Friends and Frustrations

There are 4-5000 languages currently spoken on Earth, plus several times that number of dead languages that exist in written form. Most of them don't use the ASCII system of 48 letters and 25 or so punctuation symbols, and most of those that do include some letters modified with haceks, umlauts, circimflexes, tildes, acutes, braves, strikes and other marks.

Given that every country in the world now uses wordprocessors, and most users in most countries use more than one language, why is it so bloody difficult to make your wordprocessor work with non-ASCII text?

Esperanto includes 12 characters - six upper and six lower case - that are modified slightly from the familliar roman alphabet. With today's advanced software, in today's world that's so aware of global diversity, why can't I get OpenOffice Writer to display "Æ" when I type ALT+C?

That symbol is a capital C with a circumflex (hat) over the top if your system is configured to recognise the Latin-3 coding, though it'll show as an AE digraph if you're using the default Latin-1. Go here to download "SudEuro" (Southern European) Latin-3 fonts that display Esperanto characters correctly, as well as most European languages - The English part of the coding is, of course, unchanged, so your English will display as normal.

Now, given that it's a 5 second operation to install the fonts, and typing in alphabets other than pure ASCII is what most of the world needs to do...how come I've spent two hours unsuccessfully trying to set my globally aware wordprocessor to do what a typewriter can do with the "backspace" key?

Perhaps you're asking why don't I use Alt Codes? Hold down the Alt key and type in a four digit code for the character you need. Two reasons why not: First, I don't really want to use five keystrokes to get one character, and second, it only works on the numeric keypad to the right of the keyboard - and I'm using a laptop, which doesn't have the extra number keys.

Why not create a macro to insert (say) a C with a circumflex when you press CTRL+C? I've tried. I've spent an hour trying to get OpenOffice to do just that. And it won't. I don't know why, but it won't. I think I recall that MS Word can do it, so I may install that.

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I haven't seen Mark S in around nine months. He's someone I went to school with (far too many years ago), who drops back into my life at unpredictable intervals. He's not very bright, thinks I'm an absolute genius, sympathetic and understanding, not successful but eternally optimistic with women, smokes enough tabacco to give a herd of elephants lung cancer, and spent his 20s trying to decide whether he was gay. I had sex with him a few times before he decided he wasn't.

His other main characteristic is complete unreliability. If he arranges to meet at 8pm, he might turn up at 9:30 - or else phone two weeks later to say he was delayed and promises to call later that evening to arrange meeting up, which usually doesn't happen.

As I write this at 10pm, he's two hours late and his phone's switched off - or else he just forgot to recharge it again.

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Paul T spent 40 minutes on the phone telling me why the most wonderful woman he's ever been involved with is about to dump him. The short version is: he can feel it coming.

He spent the early 90s (before I knew him) madly in love with her, and she with him. It was a chaotic, but ecstatic time. Then she dumped him, and he spent a decade recovering. Three months ago, she divorced her terminally boring husband, got back in contact with Paul, and they spent two months being madly happy again. Then he started to get worried that it was all going wrong.

Something happened in her life (a crisis - I don't know what) that took her attention away from him. She responded to his letters and text messages with brief, noncommittal replies. He has a chioce between going stir crazy with not knowing whether they have a future, and becoming wrist-slittingly depressed at the prospect of being alone for the rest of his life. He says he's chosen the latter option.

So far as I can see, what's really happening is: He always expects things to go wrong. So he gets paranoid that his unexpected second chance of happiness is slipping away because she's losing interest. So he fires off a series of communications verbosely detailing his fears and asking for reassurance. She doesn't have the time or energy to deal with his insecurities on top of whatever's messing up her own life at the moment, so she becomes temporarily distant. Which makes him more paranoid than ever. So he writes off more and more desperately, she she responds more and more perfunctorily.

In short: He can't live without her, and she can't live with him needing her so badly right now.

I'm tempted to pick him up and shake him, shouting "Listen, you great dozy pillock! You love her and she loves you! She doesn't care that you've got no money, she doesn't care that you're over 40, and she doesn't care that you're an overemotional twit who refuses to believe anyone genuinely likes them! She really does love you and really does want to be with you. Now stop working yourself into a suicidal state, and stop bombarding her with demands for the love you know she already feels!"

But there's two reasons why I can't do this. First, he's too heavy for me to lift. Second, he wouldn't listen. He never listens, not to me, not to his other friends, not even to her when she says she loves him.

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A friend is someone you spend a lot of time quietly forgiving, but don't mind doing it. An old friend is someone you still forgive, but you've been doing it so long you're forgotten why you started. Your best friend is either the one who annoys you least, or who you forgive most quickly - hopefully both.

More than one person has advised me: "If in doubt, marry your best friend." Not someone you'd walk on hot coals for, not someone who makes you feel like a silly, giddy 16 year old. But someone who you can always forgive, who always forgives you, who you don't absolutely need to be with, but whose company you always enjoy.

Well, that rules out Mark and Paul, so I won't be marrying them anytime soon. But I am looking forward to spending an evening with C tomorrow, possibly watching some of the worst and cheapest horror movies ever made.

I'll have to introduce him to Angoroj - probably the only horror movie filmed in Esperanto.

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Update: It's an hour later, and Mark has just called. He'd fallen asleep. Gah!