is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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SCHUMP ting! boiiing! CLOMP.
SCHUMP ting! boiiing! CLOMP.
On Sunday morning I traveled from Austin to San Francisco on Saturday night. That�s right. I had to wake up so early that I was waiting for Supershuttle while Austiners were on their way home from a night of drinking. When Marco and Evany picked me up at the airport at 10am SF time, I had already been awake for nine hours. By the time we met Caroleen, hung out, and ate some brunchy at Pork Store while looking at the very very pretty he-waitron, I had been awake for thirteen hours, and I felt FINE. But then about an hour later I totally crashed and slept for three hours. Then I woke up and did some unpacking and organizing and blah-blahing, watched some TV, and went back to sleep, and now it is Monday.
During my nap yesterday I became aware of the upstairs neighbors� noise two times. Last night while I slept I became aware of their noise four times. It was nothing exceptional. That is just how they are. LOUD. And they never stop to think about how their actions affect other human beings. NEVER.
They have some sort of bed set-up that has to be rolled out every night and then rolled back in every morning. Smart, for apartment-dwellers. But man, is it loud. It should be against the law for people in apartments to have no carpeting AND very loud rolling-thumping furniture routines that they have to perform at 1am and 7am. (They don�t sleep much, the neighbors. Once they get in their loudly convertible bed for the six hours of sleep, they watch a couple of hours of LOUD television!) Anyway, every night it�s SCHUMP! Then roooollllll CLOMP! And then they have to walk around the bed wearing clogs for a while getting things ready. Then in the morning it�s straight into the clogs and EEEHHAAA squeak! rooooooolll! SCHUMP! Truth be told, however, it�s the TV habit and the loud talking and constant music-listening (plus clog-walking) that is really bothersome. I�m sure I have annoying habits as heard through the ceiling and floor, too. But at least I am aware of how sound constraints change (or ought to change) with the different hours of the day and night. And I don�t wear shoes in the house.
Abrupt topic change.
At the airport in Washington DC one of the security checkers said to me, �Are you on TV?� I said, �What?� Him: �Are you on TV?� I realized what he meant was not �Are you being filmed live right now and appearing on television, all unbeknownst to yourself?� but rather, �Are you on a television show?� or �Are you Serena Altschul?� I actually get that all the time when I have blonde hair. It�s weird, because I don�t really look like Serena Altschul at all, except that we both have short blonde hair and stubby ski-jump noses. I think she would be as bummed to hear that people mistake me for her as I am.
I have recently been wondering whether wild turkeys are ever killed by falling icicles. I know they can run faster than Shaquille O�Neal and everything, but icicles fall really quickly and without warning. Whenever the wild turkeys are in my Amherst backyard I am hoping they aren�t hanging around too close to the eaves, because the icicles hanging therefrom are huge and they form, start to melt, fall and reform daily. It would be sad if this pattern of icicle death and rebirth produced wild turkey death, though perhaps it would be morbidly picturesque to find a icicle-riven turkey corpse laying like an offering on the ground next to the creepy old backyard graves. I, however, sincerely hope that all the turkeys live long happy lives that end without the help of icicles or slaughter.
Many many times each day in Amherst, Hans Blix (the cat, not the U.N. weapons inspector) and I are startled by the huge SCHUMP SHHWWWISH CLOMP of the ice formations dislodging themselves from portions of the roof, sliding down the roof, then dropping to the ground. It�s LOUD. It happens regularly but at irregular unpredictable intervals, so it never stops being alarming, especially for Hans Blix, whose faculty of reason is not so well-developed, and so for him there is a whole lot of investigating that has to happen every time the noise repeats. Sometimes instead of SCHUMP SHHWWWISH CLOMP we get a SCHUMP ting! boiiing! CLOMP of ice sliding, then hitting a bank of icicles hanging over a window, which then break loose (ting!) and bounce (boiiing!) off the window screen on the way down to the ground.
In other news, Amherst College has MAGIC coke machines. I discovered this one day when I phoned Nasser at his office to ask whether he would give me a dollar if I walked over to his office. I wanted a coke but all I had was a twenty and I didn�t want to walk all the way to town to get a fountain Pepsi because it was fucking-A cold outside. (Usually walking out of my way to get a fountain Pepsi is just what I do, it being worth it and all. But I was willing to settle for drinking Coke out of a can in order to avoid frostbite.) As luck would have it, Nasser was about to go teach, so he said he would meet me by the Coke machine with a dollar. When I got there he slid his faculty card through a little card reader and pressed the Coke button and out came a can of Coke. Then I realized that MY faculty card can get me Cokes and other non-nutritious snack foods for FREE and MAGICALLY whenever I want! (Yes, it�s not really free, and it�s not really magic, but it sure is CONVENIENT! And apparently this is what qualifies as EXCITING in my current life.) Nasser wasn�t sure whether the card readers worked, so that�s why he showed up with a dollar instead of just telling me that I�m an uninformed idiot wholly unaware of the magic of the world.
The h2so4 website has been updated for awhile, with new content, but I forget to tell you.
When I got back to San Francisco there were six computerized messages on my answering machine from the county jail, asking if I would accept a collect call from a prisoner. So either some poor guy or girl is stuck in jail and trying to reach someone and dialing the wrong number, or some old friend of mine who doesn�t know I�m mostly living in Massachusetts is calling me thinking I can afford to bail him or her out of jail! Either way, there is some wrong-thinking on the other end of that phone line.
Now I�m off to Burger Joint to have lunch with Dad. The weather is SO GREAT here today. I�m telling you, snow doesn�t even EXIST!
11:36 a.m. - March 14, 2005
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