You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2007.
I know, I know, “live-blogging” I said; but this is the part where all of you mill around in the front, gets some alcoholic drinks, and come back for some plane blogging tomorrow. Here’s another thousand words to tide you over:
Night, Hi-Chicago 10:42 Central Time
When I left you, I was watching The Hustler and I only got about five minutes into it before we started to land. It’s been cloudy in Chicago, but the torrential rainfall that delayed us and canceled other flights around the country were not in sight.
It is not a dry heat here.
As a came out of the jetway, I got hit with how itty bitty the airports I normally have dealings with really are. Here, throngs of people, and me, mixing it up with them.
I found the subway with relative ease, and noticed something very quickly – Germans are everywhere. I found them on the subway, in the hostel, on the street. It’s an invasion and they are confused and quick to get irritated, yet bound and determined to see the world. This amuses me because I can understand them muttering about the inadequacies of our systems. “Ick versteh’ nit wie das hier geht. Irgandwie blöd das ganze System. Was machen wir jetzt?”
Mid-Flight, Thursday, 7/26/07 11:46 Mountain Time
I am writing this post at thirty-one thousand feet, the sky is clear, but I’m not sure where we are. I fell asleep a bit ago and trying to calculate it via the time on my computer and the time that the pilot specified since I didn’t bring a watch, so we might only have a half hour. Or an hour, this whole computation involves numbers, and English majors need none of that.
My lands, I leave for Chicago in nearly 8 hours. Be prepared: Live blogging!
Put him on a city street,
He will scuff his anxious feet,
Shiver with the alien cold,
Look bewildered, helpless, old.
Put him on the gaunt hillside
Where his fathers worked and died,
He will straighten like a tree
Grow erect and proud and free.
Leave him blindfolded, let him roam.
Every path will lead him home.
- Author Unknown
Yesterday was fondue night. Last Christmas, I randomly mentioned to my Mom that I would really love a fondue set, whereto she walked into the kitchen and pulled out a complete 1972 fondue kit. “It was five bucks. Take it.” I should have mentioned something more difficult, but knowing my Mom and how she knows me, she would have found that something at a yardsale as well.
The kit is great: a small pot with a wood-handle, a slightly ornate curved iron stand, a burner, and a wooden stand. (Wood? Burner? It was definitely 1972.) The downside of having a 1972 fondue kit is that the burner actually, you know, requires risky material. As the fact stands that me walking into a kitchen is risky business in itself, I knew the burning might be a problem (For example, the chicken I made last night caused me to set off the fire alarm with J once again yelling at me that I don’t need to cook everything on high.)
A recent IM conversation, littered with entirely too many lol’s:
Me: Man, I could use a drink.
E: Here.
Me: Hmm?
E: *A Drink*
Me: Mystical and unnamed.
Me: Like taking candy from a stranger methinks.
E: Bah. You know me. I’m offended.
Me: Lol.
Me: I’m just saying.
Me: *quickly takes Drink*
Me: *adds one mana point*
E: Lol!
E: You know, life would be weirder if it was an RPG.
Me: So much cooler.
Me: God, the awesome hair I would have.
E: “I can’t see what’s coming up to kill me!”
Me: You just wander into people’s house and take their gold.
Me: And there are no toilets.
Me: Lol.
E: “Why hasn’t anybody ever seen or opened this random chest of gold? Kickass?”
Me: Kickass!
Me: *takes gold*
Me: Your character is now too heavy.
Me: *puts down gold*
Me: Damn.
Me: Lol.
Me: I’m highly amused.
E: “Can you flavor my mana potion this time? I’m sick of blue.”
Me: “Mana margarita!”
Me: “A round on me!”
E: Sweet Jebus.
Me: “I need to get rid of some gold.”
Me: Lol.
E: Indeed.
E: “The big dude in this party smells really bad.”
Me: “But he takes a lot of hit points.”
Me: “We have to keep him.”
E: “Shit, my hit points are crappy.”
Me: “Here, have a magic feather for that.”
E: “I suddenly feel a wave of…. EXPERIENCE!”
Me: Dude, we ARE dorks.
Appetizer
On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being highest) how much do enjoy watching sports on television?
0 and negative numbers not allowed? I’m not allowed to show my distaste in the manner most appropriate here.
Soup
If you could completely memorize any one work of fiction, which one would you pick?
Just to be difficult and utterly pointless, I would pick Remembrance of Things Past by Proust.
Salad
What is your favorite breakfast food?
The adult answer would be an English Muffin with butter, but currently my willful inner child stomps her feet and demands Trix.
Main Course
Name something fun you can do for less than $10.00.
Sex. Free!
Family friendly answer? Charades. My gods, how I love charades. I’m a mad charades demon.
Dessert
How long does it usually take you to fall asleep?
I would guess about ten minutes. I usally tend to do the random association thought process which gets me thinking about how hot Alan Rickman is to split pea soup - and it all makes perfect sense.
Yesterday was my first day on top of a horse. During the last semester a classmate of mine vocalized her passion for horses and mentioned how she taught people how to ride. The last day of class, I questioned her if, maybe, just maybe, I could get to ride horses at some point.
I was put on a flecked (flea-bitten was the terminology for the coloring I believe) white and a brown horse that was over twenty years old, complacent and well-trained, named Roger. The week previously when I had checked out the ranch, I noticed him being ridden by six year-old and who which, when being groomed, fell somewhat asleep.
As I climbed aboard old Roger and he walked at a slow pace, I started picking up how to sit, how to hold the reins, how to find my center of balance. Thankfully, I’m not afraid of heights, but I did mention to my classmate, who was teaching me (darn fabulously I might add), “I could see how falling off could be not so happy.” That leads me to need to share this quote I found, which just makes me laugh at just the politeness of the wording:
In the life of every horseman occasions will arise when it is desirable or necessary to leave the saddle in a hurry and without formality.
Religion is a smile on a dog.
- Edie Brickell And The New Bohemians, “What I am”
A tenet of procrastination is distraction. This summer has been chalk full of items that would overwhelm and befuddle the common grad student. With attempts to read classic literature such as Atlas Shrugged (Great book!) and On the Road (What, I can’t seem to get into this book? No - impossible.), I also have a stack of programs and literature on the learning on Chinese, and a headlong engagement to ride actual, Honest-To-God horses. (Are there any other?)
Sure, I have a conference in less than three months that I have not prepared for at all – does that bother me at all? No… Why? Distraction.
A lackluster couple of days later, I come back to tend to my blog. As I think about this phrase, I think about how that is a both accurate and inaccurate way of addressing a blog.
On the accurate side, you can think that every time you sit down in front of the screen, you hold in your muddy hands a plant. Sometimes it’s a weed that you bring, sometimes a wilted flower that, when stretching its roots in the virtual soil, straightens and exhales a perfume of relief and wonder.
You wonder about your weeds. You wonder sometimes why you plant them, why you’d like to see them bloom. There is a wonderment in sitting among your flowers, then breaking the stem of a dandelion, and making a wish as its seed drift away from your flow of air. You wonder if the weeds sometimes mean more to you than the flowers, if they actually help you more than the flowers, and if they perhaps do less harm.
With the inaccuracies… well, I suppose whittling everything in life down to imagery can’t be the most helpful can it?
Writing well is the best revenge.
-Dorothy Parker
There was no Friday’s Feast officially per se, but someone put some questions up in the comments and I had to be a follower. Tomorrow: Fishing pictures!
Appetizer - What was the first job you ever had?
I did technical support for my high school in the high hopes that I could get to work with my crush. It, both the crush and the job, went smashingly. Well, until they hired a perky female overlord who my favorite teacher in High School named Ms. Bubbles.
Soup - (Taken from Bravo’s Inside the Actor’s Studio) - Name a profession you have always wanted to try.
Given that the idea of figuring out what profession I’m going to fall into, I mean, make my career path, is currently my profession…let’s see… I’ll go with something that I would have wanted to do but sadly, my body is not cut out for it - I would have been an Air Force pilot.
Or a jockey. Hmm. What does that say about me?
Salad (also from the Actor’s Studio) - Name a profession you would NEVER want to try.
Chef. That would be bad news. Fun, no doubt, but not lucrative with the kind of insurance I would need.
Entree - (also from the Actor’s Studio) - What is your favorite sound in the world?
Okay. *leans forward and whispers to you* Don’t repeat this, but baby laughter.
Dessert - (and from the Actor’s Studio) - If there is a Heaven, what would you like to hear from God when you arrive?
I would like to hear a female voice say, “See, that wasn’t so bad. Have a brownie! Oh, and the cake here? Awesome. And by awesome, not so much on the Wrath of God part, but ‘This’ll go straight to my hips’. Wait… We’re incorporeal, so I guess that doesn’t apply…hmm. Awesome!” [She'd be highly talkative in my imagination.]
The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.
-Thucydides
As you read this, I’ll be out arguing with an inanimate object, namely my fishing rod. I’ve decided to take this July 4th to go to the mountains, steal my Dad’s portable fishing rod, buy some icky bait and go fishing.
I have me mah license and everythin’. It’s terribly exciting.
“I have a license to fish! Dude! …But that’s not terribly ‘Bond’ is it?”
“Well…it sorta is a license to kill.”
“Oh, huh…Yeah! Heck yeah!”
During the last weekend, I told E that I wanted to find a ticker for my blog. I wanted to find something that would count up and would have a catchy title.
“How about ‘Clean since last Wednesday?’” I asked, laughingly. He replied with, “I don’t think that would give the best connotations.”
I sullenly agreed and then nixed my plan for a counter. The date has been flexing its muscle more in my mind today. It’s the sickness of the withdrawal starting to take hold and my body is readying itself with sublime shudders that are just under the skin, just stray of the visible spectrum.
The weather was nearly unbearable today. The heat became a wall that intensified, oven-like, while running errands after work in my car. As the sweat came in not just drops, but rivulets down my body, I thought not only of how I was becoming not only dehydrated, but how I was also in strange state of detox.
Okay I’m being a bit lazy. Actually, I’ve been wanting to post this first one for a while and doing so today gives me time to type my other post for today (Two, TWO posts - AH AH AH).
From Dresden Codak, “Rule 110″:
So this sums up perfectly how I interact with men, in my mind and in reality, even including the airship. This girl even has my hair.
From Russell’s Teapot:
This one is for the more heathen and people less likely to be offended in my audience (not always one and the the same) but you know what, even if it offends you, it’s still damn funny.
As I sat next to my Dad, a few minutes before he was going to be wheeled away, he reflected on the double chocolate cake I made earlier in the week and then went on to talk about the different sorts of German cake that he had eaten: my Oma’s Buttercreme Torte and Bienstich, a small cake covered with almond and butter glaze. He groaned remembering the taste of them when they warm.
“If I only had one food to eat for the rest of my life,” he said, “…I think it would be cake.” His eyes widened, even though they had sunk deeply into their cavities, and his voice grew a slight bit louder, “Do you know how many varieties of cake there are?”
Do I ever.
