Dream Job?

I had a dream last night that I was running a successful business.

What was I doing?

Teaching adults how to engage in dramatic play (e.g. "make-believe") with their children.

Hmmm. Wonder if there's a market for this kind of thing.

What Would *You* Sing For Simon?

So I was doing my yoga today, like I do (almost) every day, and American Idol: Rewind was on in the background.

It made me think, like it does every time I happen to catch it (while doing the dishes or folding clothes): given the chance, what would I sing in front of Simon Cowell?

I'm not a bad singer. I've got a BA in music, so I know a bit about pitch, tone, and rhythm. But the question stymies me, every time. What song could I sing that would be good enough to impress Simon?

Or, rephrased: what song could I sing that would make me sound like an American Idol?

That, after all, seems to be the thing that trips up 50% of the contestants. (The other 45% can't match pitch, and the remaining 5% get picked for the show.)

If I were going to pick something that I could sing well, under pressure, I might choose "Not a Day Goes By" or something from the Cole Porter oeuvre. But one does not become an American Idol by singing showtunes.

So it would have to be a... sigh... popular song.

Madonna? Christina? Britney?

Couldn't I become the first American Idol to win by singing "Jam Tomorrow, Jam Yesterday?"

In the end I'd probably pick something like Jewel's "You Were Meant For Me" or Anna Nalick's "Breathe (2 a.m.)," though neither of those seem like they would inspire American idolatry.

Or I could channel my inner nerd (inner? what inner?) and sing Jason Mraz's "Wordplay." With the combination of sexy glasses and articulate diction, I might be able to garner the xkcd demographic vote.

Sigh. Josh Cohen had it easy.

What would *you* sing for Simon?



Editor's Note: If Blue doesn't ever actually look at the TV, it means she can truthfully say that she doesn't watch American Idol: Rewind. Which, of course, she doesn't.

Just Like A Culturally Unaware Neighbor

Right now I'm on page 448 of Deathly Hallows... but I can only read so much in one day.

Anyway, I promised you a story. It's a long story -- I'm sorry. My stories tend to run long. The ridiculous stuff happens near the end, if you want to skip ahead. ^__^

Every year I have an annual meeting with my insurance agent. This meeting is theoretically to overview my policy; but, as anyone who's dealt with insurance companies knows, it's merely an excuse to get me into the office for a one-on-one sales pitch. Great.

In the office, however, I was struck by how much my insurance agent had changed since I last saw her. In a year her hair had gone from honey-bottle blonde to a tepid gray, and she had become very thin. She seemed to be moving a little too quickly, and without forethought; her head and shoulders often jerked as if they had been planning to start off in different directions.

She presented me with the option of increasing my life insurance policy, which I quickly explained I was not going to accept, as the only reason I have life insurance is to get the multi-line discount on my car insurance. Either way I have no dependents, so there's little point to paying more now for a theoretically bigger kickback.

The meeting should have "ended" in five minutes, but (having once been a telemarketer) I knew that my agent was going to take a few more shots at turning my "no" into a "yes," and I wasn't going to be allowed to leave until she did. Had this been a phone conversation, I would have hung up; but I couldn't very well just walk out of the room. (That, of course, being the "point" of the annual meeting.)

Her next gambit was the expected "well, you still don't have renter's insurance" play -- and I explained once again that the total value of my possessions was probably $700, at best, and I was uninterested. She proposed that we make a chart to determine the "true value!" of my belongings, but I didn't care to go over my thrift-store lifestyle with her and declined.

And I put my hand on my purse, hoping it would signal the end of this meeting, but my agent turned around, typed a few numbers into her computer, and whirled back, eyes gleaming.

"Have you ever considered personal liability insurance?"

"What's that?" I asked, simply because I was curious. I like to know what things are before salespeople try to convince me to buy them.

"Well..." she began, and then she affected a smile. "Suppose you... I mean, you said you were traveling to India?"

(I had told her this during the "building rapport" portion of our meeting. It did not inspire me towards any rapport.)

"So," she continued, "what if something... I mean I don't want to say that anything would happen, but suppose you were to..."

I suddenly understood what personal liability insurance was.

"Do you mean if I got drunk and punched someone in the face?" I asked, completely deadpan.

My agent was almost floored. "Well, I don't mean... yes, that's what the insurance would be for, but I don't think you're going to do a thing like that."

"Neither do I," I said. "I think we'll be all right."

Check and mate, since the agent had just told me that I didn't actually need the product she was trying to sell. But she had one more shot.

"Tutoring!" she cried. "Will you be doing any tutoring in India?"

"I'll be teaching," I said.

"That's like tutoring!"

Yes, it is, I thought wryly, but did not say anything.

"So what if... well, what if something were to happen between you and one of your students?"

"I'm sorry?" I asked, even though I knew perfectly well where she was going. I just wanted to clarify that my insurance agent was using the sales technique of proposing I might commit indiscretions with my future students.

"You know, suppose something unfortunate were to happen between you and a student! You wouldn't actually have to do it, the student could just decide to accuse you!"

I was relieved to know that she was offering me the option of not committing said indiscretions.

She continued. "Does India have insurance?"

"I... believe so," I said meekly.

"Then they must have lawsuits!"

Yes, I thought, although everyone rides to the courthouse on elephants and tigers.

"And I would hate to see you get thrown in some Indian jail! I don't know what Indian jails are like, but I'm sure they're much worse than American ones!"

That was the end of the meeting, as far as I was concerned; I declined her offer, thanked her, got up, and left. I wonder if my agent knew exactly everything she had said during that meeting. I can't help feeling sorry, a little, because she had looked so down on her luck, but all the same, her sales tactics were so... ridiculous. Ah, well. *__^

Musings on a Weekend Visit

A comment, during the first hour of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue: "Um... not much is happening in this film, is it?"

***********

A shopping story. Without divulging any more than is necessary, remember that I am a fairly petite person who is small but by no means skinny (that honor is reserved for my sister, built straight up and down like a model).

Which means that in most generic department stores I am a size 6, and in the juniors section (where I still occasionally hunt, although less and less often) a definite 8. "Juniors," after all, are not supposed to have hips.

Anyway. At Ann Taylor (where S. took me, or -- more accurately -- I took him, since we quickly tired of exploring ill-fitting options at Target), I am a size 2.

No, not even that. A 2 petite.

I would say "be jealous" but I am myself appalled. (How would my sister, who is a department store size 0, manage? Does Ann Taylor make negative sizes, or would a person so slight slip through the cracks, um... literally?)

It also occurs to me that fudging the sizes requires the customer to spend more time in the store and carry more items into the dressing room, increasing the possibility of multiple purchases. Great. Because there's nothing quite as exciting as being manipulated.

***********

A comment, in the middle of the film: "This concerto is awfully depressing-sounding for a celebration of the unification of Europe." (Not to mention that it doesn't seem to actually be a concerto at all, as there is no featured solo instrument.)

***********

The whole reason we were out shopping in the first place was because we had learned that the battery I had recently purchased for my laptop (to replace the battery that appeared to be dead, as it no longer charged) was not charging. So we went down to the local strip mall to talk to the Geeks at Best Buy. Our Geek said he didn't really know what the problem was but his best guess was that it was the power cord that had worn out, not the battery.

Cost of a new power cord? $125. For a cord. Positive wire, negative wire, ground wire twisted together and wrapped in heat-resistant plastic. Plus the special little dooby shaped in only a particular way which guaranteed it would fit in only one particular kind of laptop.

Looks like I'll be buying mine on Ebay.

***********

A comment, in the middle of the film: "But none of these plotlines are going anywhere!"

***********

S. also taught me the luxury of browsing in bookstores; that is to say, taking a book (or several), retiring to a cushy armchair, and remaining there until the book is finished. Which was a very nice thing to do on a hot day when one no longer has access to her university library due to a series of bureaucratic idiocies (as with my university health insurance, one is instantly dropped from the rolls as soon as one is no longer attending class; thus persons wishing either health insurance or library privileges during the summer must jump through a series of hoops and cut a small check).

And I taught him the luxury of "going into a store just to play the sample X-Boxes and Playstation 3s." We almost bought a Wii. The only reason we didn't is because we couldn't find any Wiis available (plenty of Wiimotes and Wiipacks, but no actual Wiis). Ah, wiiell.

***********

A question, posed after we both woke up to find the credits of Blue scrolling across my laptop/DVD player: "Are we anti-intellectuals after all, if we fell asleep during a Kieslowski film?"

Head of the Class

So Ruby Payne and the NYT have just informed me that "upper-class people don't eat casseroles."

(Technically, it's rich people don't eat casseroles, but since Payne's lecture/book combines class and wealth, one can make the assumption that upper-class people don't, either.)

Well! Guess I have no class.

Of more interest is her analysis of humor:

Humor in poverty? About people and sex. In the middle class? About situations. In wealth? About social faux pas.

Okay. What if you're like me (and perhaps like a lot of y'all as well) and find the most humor in well-played wordplay (and occasionally, numberplay)?

What class does that belong to? The faux-intelligentsia? The real intelligentsia? The nerds? And does this particular humor cross economic lines?

Evil Will Always Triumph Because Good Is Dumb

Bonus points if you recognize the above quote. ^__^

Unfortunately, it is sad but true. Sadder even because I like to think that I'm a somewhat intelligent person, and I almost got lured into doing something very, very stupid.

As you may or may not remember, my roommate moved out due to unexpected circumstances, which left me scrambling to find someone to fill the apartment. I posted on the usual suspects: craigslist, roommates.com, etc.

About a week into the search, I got what looked like a promising response. A young woman named Lizzy Knith sent me an email, describing her interest in video games and her plan to study fashion design in the US in the fall.

Only one part of the email seemed a little off. I'm a British, wrote Lizzy. A British? Perhaps it was some bit of Brit-slang I had not heard of, perhaps akin to the recent trend of lolcat-speak. I can has roommate?

Lizzy and I began a correspondence. It seemed like a good match; her interests were nearly identical to mine. She was chatty and personable and we soon agreed that she could move into the apartment on June 10.

Then Lizzy told me that she was going to ship a few things from London to my apartment before she actually flew in; her furniture, her sewing machine ("which I just can't live without!"), and the car her parents had given her in honor of her trip to America.

When I mentioned this to S., he said "but a British car won't work here."

I agreed that was rather strange, and I debated for a while about how to word the email back to Lizzy. Surely I would insult her intelligence by implying that she was unaware that in Britain, they drove on the opposite side of the road.

She wrote back: "Oh, no, it's all right. We had the steering column transferred to the other side of the car."

The things technology can do these days!

And then I got the most recent email: Lizzy wanted me to know that her first month's rent and security deposit, as well as the money to pay the movers bringing the furniture, was on its way. Her uncle, who was sponsoring her trip, was sending the payment to me by money order.

Where does said uncle live? In Benin.

And where is Benin? (Daniel, I know you know. ^__^)

Benin is in Nigeria.

This is the new version of the "Nigerian Scam." Unlike the poorly-punctuated emails of yore, urging "Kind Sir or Madam" to send money to a poor displaced businessman, the scammers have figured out how to spell and how to sound reasonably articulate. They can also hold up their end of a conversation.

The game, this time, is to lure people (mostly students) into accepting money orders from young, perky potential roommates. After the victim deposits the money order, the scam artist will write back saying that the roommate can no longer take the room (usually there's a mysterious illness, or a family tragedy). The victim is then asked to send the sum back to the scam artist. The artist collects the sum, and the victim collects nothing, particularly after the bank discovers that the original money order was counterfeit.

I went back and ran Lizzy's first email through a search engine. Sure enough, it appeared in near identical text on a scam warning site, although "Lizzy" was now "John" and the oddly-phrased "I'm a British" became "I'm a Canadian."

I feel so, so stupid. Obviously as soon as I got the message about the Nigerian money order I knew, but I spent two weeks (and two weeks I could have been looking for a *real* roommate) corresponding with someone who didn't even exist.

Blargh.

I've cut off the correspondence, of course, but I wonder if the money order had already been sent, and if it will ever turn up in my mailbox. I'd rather it didn't.

Anyway, that's that. If you're looking for a roommate in the near future, don't get tricked like I did.

Oh, and btw... you can't actually do that thing with a car that "Lizzy" told me was done to hers. Just so you know. ^__^

Where Is Blue From, Part II: The People In My Neighborhood

The last poem has inspired me to tell you a story. Or, perhaps, the story inspired the poem. Either way. ^__^

Last night, at around 11:30 p.m, when I was just about tucking myself into bed, I heard this strange screaming-squealing noise. At first I thought it was one of the small children who live in the apartment next to mine (the one whose parents use the two-foot alley between our buildings as their own private dump, and who throw items into the alley via their ground-floor windows).

But it didn't go away, and it sounded like it was coming from inside the apartment. So I went to investigate.

A gray cat with white feet had somehow managed to get into my heating system, and had found its way to one of the vents. The poor thing (damned determined was what it was) was repeatedly banging its head into the vent grate to try to dislodge it, and accompanying every headbutt with a piercing meow. Kitty had managed to push the grate about four inches out from the wall (impressive), but not quite enough to squeeze through.

I removed the grate and let the cat into my apartment. (This did not make my own kitty particularly happy.) The gray cat did not look at all malnourished or scruffy; it actually appeared fairly healthy and tidy, which led me to believe that it wasn't a stray but had simply lost its family somehow.

I had remembered seeing several "Lost Cat" signs posted around the neighborhood, so I sequestered the two kitties into two separate rooms and went out to find one of the signs and contact the people I hoped might own this cat.

"Hi, sorry for calling so late, but I think I may have your cat. The sign said that the lost cat was gray. This cat also has white feet. Does your cat have white feet?"

There was a pause. Then, on the other end:

"Hey, Tracy, does our cat have white feet?"

Another pause.

"Doug, does our cat have white feet?"

Another pause.

"Mike, do you remember what that cat looked like?"

At this point, I'm thinking y'all don't deserve to have a cat, but I keep it to myself. The group of roommates come to the conclusion that their lost cat does not have white feet, and I return home.

Now, a truly good person probably would have let this gray cat stay in their apartment for the night. But I'm not completely good, not all the time, and I could hear the gray kitty and my kitty meowing bloody murder at each other through their closed doors even from outside my apartment. So I set some food and water out on the apartment's front porch and went to tell the gray kitty that he could eat and drink all he wanted outside, but he couldn't sleep here.

And I took the gray cat in my arms and put him out on the porch.

But someone saw me. A pair of someones. The two young men who occupy the upstairs apartment, above the diaper-throwing family. These two men spend their time, as far as I can tell, hanging out of their bedroom window (screen open, one leg in, one leg out). They like to catcall me (oh, fine, pun intended). The first time I met them, one of the young men was hanging out of the window and combing his leg hair. That's probably all you need to know about these two.

From the window: "Put our cat down!"

"Is this your cat?" I asked.

From the window: "Duh. Now put it down."

"Will you come and get him?"

From the window: "Nah, we'll pick it up tomorrow. He's not going anywhere."

When I left for work this morning, the food and water were gone, and so was the cat.

And that is a story about the place where I live. ^__^

Through the Membrane: In Praise of Ondaatje

I'm really getting a kick out of this temping gig.

Having just finished Italo Calvino's If On A Winter Night A Traveler (which is the book I marginalized for S., and which I thoroughly recommend to anyone who likes a good postmodern, wickedly recursive narrative), I am now two-thirds through The English Patient.

S. bought me this book during the NYC trip, as an introduction to Ondaatje, whom I had never read. We saw it first sitting on the sidewalk as part of a street book sale, but he didn't buy that copy; he wanted my first taste of Ondaatje to be hardbound, solid, permanent. So we wandered through a few used bookstores until we found one that was worthy of reading.

Anyway. The novel surprised me. Not by its clarity or detail or poetry -- I was expecting all of that -- but by the way it drew me into the story.

Some books, like the Calvino, one has to read with a half-detached mind, one side reading while the other working busily to put together the puzzles the author has set forward. Some books, like The Sari Shop, are entertaining but constantly invite the awareness that one is reading "a story." Some books, like our friend Suitable Boy (and Equal Music, for that matter -- I would guess Golden Gate as well though I've not yet read it) require parsing, rereading, pondering, savoring.

And some books seem to push you through a membrane where you find yourself not reading, really; not being aware of putting one word in front of the other but instead experiencing the book as a series of images coming at you as fast as life. Sometimes reading is an experience akin to dreaming.

And The English Patient is like that, which surprised me, because I hadn't "fallen into" a book quite like that for a few years. It reminds me of how I used to read as a child, which perhaps is because this temp experience (and the experience of finishing a task quickly so that one can return, breathlessly, to a group of characters held underneath one's desk) is so reminiscent of being in elementary school.

To my readers: which books have pushed you "through the membrane?" Which made you forget that there was any other world besides the one in the pages?

And All This Time, I Thought I Loved the Learning...

I'm temping this summer, if you haven't yet gathered as much from my "Temp Poetry." At first I thought I was going to hate the job, because it started out being the usual kind of temp things: sorting, stapling, filing, etc.

But then it got better. The jist of the story, without giving any secrets away about my place of employment, is that the management has figured out I'm clever and has started giving me more complicated and engaging work to do. Thus my brain is kept active and I am quite happy.

And yet... I'm not happy necessarily because I have started to get interesting jobs. I'm happy because when I get done with these interesting jobs, I can sit in my cube and read (until someone has another job for me).

So I was in the middle of one of these jobs today, practically dancing around a conference table as I worked to organize a bunch of something-somethings into a cohesive blah-blah to present to my supervisor, and -- if one can remember an emotion the way one remembers a scent, or a piece of music -- I suddenly remembered what it was to have this feeling.

It was to be in elementary school, and to sit in class puzzling out the quickest way to do long division so that I could get back to the copy of The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles that I had sitting in-between the safety scissors and pencil shavings of my desk.

(Brief aside: I hated the order to "show your work" because it took so long to write out what my brain had already solved; I'm guessing I'm not the only one among us who shared this sentiment. I used to be able to multiply and divide three- and four-digit numbers in my head, although that skill went away when I entered high school and everyone had to buy that damn TI-85 calculator. As the calculator worked faster than my brain... away went my magical ability -- which I truly regret, as even adding three- and four-digit numbers now requires me to use a pen and paper. I think the calculator was the worst thing ever to happen to my mathematics education.)

Anyway. And because I was quick and efficient and accurate, the teachers all said "oh, she's so interested in math/science/social studies," etc. etc. etc. and all those years, I believed them.

But I realized today that I was only in it for the books.

^__^

How We Sound When We Talk To Our Cats

Here's a quick post (probably the first of many tonight, so be prepared):

I just discovered a site called "Arbuckle" which is dedicated to redrawing the Garfield comic strips without Garfield's thought balloons.

In the original comic, Jon and Garfield interact with one another, although artist Jim Davis clearly indicates that Garfield is thinking, rather than speaking, his responses.

Thus it begs the question "Are Garfield's responses all in Jon's head? What's actually going on in these daily interactions between a man and his cat?"

I know, I know, someone's spent too much time philosophizing over a comic strip long past its expiration date. But take a look at a sample "Garfield:"


And here's the same comic, turned into "Arbuckle:"

Kinda makes you think, eh?

Another Temp Poem

They stand around a computer screen, looking
At a photograph of someone's great-great-grandmother
Just uncovered. Even the sepia and the cracks
And the glare from the screen do not diminish the woman's
Hard-lined face, weather-tanned hands, sallow chin.
In the photograph, she does not smile.

"How sad," one says, "working so hard
Did terrible things to women's bodies."
The four women nod, all of them,
Double chins shaking,
Eyes blinking beneath layers of myopic lenses,
Arms quivering like translucent jellyfish
Under the fluorescent lights.


(From the editor: She hates to spoil the poem, but she wants to make perfectly clear that this is not a critique of the women, but of their environment. After all, the full-time desk job is not the healthiest.)

Temp Poem

Upon coming into someone else's desk
Which she will occupy, for three months,
She considers what to set down of her own.

Should she ignore the pictures left behind?
The newspaper comics (Cathy and One Big Happy),
The post-its with numbers for someone else's dry cleaning,
Reminders that the dog needs its heartworm pills?

On the first day, she tiptoed gingerly, afraid to upset anything.
On the second day, she brought in a small photograph
Tiny enough to hide behind a coffee mug.
The women in the nearby cubes,
No doubt alert to any change in the environment
(Cupcakes down one aisle, a haircut in the corner)
Somehow notice.

And they ask her questions, first about the photograph
("he's so good-looking!")
And then about her.
And then they tell her where to go to find the cupcakes.

So now she is buffeted on all sides;
The cubes of women stepped away from strangers,
Stopping by to ask advice about how to silently persuade a husband
To purchase a black onyx necklace for a birthday still six months away
("You'll have to tell him, somehow," is all she can offer)
And, more importantly, the eyes in her photograph
Taking her past the itchy walls of the cubicle,
The reflective paradox of the monitor,
And the reminder that Tuesday the twenty-second
Is an unknown church's potluck dinner.

Because of those eyes, she will stay.
Because of that smile, she will smile.
And tomorrow, into a tiny hidden corner,
She's thumbtacking up a poem.

When An Ogre and A Princess Ogre Love Each Other Very Much...

Since I've just written a post on sexual overtones in children's films:

The marketing for Shrek the Third is out in full force, as I noticed when I was grocery shopping this evening.

Unfortunately, since I am over the age of, say, eight... I can't see the advertisements for those cute little diapered ogre-babies without instantly getting a mental picture of Shrek and Fiona... um...

Yeah, now you're imagining it too. You can thank me later. Don't forget to add the voices.

(P.S. I am very grateful that Disney decided not to go for the old joke of "one of the babies in the set doesn't look like the father," as was done, for example, with Apu's octuplets. Because having Fiona birth a little Donkey baby would have been just too much.)

I'm A Barbie Girl

From the New York Times: Mattel's just created another Second Life-style playland for young girls called "BarbieGirls.com."

To explore this website, young girls (the intended age is 8-13) must first register and make themselves into a Barbie avatar.

These look nothing like the Barbies I remember playing with as a child. Wasn't it that we were supposed to be making Barbie look more like a real woman and less like the German sex toy she started out to be?



Here's my Barbie avatar.

She looks eight years old, doesn't she?

(BTW, only one of the Barbie shirt options covers Barbie's navel. Just so you know. And there is no "sneakers" option for Barbie's feet: just heels -- yes, heels! -- and these Mary Janes.)

Brief Check-In

Hi, all... just a brief check-in to reassure y'all I'm still here... it's an interesting time in the academic year and things are winding down and winding up simultaneously.

In the absence of anything much on my end, I direct you to I Can Has Cheezburger. Because nothing makes your day like a Lolcat.

Twice a year...

Referencing this post:

Last night, when I made my routine oven-check, I found it still on. My roommate had made cupcakes a few hours ago, and had forgotten to turn it off.

It's not OCD if you're right. ^__^

Tagged... I'm it!

Following Sashi's meme:

Five Things You May Not Know About Me.

Unless, of course, you're my parents (who are both regular readers). I'm not going to search through my brain to try and find five things you two don't know about me.

1. I used to be able to program in BASIC. Now, of course, I've forgotten how. Not that it would do any good on my computer.

2. I still think about the characters from the novel I wrote in high school, and know exactly how their lives continue, and what story the second book should tell. I've sat down, several times (as recently as last summer), and tried to write it. But I've changed since high school, and can't find my way back to the world I once created.

3. I've been using the same shade of nail polish (without variation) for two years. I can't imagine using anything else.

4. Although I've lost the ability to play all of the Debussy and Liszt and Mozart I spent so many hours memorizing in high school and college, I can still sit down at any piano and instantly play any of the Super Mario themes (from the original through Super Mario World -- including MarioKart).

5. Every night before I go to bed, I check to make sure that the oven is turned off. About twice a year, I find that it is still turned on (always when someone else has been cooking, of course ^__^). These odds make it completely worth it.

There. Now I've done my first meme. Have I sold out? ^__^


(Oh, and here's a bonus #6 -- my high school boyfriend told me that he invented "^__^" just for me, and that it would be our own personal, secret emoticon... and I believed him.)

Musings on Hair

Niranjana, this one's for you.

My hair's just grown long enough for me to put it into a coronet. Which I really like, because although the two single braids are fun they aren't quite professional enough for teaching.

When I catch myself in the mirror I am reminded of the above image, from Little Town on the Prairie (drawn by Garth Williams).

But the real reason I'm putting up this picture is because Mr. Williams included another detail, one I didn't notice until I was old enough to realize what it was.

Garth Williams drew fifteen-year-old Laura Ingalls with hairy legs.

When I noticed it, at age nineteen or so (yes, I still reread the Little House books sometimes), I was intensely gratified and wanted to personally thank him.

It almost made up for the fact that no female character until Are You There God, It's Me Margaret ever seemed to go through puberty -- because Mr. Williams cared enough to include a small marker of its existence.

(It's also a reminder that 19th-century American women didn't shave their legs, but that's another topic for another time!)

Click on the image to enlarge the detail. (Copyright Harper, 1953.)

Snow Day!

A snow day is the greatest kind of boon --
An unexpected chance to sleep 'till noon.

Only in academe, right? (Actually, where I live many businesses are closed today as well -- it's pretty hazardous out there.) Plenty has been written about the snow day as true holiday -- that is, a day free from work and free from the usual holiday obligations of presents, visiting, cooking, etc. A gift in and of itself -- twenty-four free hours.

And all the university students undoubtedly slept, as I did too.

It does beg some deconstruction, though. For example, my university's website states that the entire campus is closed, although "emergency personnel are still expected to report to work." Who are those emergency personnel? I'm guessing groundskeepers/maintenance workers, to check for frozen pipes and to start the digging-out process (though, with the snow still coming down, digging out is pretty futile).

I wonder about cafeteria workers. We have a couple thousand students living in our residence halls who are fairly dependent on the cafeterias for food. So... are food service workers considered "emergency" personnel? And if not, are the students going to bundle up and walk the three blocks through the driving snow to the McDonalds?

And, of course, what does this say about the McDonalds workers, who are not among the businesses who are closed today? Office parks close, the university closes, the elementary and high schools close... but the fast food restaurants and Wal-Marts and even the mall remains open. So the people who are driving to work in cars of the poorest condition, who might not have adequate health care or be able to afford repairs to either their auto or person should they have one of the accidents that the middle-class businesses and schools are trying to avoid by closing up shop -- these people are expected to make their way through the unplowed roads and report for duty.

(Lest I am accused of romanticizing the concerns of low-wage workers, during our last major snowstorm, on a day where nearly everything but the fast-food places were closed, I had to drive my roommate downtown on an urgent errand. I skidded into a curb, got my front bumper stuck on some giant ice-rocks buried beneath the snow, and ended up pulling it off of my car when I tried to back out of the skid. Fixing it was an expense I could ill afford. So I can only imagine that similar things are happening to workers all over the city -- maybe not all of them, surely some of them are better drivers than I am, but still -- and that service workers are running up unneeded and unsafe expense today while the rest of us look out from our windows and watch.)

On Computers and the Journey

I've got my computer back, if you're following that story. The $160 estimate turned into a $350 reality. I think it was one of those things where they looked under the hood and realized that there was a whole lot of problems they could fix... I've essentially got an entirely new computer inside my old computer's shell.

I suppose that's good. Since the hard drive was worn through, it wasn't as though they could just remove WinAntiVirus and be done with it. Maybe I got taken advantage of; I suppose I don't know. At any rate I've got the best of everything, right now (not Windows Vista though -- the tech guys said to wait a year before purchasing it so that Windows could knock out all the bugs).

They were also able to transfer some of the old data; that is, I've got all my documents, music files, and photos. I lost a lot, though. All of the programs that came with the laptop when I first purchased it (Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, InterVideo WinDVD, iTunes, etc.) as well as all of my customizations (read: games -- I don't go around calling my concoctions Mid Tonics for nothing, and I am, for all intents and purposes, a Squaresoft whore).

This is the fourth time I've lost a computer. Well, I don't mean to put it that way, exactly; it's not as if I go around breaking hard drives indiscriminately. But computers change and upgrade so often that in the twenty years I've been using them, I've "lost" four.

The first was an old thing from the 1980s that my father used to write his dissertation. It took floppy disks and featured Pong. I suppose I'm a bit of an extraordinary child in that there was always a computer in my house when I was growing up -- I've been using one for as long as I can remember. In elementary school, I learned how to program in BASIC and wrote Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style games for this machine. I also wrote disks and disks of short stories, plays, and half-finished novels.

In junior high (that would be about 1996 for those keeping track) our family bought a Macintosh. It was the only time when buying the Mac was the bad choice. Mac had yet to earn its "does not crash or fill up with viruses" badge, and at this point in its history had only earned the qualification of "not being able to run any software anyone might actually want to use." It was a glorified word-processor. I played Myst, because Myst was the only game that could be played on a Mac, and continued to write stories. On this computer, I completed a novel.

When I started college, my family ditched the Mac and got a PC. I, meanwhile, got a PC of my own (provided by my university as part of my scholarship). I filled it up with games, since I could finally buy games that would run on the machine, as well as music and video files (I started college the same year Napster did). There were also the usual stories and poems, as well as plenty of research papers. This PC lasted for five years, until it essentially choked under its own weight. I filled the hard drive to the brim, and when I was applying to grad school I would have to delete one old paper to accommodate every new "Dear Graduate Director So-And-So" letter I wrote.

Upon acceptance to grad school, I bought the laptop. This would be the first time going Windows was the stupid route, and I kick myself daily for not investing in the iBook. Two firewalls and three virus detection programs and I still got overrun. And now... the same outer core, but a brand new inside. The opposite, I suppose, of Botox.

Here's the sad part of the story. Nothing from the old computers has ever been able to transfer to the new computers. The 1980s computer took floppies which could not be used in the Mac; the hard disks in the Mac and the PC were technically the same but the software was non-compatible; the laptop only took CDs. So, with every new computer, I had to make a choice. What to save, and what to let go.

From the first computer, I printed out a single play; the best, I thought, of my work at the time. From the Mac, I printed my novel. I loaded up about seven hard disks from the PC, most with research papers, and spent a full day in a computer lab painstakingly transferring all the files and altering them so that they could be burned onto a CD. I couldn't take any of the music or video, since the files were all too large to fit onto a disk. Probably fair punishment for downloading them in the first place.

But there are things, now, I regret. My sixth grade self didn't have the foresight to save my kindergarten and first-grade writings. Both the Mac and the PC had music notation software programs and I wrote several compositions... none survived. And I do sincerely miss having access to the complete works of Stephen Sondheim.

I'm only telling this story on my blog because I've always kind of felt that changing computers is like changing countries -- of course, I've never actually moved to another country, so what do I know what I'm talking about, but I'm thinking of the idea that for many people, moving means everything one owns must be distilled down to a single suitcase or trunk. The image of a man holding up two beloved objects and saying to his wife "this one, or this?"

And now, of course, so much is stored on the magical internet -- I can't tell you how many letters I've lost when I transferred email systems. Even this story I'm telling now will soon pass out of record, the files flying away and the 0s and 1s getting lost among the radio waves and satellite feeds that float around us in the air and that, somehow, we breathe.

I can handle not having many possessions because I keep my world on my computer. But even in this simplicity I am not protected; life is always on the move and we must always choose what to take with us and what to leave behind.