is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not On The Way To Anywhere: Vermont, Amherst. Plus: Frost Heave!
Not On The Way To Anywhere: Vermont, Amherst. Plus: Frost Heave!
My relatives in Vermont live on one of those roads that isn�t paved and that you have to get to by driving through an incredibly cute covered bridge. See?
But once you get through that bridge, it�s all downhill even though it�s uphill. If you get car sick, watch out, because on this rural dirt road you will soon feel the need to frost heave!
On the way to Vermont I kept seeing signs that said �Frost Heave Ahead� and wondering what the heehaw that meant. I also marveled at just how bad the condition of some of the roads was, especially the dirt road up to my aunt and uncle�s house (which one finds by knowing it is 3.3 miles past the covered bridge. But then one still drives by it because its driveway is not so easy to see. Then one turns around and comes back and finds it. All the while one�s car is being tossed around by the road like a little plaything.). Parts of the road were so muddy that my car got pushed to the side by the mud. Other parts had bizarre and oh-so-sudden upcroppings or downcroppings such that it was a very bouncy ride indeed. In fact it tore one of the rubber thingies that holds the muffler onto my car, so now I have to go back to the auto parts store and do the dumb-girl act where I go �I need one of those rubber thingies that holds the muffler onto the car for a 1986 Audi 4000.� Bummer.
Anyway, it turns out that those bizarre upcroppings and downcroppings were FROST HEAVES. A frost heave, apparently, isn�t what happens to you after you eat at Wendy�s (though that is precisely what happened to me the last time I had fries and a Frostee, I tell you). A frost heave is what happens in spring when water in the ground that was frozen unfreezes and then freezes and then unfreezes and therefore expands and contracts and expands, and makes dirt roads get all fuckadoodled up. (Actually, if you follow the link, you'll learn, as I did, that frost heave is what happens to paved roads when the dirt beneath them gets fuckadoodled up. I guess what happens to plain old dirt roads is just "frost action." Had I known that last weekend, I could have implemented a wider array of language-misuse-based jokes. Because....)
By the end of the weekend I had, by means of my own constant usage, persuaded everyone to refer to vomiting in general as �frost heaving,� so that my Uncle Lew told a story about how driving over route 292 in a car makes the Cat named Poo frost heave. The cat named Fred, pictured here, is made of sterner stuff. He has been known to sit on Poo in order to calm her down.
My cousin Gail and her husband Doug and their new baby Miles came by for the day on Saturday, as did my Grandma Etta. It was fun to see them all, and we ate lots of good food throughout the day.
We also discussed what it is like to live somewhere that is not on the way to somewhere else. What it means is that you don�t get very many houseguests, like you might get if you lived in, say, New York or San Francisco or Chicago. Or, I hope, Philadelphia, since that seems to be where I�ll be living for two years starting in August. (More on that later.) Amherst is one of those places that is not on the way to anywhere else. The only person from the west coast who has visited me is my Mom. The only person from New York who has visited me is Paul. Marilyn and Heidi have both been here multiple times (because they live closest, and are good of heart). I am not attempting to cast aspersions on non-visitors. I�m just saying that when you live somewhere that is not on the way to anywhere else, you don�t get so many visitors. Here I offer pictorial evidence (the view from my guest room) that my aunt and uncle�s house is not at all on the way to anywhere else. Except Canada.
So it looks like I�ll be outside Philadelphia at Haverford College for two years as a postdoctoral fellow there. I�ll teach courses in their Philosophy department and try to write a book. It�s possible I�ll get an offer for a Philosophy job from Bennington College later this week, but I think I need to do the postdoc thing for various reasons. Bennington is charming, I really like the faculty and students I met there, they will probably offer more money than Haverford, but they are outside the tenure system, and also very isolated, and I�m not sure that it will bring out the best in me to be even more isolated than I am in Amherst. Plus, in the Shire I�d have to worry about whether Hans Blix was going to get eaten by a wolf or an orc or something.
In Philadelphia I�ll be very close to friends I have in, well, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and New York City. Then I can go do silly things like the weekend before last when Paul, Linda and I went to a New Wave Club for a few hours and then went to a new semi-secret Speakeasy-type club where we drank VERY TASTY drinks that were made out of GIN and MAGIC. Normally I don�t drink gin, but somehow the magic made it all OK.
12:00 a.m. - April 19, 2005
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
