I’ve received several e-mail messages from the makers of ooVoo, which is apparently what all the kewl kids will be using for IM and video chat. The final release launches this week and I’d love to give it a try. Except I don’t own a webcam. I guess I always assumed that nobody out there would want to look at my ugly mug when conversing with me. But perhaps I should reconsider.

One thing about ooVoo’s marketing efforts made me smile. A cute British woman from ooVoo named Molly sent me a video message to inform me of the software’s official release. In the course of doing so, she referred to me as a “leading blogger”. Really? 60 hits per day makes me a leading blogger? I suspect you’re making a blatant appeal to my ego, Molly. But, please, do go on.

According to this survey,  approximately 20% of Americans must’ve been absent from school on the day they taught that the Earth orbits around the Sun. Or maybe these are the unfortunate souls who were home-schooled by well-meaning but completely deluded fundamentalist parents. And you know what’s sad? These statistics don’t even have the power to shock me anymore. When the grand opening of a creationist “museum” gets oodles of press coverage and three major-party presidential candidates proudly declare their belief in magic, it’s folly to pretend that a good portion of Americans don’t share these medieval worldviews. I blame the Europeans. If you guys hadn’t been so eager to deport your religious fanatics a few hundred years ago, the majority of decent and informed Americans wouldn’t have to contend with their irksome and embarrassing descendants today. Thanks a bunch.

From the Department-of-No-Fucking-Way, here’s a story about a young man in a wheelchair who was crossing the street when his handlebars somehow became embedded in the grille of an oncoming truck. He was carried along at speeds of 50 MPH before the police finally managed to inform the oblivious driver that something was amiss. Remarkably, nobody was hurt.

I will not be at all surprised when this incident is recreated in the next Jackass movie.

In the New Yorker a couple issues back, they ran a profile of a Microsoft engineer who is attempting to record and preserve every aspect of his daily life. Every e-mail he’s written, every photograph that he’s taken or appeared in, he even records his conversations with a small digital recorder. He seems to think that before long, everyone will be documenting their lives on the fly.

I think I’ve previously mentioned my compulsion for saving old e-mails and archiving my college papers and atrocious poetry. And I have sometimes daydreamed what it would be like to have some sort of brain augment to capture, store, and catalog every second of waking life. Think of all the facts I could harvest from such a record. How many hours of my life have I spent in front of the computer? How many kisses have I received and from whom? Did I really say that awful thing to you that one time? Imagine if each one of us was constantly and subconsciously compiling a personal almanac that could be referenced at any time. It could be a great way to correct misunderstandings (“See, I did return that tennis racket I borrowed from you.”). But it might also drive home the unceasing and cumulative tedium of existence (I’ve spent how many hours of my life in the bathroom?”).

For people with severe physical disabilities like mine, the fear of institutionalization is never far removed from our thoughts. It looms at the periphery of our daily lives, an ominous reminder of the precariousness of our independence. The closest I’ve come to institutionalization is when I was thirteen and first put on the ventilator. Hospital officials suggested that I be put in a facility for medically fragile children, which would have required my parents to surrender legal custody of me. My parents refused and that was the end of the discussion.

Through luck or circumstance, I’ve never been in serious danger of being placed in a facility since then. But I recognize that my comfortable living situation hangs by a tenuous thread. If I suddenly lost a couple nurses, I would be in serious trouble. I don’t have much family in the area to provide backup and it takes time to find replacement staff. I’m fairly confident I could figure something out, but it would be touch-and-go for a while.

Remaining independent and keeping myself out of a facility is probably one of the primary driving forces of my life. It takes precedence over any other long-term goals I might have. I can’t have a career, I can’t see the world, I can’t have a relationship if I’m warehoused in a nursing home. Fortunately, it’s not an immediate concern at the moment. It’s more of a low-level anxiety that can usually be ignored, but it will most likely never go away.