Note: This blog has been deprecated, because the system it's built upon (MovableType) was comment-spammed to the point of destabilization. This URL now exists for archival purposes. Trying to add a comment to an old entry will not work here; however, the entries do exist at my blog's current manifestation, here, and comments do work (and I'm still very happy to read them, if you're so kind to leave them).
Five minutes ago, I sat on the couch, going about my business grading Damian's math homework. This is normal.
I was breathing through my nose, and picked up something that smelled like a stale bowling alley. This was not normal.
My mom had entered the kitchen with a metal do-hickey, and showed it to me, asking what it was. Keep in mind, she was born and raised in Korea, coming to America when she was about thirty. She has picked up on American culture fairly well, but doesn't have the 'States knowledge of a native.
I held the metal do-hickey in my hands, thinking it was a small oiling tin, as big as the palm of my hand. The only idea I had in my mind was something out of a '30's cartoon, in a mechanic's shop. It looked like an oil spitoon, one of those thingies that would make the "pbwpt" sound if a cartoon character plunked the bottom with significant strength.
I then thought in more contemporary terms, and recalled an oil tin in my garage that had a spring-lever button to squirt the oil out of the spout. The do-hickey had a short button-looking thing, without a retraction shaft, and it also had a long spout. I almost pushed the "button" before I took a closer look at the "spout." The "spout" had a squarish end and hole, and looked like plenty of air could pass through it. "Hmm. That doesn't look like it's for oil," I thought.
I looked at the "button" again. It definitely was not a button--it had three holes, and a concave-up state. So, it was a small bowl...
Insert figurative light bulb over my head: Here.
"Mom, where did you find this?"
"Oh, out on the street. I thought looked like watering tin..." (Not to over-emphasize her Korean accent here, but I think I need to re-iterate that she may not be completely aware of all things American.)
"Dad! Could you come here!"
"What?"
"I think mom found a bong!"
My dad examined it for a few seconds, and chucked it in the trash. Ee-yup.
Of course, it almost offends my mom to see anything go in the trash can, since she can mix and match odd things for floral arrangements. My dad, brother and I finally convinced her that it was illegal to even touch one of those things, and she finally let it go.
The kicker of this, though--she thought it was a watering tin at first. Then later on, she got the idea that it could've always been a horn. Something like a saxophone...with a hemispheric base.
Insert movie reference here. Damian sang the obligatory low note. Damian and I laughed heartily at the horn thought--though, once again, my mom was left behind. I don't think it would've been a good idea to explain the whole marijuana backstory to her from Providence.
Insert low Eb here.
Some time in December or January, I had taken a liking to the phrase Carpe Diem. I hadn't made it my life's philosophy or anything, but I had it in my mind's foreground a bit more.
Of course, I can't resist the temptation to play with anything that happens to be in my mind's foreground. So, I coupled Carpe with many a pseudo-Latin term. I had, and continue to have, little knowledge of words in Latin, but I assume that a good deal of Latin nouns end in "-em" and "-us." I had just come off a stint of pseudo-German cognates that ended in "häggen," and was ready to start a new wave of additions to the sub-vernacular English.
Also around last December, The Two Towers premiered. At somebody's house, we were chatting about Hobbits, and Cassie's fetish thereof. I decided to be clever at some point in the conversation, and spouted this fresh phrase: "Carpe Hobbitus!"
I think Cassie liked it so much, it went on her swim-team sweatshirt. I think. I know something about curly-haired boymen went on that shirt.
Well, I had dropped that craze after a while, and stopped with the brand-new Latin words, until last Wednesday at Idaho Dave's Lindy Bomb. Ali, Miranda, Katie & I were sitting on a side of the Abbey Ballroom, and the room was sparsely populated--it was a bit late in the evening, and most of the dancers had parted. Ali and Miranda both wanted a dance with Dave before calling it a night, but they never could get his attention from the front desk and DJ stand.
After a song or two, Dave finally looked available, but neither Ali nor Miranda were paying attention. So, I prodded Ali into trying to get Dave's attention with "Carpe Davem." I got a good chuckle out of Miranda. Unfortunately, Dave went into a dance with his regular partner, or somesuch, so Ali asked me for a dance. "Carpe Hobbitus" I said as I accepted her hand and went out onto the floor.
Katie's jaw dropped to the floor; Ali wasn't there when I invented that phrase for Cassie, and she was pretty oblivious to what I said, since it sounded all Latin-y. The reason I said this, for those of you who don't know Ali, is she's a tiny woman, who spent the 18 years of her life growing to a little over five feet tall. She never found out that I said "Seize the Hobbit" before our last dance that night.
If I had a Snidely Whiplash mustache, I would've been twirling it with a twenty-tooth evil grin.
Yesterday, or the day before, I was checking up on my old Yahoo! profile, just to see how out-of-date it was. I don't remember much besides the Marital Status Field. I thought for a second, and then changed that field from "No Response" to "Single, and not looking."
Yet, tonight I had a date. Well, I should say, I had a date planned.
A girl from Aaron's Accounting class took a liking to me after I "audited" Mr. Fabritius's course for a lunch period and screwed around in there with Aaron. A few months later (if eight is a few), she worked up the courage to call me. It was a fairly idle phone chat, and didn't last for too long. She called me again a few weeks later, and asked me out on a coffee date--just to chat. Since neither of us actually like coffee, she changed it to a water date. I was fine with this--I'm no good at phone conversations anyway. (I think she actually didn't want to use the word "date," but I'm at a loss to find something else to call it.)
She did what I thought was a pretty adult thing to do and scheduled the date, weeks in advance. Two weeks, actually; she asked for me to leave tonight free, and she would do the same. She even wrote it down in her pocketbook (or whatever her substitute is). I wrote it down in my Short-Term Memory (pocketbook). I sadly passed on a Lindy costume-dance in Seattle for this, but convinced myself I would enjoy myself anyway--I thought I would have a more decent chat with her than on the phone. I also highly suspected that there would be no second date--a get-together with friends as friends, mebbe, but I'm not looking for a girlfriend. I'm married to my work.
Well, after she scheduled the water date, we parlayed for a few more minutes, and she had to go to a movie thing with her friends. She said she would call again and leave me her address.
Cut to: Tonight, 1815. 'Tis the time I should have been picking her up.
I cut to this time because absolutely nothing significant happened between us since the last phone conversation. She never called again, and my callerid had its memory wiped before I could write down her number somewhere. So, with no phone number or address, or idea of where we were going to go anyway, all I could do was sit at home and wait for a phone call. I was fine with this, really; my mom decided that afternoon that she needed some "Lift with the Back" labor done, and I was quite willing to take a break. Since I never got a call, I suspect the girl simply forgot about the date.
Well, come 9 o'clock, I actually got a call--from lovely little Cassie. I filled her in on my unexpectedly uneventful evening; she subsequently invited me over to play pool, and I brought Damian.
After a few rounds o' pool and ping pong, Cassie and Aaron re-introduced me to a pair of characters I never suspected would be a couple...
_______________________
...Ren and Stimpy.
They're back, on a network that calls itself "The First Network for Men," what I presume to be a rebuttal to Oxygen. This show is no longer for kids--it's on the same channel as Pamela Anderson's new big-breasted cartoon, "Striperella." This channel allows Ren & Stimpy artistic freedom--scratch that, the show can go on a rampage and get away with it.
The first hint that the old Nickelodeon (kid's TV channel) rules were out the window was a scene of Ren in bed, next to Stimpy, under the same blanket. Now, this wasn't unusual to the show--they would sleep in the same bed before, but in PJs, in complete innocence. Tonight, Stimpy fluttered his (suddenly feminine) eyelids at Ren, then pouted and said "...but Ren, I have needs too."
The last thing I'll say about them being a couple is this: I never, ever, in my life, want to hear the phrase "You're the pitcher, I'm the catcher," again.
I miss the old gross-outs of the Nickelodeon-era Ren & Stimpy. They would have booger jokes, and odd things happening with Stimpy's nose (sometimes the two at the same time), and other...polite gags. There was never something like an elongated uvula tickling Ren between the cheeks--and I'm not talking about lips.
What the new Ren & Stimpy do with snot mortifies me. I can watch it for kicks, but it takes some deep digging into my immaturity to keep laughing. I don't even want to give a sample to all of those who don't feel like they have the gastric fortitude to see it, so highlight the "empty" following text if you feel ready for a grossout: Stimpy's soup was too thin. Guess what the thickening agent was. Here's a hint--a phlegmatic guy in a bar added an extra ingredient. I wish those two would just go around and sell rubber nipples again; that was good, clean humor.
Oh well. So Striperella has company.
This is something I left out of the bowling night entry.
Aaron had almost gotten a turkey in game one. Well, I realize that turkey means three strikes in a row in frame ten, but in our level of bowling, three strikes in a row period is cause for celebration and "Gobbling." Aaron was approaching the lane, ready to throw his first strike, when dear li'l Damian spouted Aaron's ruination:
"It tastes so good, why don't we call it 'Taste-icles?'
I don't know how he came to quoting that line from Futurama. We are all still flabberghasted at the sheer gross-out factor of that. But Aaron was the one who paid.
Quoth his thought train: Taste-icles? What the bloody-? And before he could finish thinking about this absolute distraction, his arm had already swung the ball down the lane. Aaron kindly illustrated his train of thought and concurrent bodily movements by quoting himself to "bloody-", accompanied with many a bicep pump.
Taste-icles still haunt me to this day. And not just because they remind me of those hideous taste-taculars.
It's 02:30. I have spent most of today on an impractical distraction. For about three hours, Damian and I did actual work at our viola teacher's house by helping her move (clearing walls of posters, moving some furniture around). But after getting paid for our helping hands, Damian and I have been hammering monsters with each other on a small-scale MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game).
This is the first day in a LONG time that I have had little to nothing to do, and did it. I think I could get to like this idea of a "vay-cay-shon." But not for long; I'm already feeling pangs for a job. I want to get some work done, but I feel extremely inclined to wait until July. Most of the state budgets should be figured out by then, and then state-related organizations will know how much extra man-hours they can take on.
Besides that, I do have a to-do list, which brings me to a quick concert plug:
°Thursday, at 1100 and 1300, in Farmers' Market, the Northwest Navy Band will be doing two shows. One of the shows is pretty swing-music based, and the other is jazz-based (eh, don't quote me on the latter). This group has my whole-hearted pitch; they did a show at SPSCC about a month ago, and made some fine jazz music. Sing, Sang, Sung was in that program and was on par with the OHS Jazz Band's performance.
So, that's my one middle-of-the-day event this week. 'Tis enough to keep me out of work for a while. Well, besides that, I have to figure out some last details with this gargantuan horde of digital pictures from the last couple years. More on that later.
Well, I just had my first round of golfing since about nine months ago. Without warming up my swing at all, I don't think I did too bad: Seven strokes on a Par-3. Oh yeah. Insert elbow pump here.
I took so many swings, with implied whiffs, today with my driver, one of my friends said "Strike three, you're out." I chuckled at that, and then thought later on that I had missed so many times, I was technically in my fourth inning.
Ah, but what do I have to be proud of? On the ninth hole, I made not one, but two magnificent splashes in the water hazard that divided the fairway from the tee-off spot. I had one shot that could've taken a bird's head off if there was a bird in some cattails. And I had a marvelous "Just tap it in" moment on one of the greens. I was on my eighth or ninth stroke of a Par-4, and about six feet from the hole. One light putt later, I was about six inches from the hole.
Quoth one of my buddies: "Just tap it in," à la Happy Gilmore.
Well, I knew no good could come of my next shot, since I was already doubly over par. I also knew that I would probably be rejected by the pin, since we decided to leave the flag in the hole. So, I took care of all of my worries in one fell swoop: I smacked the ball with my putter, let it roll into the cup and bounce off the pin, and then hit the ball again with my putter's follow-through. Speaking of the follow-through, I let the pin reject my putter too, with an ever-so-satisfying clang. The ball rolled off to my now-doubled-over friend.
Next game, I wanna try to make a Par-3 in less than seven strokes. That's my personal record, and I guess I'll just have to try to get myself down to double-over.
School's out. Et Cetera (sp. Lysus?).
Aaron, Cass & I had nothing planned, but we were together anyway. Bowling was in mind, but five people in total couldn't come with us; so, we picked up good ol' Damian, my Freshman brother.
Yes, I realize school's out, so he's probably not a Freshman anymore by some people's standards. But by the AlAaCa (Alex/Aaron/Cass) standard, he still has a few "prerequisites" to hanging out with the Big Boys/Girl. More on that later.
Bowling was one of my finest games in a while--I bowled 130 at the end of the second game. Yes, that's good for me.
Damian, in the meanwhile, had something akin to a "First Night Out" in bowling. I can't even remember if he had bowled before tonight--and I doubt he could either.
In the middle of the first game, he asked me why everybody swung their right leg behind the left leg (because he sure didn't). I told him that it was to remove all extraneous rotation from the torso, to keep the right arm straight.
Well, he tried this leg rotation that is so smooth on the other three of us. First off, his rotation was anything but smooth. On his first frame that he was armed with this knowledge of rotation and anti-rotation, he kicked. Of course, the ball went straight to the gutter.
Well, he felt he had to fix it, and kudos to him for knowing it could be done better. But did he fix it?
The next time he was up, he kicked so hard that he shot the ball at about a 10° angle with vertical, and it went a whole three feet forward before landing in the gutter. Of course, all of the speed had been translated into across-the-lane movement, so his ball spent quite a while strolling through the gutter.
For the entire twenty seconds that his ball took traversing the lane, I was doubled over in my seat with laughter. It was quite the graceless move, but Damian managed to make it funny anyway. That was actually the hardest I had laughed in ages--the hardest since I saw Cassie's "Lost American" performance in the last 4th-Year Japanese Video. My feet were kicked up and over the back of my seat--I was this close to inverting myself.
I still got more laughs out of Damian's bowling later--he actually developed a hop while bowling. He almost fixed the kick thing, but now I was positive that both of his feet left the ground in the middle of his throw.
He has a bit of work to do; maybe sometime soon he'll break 70. Since that wasn't going to be tonight, we parted bowling with Cattin's on the horizon.
Even though I've gotten a bit of spending money from graduation (one heckuva bit, at about a hundred bucks), I intend to conserve it to last me through the summer. Part of me believes that since I don't shop, this'll be possible, but the rest of me knows that in a month I'll have to ask dear ol' dad for lunch money again (if I'm still unemployed). Anywhoo, I was feeling a bit cheapish at Cattin's, and decided to split a milkshake with Damian. He would get the glass, I would get the blender cup--filling for both of us.
This plan went along dandily, until Damian pretended to salt Aaron's glass of water. Cassie noted this, and truly salted Damian's drink. Then Aaron peppered it. And in comes Cassie with the sugar shaker!
Well, Damian's water had been quite undistilled, so he thought it would do little good unless as a toy. He held it in his lap with mischief on his face, and then hovered the glass over my leg (I was sitting next to him).
Now, it took me a good few seconds to realize there was now moisture on my leg. After the idea of "wet" settled in, my cheeks and wide eyes screamed "That little twerp WATERED ME!" And I had done little but chuckle along at the antics.
I let my face do all the screaming, and kept my larynx completely out of it; our 'shakes had arrived. I calmly thanked the waitress, and stroked my wet spot, now feeling the grainy sugar and salt precipitate from Damian's ex-drink. After the waitress had left, Cassie felt that Damian had to be punished; but, since she wasn't in a commanding position but had a commanding voice, she ordered an ice cube down Damian's boxers.
And who embedded the cube? Damian, himself. After giving a slight complaint of discomfort, he requested his portion of the 'shake.
I was still in "That Li'l TWERP" mode, so I did the only mature thing I could do. I threw my tongue into the glass of chocolate shake, shifted my head to over the cup, and spit the chocolate into the blender tin. Li'l twerp.
Well, two ice cubes and a napkin later, Damian's boxers were still moist and chilled. *Ahem.* The milkshake, originally intended for the both of us, had lost just about all of it's in-the-glass component; with the load of chocolate, creamy goodness in my system, my attention had dwindled. Heck, I was still chuckling at Damian's hop. Damian had had nothing to drink but water--er, half of a water. (Actually, Damian's shakingh is head at me as I write this, suggesting even less.) So, in a moment of hunger, he snatched the blender tin away from me, and dug in with a spoon.
Quoth me: "Yeah, so enjoy my spit-laced 'shake."
Quoth Damian: "Meh. I flipped it." (A loose sifting job, that was.)
The three post-Seniors around the table decided that this just wasn't bad enough, though. We could always do better with the freshman.
Quoth Cassie: "OK, now lick the wall."
I frowned on this, afraid of how much cigarette smoke must have been absorbed into that wall; so, Cassie dumped some sugar on Damian's napkin, spilling a bit on the table, and procured her next challenge: "Then lick the table--at least they clean that."
Down his head went, and when it came up, a tongue-sized streak was in the sugar.
Now, how did we know to end this before it got really silly? Cassie salted Damian's shake. Not assaulted, just salted. However, Damian's taste buds came under physical distress when he got to the very bottom of the shake, where all of the salt had somehow settled in one spot.
Quoth Damian: "All right, I think I'm done with my salty-spitty-shake now."
And thus we parted--but not without one last hazing-without-benefits ritual: A dance. Cassie and Aaron desperately wanted to see Hammertime come out of Damian, and they even did it along with him. Or rather, they did...something. Cassie may be able to explain it, but it's two large forearm circular motions in front of the chest while high-stepping in duple, keeping a low pelvis all the meanwhile. I think I got that right; my memory's a bit hazy on that dance, because of what Damian improvised after the Cassie/Aaron jig: A thrust with both fists forward, and a thrust with the buttocks and rest of the body backward.
Man, oh man, does that rile me. But, Damian ended the night on a not quite-so demeaning note; he performed that [hideous] dance for a group of seniors, with much appraisal [from Aaron and Cassie].
Kudos to the Freshman, for he may grow to be sophomoric.
I hold on to way too much information.
I've had a Hotmail account for an incredibly long time. Pre-Y2K. The first message is dated Oct. 20, 1998, and that's the Welcome message.
I've held on to every single e-mail that had a real person contacting me since then; I like having a record of my conversations, strange as that sounds.
Well, after 4.5 years, that junk kinda piles up. Actually, after 3.5 years, all that personal junk piles up. In the last year, I have not received one non-automated message in that account. Now, I did request some of the inhuman e-mails, but none of my requests had boobies.
Every night, I check the account, and clear out the Farm F^%^ers, the Penal Enhancements, and the magical money-making junk mail. After brushing those aside, I empty the Junk Mail folder; there's just no winning against automated e-mail dataminers.
The account's more like a chore, now; I begin to wonder if I really want to hold on to the 530 messages I may possibly care about.
I'm a bit sad that I didn't take Microeconomics this quarter. I don't miss Swenson at all, mind you, but I do miss seeing Aaron, Cassie et al in the instrument hall. (I can barely remember who "et al" is at the moment; that's how distant the memory seems.) Since I signed up for SQL, which goes from 2:05 to 3:05, I haven't been able to pick up Damian at all. I couldn't even do anything at OHS during sixth period if I wanted to.
Like go to the library. Sorry =|
I would've liked to at least know where Damian goes after sixth period. I tried picking him up today, but that was doomed to failure before it started; Damian doesn't go to the instrument room anymore, so I have little to no clue of where to find him. Especially if it's a few minutes after the final bell rings.
I didn't feel too bad about leaving him for "lost" today. He barely remembers to check for when my mom comes to pick him up, and walks home with a friend without thinking about it. I should've thought of that before going to Oly.
Oh well.
All is not well in the Wild, Wacky West.
Sunday night, I left Aaron's friend's (the guy who owns the Mac with iMovie) house, without a tape of my film. All of the editing was done, but the Que! 60GB firewire drive just wouldn't export to camera without locking up.
So, the guy told me to pack up the hard drive, with its firewire cable and power source, so he could take it into his work the next day and export the tape with another drive. He also told me to call in the afternoon to check up on the tape.
Well, come 1300, I called him at his work, and I told him I had "my fingers crossed for success." There was nothing quite like hearing him say "You probably should've crossed your fingers harder last night.
"You packed the power cable to my camera, not the power cable to the drive."
Urgh.
So, since he couldn't get back home to get the cable, and I had a busy afternoon ahead of me, we agreed to wait another day for the export.
Come 1300 today, I called him again (only one hand's fingers crossed). He gave me The Good Word, and said the tape was done; he even reviewed it himself. Jen and Angela got a glimpse of me right after I heard this; I collapsed on a couch in the SUB with a ginormous grin of relief on my face.
Come 1950, I had made my way to the guy's house after my classes were over. There was another one of those hard-to-forget moments, in how he greeted me at the door. "Well, Alex, there's good news and there's bad news." He had a somewhat disarming grin on his face too; I'm not quite sure how my face looked, but my own grin was definitely fading.
"Good news: The tape finished fine at work. Bad news: well, let me emphasize at work a little more..."
The tape's sitting in his room at his workplace. So, by 0730 tomorrow morning, I should have the tape in my hands--even though he works way out at Griffin Elementary/Middle School.
Don't expect me to be quite so punctual at Orchestra.
That aside, Showdown at Noon o'Clock airs for the first time tomorrow, between 0900 and 1000, in the Lecture Hall. The second showing'll be somewhere at SPSCC in lieu of a lunch, sometime this week. And third, at a Cheesy Scary Movie Marathon, care of a good friend. E-mail me for info on the latter later.
I spent this entire weekend editing Showdown at Noon o'Clock.
Am I exaggerating when I say entire? Besides the senior banquet, no. I got up at about ten o'clock Saturday and was driven to a family friend of Aaron Wilson's. There, I worked on iMovie until about 5:40, when I departed for the senior banquet. I only had one voice clip to add, and it would be ready to export--however, the voice would've taken another five minutes that I didn't want to pressure Aaron with. So, I told iMovie to save, got it to quit, and then I departed.
Notice how I told it to save, and got it to quit?
I had saved early and often throughout the day, at least twenty times every hour. However, not once did I quit the program and restart it.
Well, what got Aaron, Cassie and I to depart his friend's house was the hard drive that I was working on froze, and his friend had to change the driver. I didn't lose any of the video clip data...
...except for every single modification I had made to them.
That hard drive did not save once all day long.
So, I went over to that guy's house again today, at noon. I got back to where I was yesterday in only four hours, and finished all of the editing by eight o'clock. With a great sigh of relief, I told iMovie to export the finished product to a digital camcorder...
...and watched the hard drive freeze again.
The saving thing was fixed by this point, so there was no need to worry there; but after three more attempts to export the movie, Aaron's friend and I realized that his Firewire hard drive will not export successfuly to a digital camcorder.
Solution: Since Aaron's friend works at a school as head tech guru, he'll export the video tomorrow, and I can get the tape in the afternoon. Huzzah.
Meanwhile, I have a History term paper to write. I need eight pages total, and I'm at two at the moment. But I'm not worried or stressed at all; it's an expository paper on Gettysburg. No need to persuade at all, just report. In other words, it's a high-school level paper, with only a college-level length.
Ironically, I care more about my actual high school assignment than the High-School-in-Disguise paper. Why?
Will I want to read this term paper in ten years? I'm paraphrasing about ten different civil war websites and books, so there's little of my input in this thing. And I have little interest in the Civil War beyond writing this paper, so the subject matter probably won't attract me too terribly.
Will I want to watch Showdown in ten years? It's not only majorly my input, it's a good deal of my friends playing almost type-cast roles--roles that I knew their personalities could mimic almost perfectly, some without too much effort (Cassie's the good woman!). And I killed Mr. Beeson to make this film.
With my ne'er-fare-well memory, I'll definitely want this little module.
As for the term paper...meh. Only six more pages to go. See you guys in the morning.
Ahem.
Well, this morning, I drove Damian to school, like on any other bright, sun-shiney (and otherwise) day, in The Stickamajig (my car). I found a parking spot at the back Oly lot, which takes me about seventy more seconds than normal to drive to. After Damian got out of the car with his stuff, I gave an "Oh crap!" and hopped back in, zipping off (at the speed limit) back home. I had forgotten my clothes for some filming that had to happen at first lunch.
Well, thankfully there were few people making left turns onto the particularly busy streets. The way I was driving back to school again, though, would've left me with about negative three minutes to get to orchestra, thanks to the traffic congestion on North Street.
Well, I joined this traffic congestion and formed the end of the thirty-car-long line. I was the end for about ten seconds when I looked in my rearview mirror and noticed the new end of the line coming up behind me: A blue-and-white Ford F250, or some other fairly tall Ford truck.
Now, on any normal, bright sunshiney day this truck approaching wouldn't scare me. And it didn't.
However, I noticed that it was approaching at cruising speed for far longer than it should have. I didn't truly worry until about one half of a second before impact.
Yup. I used the i word.
Now, I've heard social theorists claim that cars are an extension of human bodies; some social theorists within this set also claim that cars make humans dumber creatures, by defining intelligence as a ratio of brain size to body size. I don't consider humans dumber in cars, but I do consider them simpler--fairly linear paths, no straight-sideways motion, and only about twelve lights, in six electrical pairs, to communicate with other people-cars. And, of course, no central nervous system beyond the instrument panel's lights.
Well, that F250 brought me back to an extreme human state, by unwittingly incorporating my central nervous system into the driving scenario. As his bumper hit mine going at about fifteen miles an hour, I lurched forward about four feet before stopping (if anybody wants to try to calculate the force in this puppy, I won't stop you).
Now, I was expecting a simple thud while the damage was being done, and I expected said thud to end fairly abruptly, before I came to a stop. However, the collision was pretty much inelastic; I don't know if that's related to sound, but the thud drew itself out for the entire duration of my moving forward. In fact, I was still hearing it--though I'll bet just mentally perceiving it--as I sat in my seat and realized at all levels of consciousness, "Hey. That yuppy just smacked right into me."
Well, besides enjoying this fantastic percussive stroke, I had to do my duty and check the damage. I may have seemed pretty threatening to this guy in the truck, I'm not sure: All that I knew he could see of me were my eyes in the rear-view mirror and a stern index finger pointing at the curb.
When we could get out and check the damage, it didn't look like he had wet himself. No quiver in the voice or knees, either--but there was sincere apology in his voice.
I checked both of our bumpers pretty thoroughly. The damage results are so:
° His bumper had only the warps that it had before (or so he told me).
° My bumper suffered no damage--that layer of pollen that I've never washed off actually took the most damage. He removed the pollen in a little line, about six inches long. There may be a scratch back there, but it's nothing to cry over--that ding on the chrome from years ago, though...
Anywhoo, he felt like he had to confess why he hit me. A spider crawled on him and flipped him out.
I was in a good mood for having survived my first accident, and I gave him a cheery send-off. Arachnophobics don't technically have to stick together, but we can at least be kind to each other in our sissier moments.
Saturday, the Dunk:
I hear the Dead Sea's pretty dense. I hear that there's enough salt in the Dead Sea that one can float fairly easily--and also that one leaves the Dead Sea covered in salt after the water evaporates away from one's skin.
Well, I took a Dunk today. The water I was in was three times as dense as the Dead Sea--two hundred gallons of water, with one thousand pounds of Epsom salt dissolved in it. After I got in, I popped up like a cork--quite neat, especially with the silky-feeling water around me.
Now, I went to this Dunk expecting something like I had read in a Tom Clancy novel (Red Storm Rising). I have forgotten enough of the plot of that book to make this a non-spoiler: An agent in the USSR had been discovered and was being held prisoner in a thousand-gallon tank, suspended in a room-temperature saline solution in a rubber suit. Her face had an undetectable breathing apparatus clapped on it, so she had NO senses except for the touch of her tongue.
Well, I slightly related to this today. There was neither a rubber suit nor a large elephant-like breathing apparatus--but there was half a ton of Epsom salt, and absolutely no light.
The science behind the rubber suit in Red Storm Rising: The sense of touch can be dulled. If a light material is left on your skin--say, a small patch of cloth on your arm-after a few minutes (or shorter than that), you won't be able to detect the cloth without looking. The rubber suit idea was meant to deprive the person's entire body of the sense of touch, and the other four prime sensory losses are fairly well-implied.
Because I'm picky, I'd like to note that there are four more senses that the body has that are fairly universally agreed upon by psychologists everywhere, one of which is the sense of your internal organs' messages--particularly the bladder. I think the plan in Red Storm Rising was doomed to failure, because a need to tinkie would've completely ruined at least my dunk--getting out, toweling, charging, #1, charging back, re-submerging...blah.
So, as to other senses which I had during the Dunk: the worst one was the feeling I had from my chest. I could hear and feel my breathing--I only noticed this after a few minutes. Now, I had been told that the air was ventilated in the otherwise-sealed environment, but that it could/would become stuffy, and I had a fan that I could use in the case of a stuffy tank.
The air did become a bit stuffy; and when I noticed this, I began to breathe too heavily, just as a strange reaction. I didn't force myself to a heave, but I really should've turned on the fan.
Fan? Bah! It can't be more than twenty minutes of the hour-long session! I'm more hardcore than that!
I love being manly sometimes. But besides the leftover testosterone in my blood, I was also told that the fan could be slightly audible, and I wanted as close to no senses as possible.
How the Purpose Stood Defeated :
The air wasn't only stuffy. It was quite humid, too, presumably from the room-temperature saline solution. So, what does wet air do to low ceilings? Condense. What does condensed water do? Drip.
When the drips would hit the water, it made me feel quite lonely--the echo was extremely slow to come to my submerged and plugged ears, so I felt like I was in a canyon (during an eclipse, and, euh...nekkid). When the drops hit my knee, I realized how acute my sleeping sense of touch became--I felt the water droplet roll down my bony knee, every millimeter of the way.
My touch didn't get to "sleep" that often, though. See, I'm a tall guy--6'3" or higher--and this tank was only so long--a bit smaller than a small SUV. I would occasionally bump into a side with my toe, which was a huge turnoff--some stubborn part of my heart wanted the Clancy experience. But pushing off of the side solely with my toe gave a floating-down-river feeling: the kinesthetic (another one of those extra senses) sense of movement from muscular input told me I was floating down a swiftly moving stream. It took me a good twenty seconds to hit the other side, though, thus adding to the "damn this place feels big" sensation.
And for such a "big" place, it's somewhat hard to kick back and relax everything. The hardest challenge of floating is learning to completely slacken the neck. The neck never realizes that all parts of the body can float without effort, and thus the head doesn't need any support. So, the neck has little to do but tense up, crimping the experience one last time.
So, I left that tank with a proposal to all who want to take on this Floating: Try to relax the neck. It's surprisingly hard to command.
I also left the tank with white streaks all over me--Epsom salt doesn't absorb into your skin, and after the moisture dries off it leaves a sort of sugary powder all over you if you're not thorough with the towel. Thus the shower at the end--and Floatzone's shower is quite neat. The soap smells like peppermints.
So, I parted from Floatzone actually fairly stress-free. I didn't worry about the filming for Showdown for the whole drive back to Olympia; I was ready to tackle the six solid hours of camera work even once I would get home.
And I left Floatzone with candy-cane scented armpits. Something else I could take with me.
Friday, the whine
I wouldn't mind a good, long rest period.
I've slept this week at 1 o'clock, every night, and essentially rose every morning at six. Yet, I only seem groggy when walking around the halls at Olympia High School; I'm otherwise quite cheery in classes, and at SPSCC. I realize I also experience quite the slowdown in mental processing power when trying to think about several things at once, or about my movie Showdown.
Film Literature is essentially the reason I've been up all week; other than that, I've only had to write one two-page biography for History. I have an entire spectrum of feelings for Film Lit.--That class is the main reason that I'm making my last great project of high school (Showdown); but I keep reminding myself that we have eight days of school left at OHS, and that's how long I have to get the movie done. If tapped, the stress could poor from me like maple syrup.
Well, Sunday, I plan to have almost all of the filming for that project done. Venez, Dimanche!