. Like, for example, my investigations into a computer whose instruction manual is incomplete.

Earlier this week, after hours and days of hard work and research, and various (literally) thunderous failures, I persuaded the computer to make a noise. Then I managed to do it more consistently, knowing what I was doing, and yesterday I was finally able to make music (a basic, rudimentary little tune, but music nonetheless), all without the manual so much as mentioning the word “sound.” I managed it thanks to a program in BASIC with a few seconds of music in it, which I was able to “open” and “list.” The hardest part was making sense of the lengthy program code, identifying the part that referred to the music, and working out the meaning of a series of statements beginning with enigmatic words.

September 29