Being a fairly proactive person myself, when I've had enough sleep and enough to eat, there are few things that piss me off more than complainers. Now, I understand venting--if you're stressed and you just want someone to validate that the next 72 hours are probably going to be rough, and after my "man, that is rough, I'm sorry" you pick yourself up and go do your papers or your friend's wake or whatever. What I don't understand is complaining--mindless, pointless negativity with no end in sight, about things you can't control or change.
Especially about your city. This happened a lot in my hometown--people blame all their problems on the area. We were podunk, no good, hillbilly, the kind of people who drive tractors to school and proudly park them by the road. The people who served us $3.75 coffee at the coffee shop were small minded. Our families didn't understand us, our thoughts, our desires, and it was all because we were from a farm town. The town was useless, the people useless, just dust to kick off our feet as we ran away. I'll admit, I was one of those people. Granted, I was sixteen at the time and thought I knew everything, but I was still one of them.
I grew out of it. I'm not overly fond of some of my family members, as I've written about before, and my town definitely has its downsides. But for better or for worse, it's my home, and I can never change that. I might as well suck all the good out of it I can, because there's a lot of good there.
It really pisses me off when people are negative about Cleveland. Partially because I want to press my cheek against this city at least once a day, but also partially because we're at the point now where we have a choice. You didn't have to go to college/take a job in Cleveland. You chose to come here. So why the fuck are you whining so much about it? Cleveland's not responsible for the weather, your grades, your parents, your boyfriend, your health, your mood, your workload, the weight you gained, the lack of good movies to watch, or your boredom. We had, in our comics class, another guest speaker who was a native Clevelander who did independent comics. Aside from being a complete and total indie snob as well as being angry and dismissive of ALL OTHER COMICS BESIDES HIS OWN, he talked a lot of shit about Cleveland and how it sucks a lot in general and especially for comic writers/artists.
I'm sorry? Superman? American Splendor? There have been tons of comics that started in Cleveland, comic writers and artists that came from here. Cleveland is a great place to be into the creation of comics. You just have to not be so god damn negative.
I really think Santa said it best, in this quote that is in my AIM profile so I see it every day:
clevelands not for everyone, i understand that. but how do you expect this city to be anything if all that is going on is people walking the streets with their heads down, mumbling about how theyre not somewhere else? how are things supposed to change if everyones life goal is to move away?...do you think if you leave here that a different city is going to hold your fucking hand and do all those things for you? that there are different forms of the human condition? one for cleveland and one for new york?
I've had people tell me their lives would be so much better if they were just in New York or Seattle or Chicago or anywhere but here. People seem to think that the New York Subway holds miniature Disneylands at the end of every stop, and that the Cleveland public transit 1) doesn't take you anywhere and 2) is too difficult to figure out. Here's news: If you're depressed in Cleveland, you're going to be depressed in New York. For different surface reasons; because your cost of living is too high, because you can't find a good Chinese place, because the elevators never work.
One of the very, very few lessons I've learned in life is that you are either content with your life or you are not. External things can offer you minor perturbations from your norm, but in general, you control how happy/content/satisfied you are. You don't like Cleveland? Either move away, or shut up and find something to like.
28 February 2007
27 February 2007
licking the pages of Vogue
Grad school is fast approaching, and I will be moving to Virginia in six months. (Grad school is the University of Virginia. A foregone conclusion since the moment I was there in October, and yet a difficult decision to make.) While I'm there, I will be trying to live on a grad student's stipend. Now, I know that I'm very, very lucky to not have to pay to go to grad school, but a grad student's stipend is not exactly a whole bunch of money. As my father put it when he worked me out a sample budget, it's fine and it all works, I just can't eat. I could drink. Water. But not eat.
Which means that I need to cut my grocery bills by about $4.50 every month, by not purchasing Vogue. Not only is it a pretty useless expenditure (it usually doesn't even fit on the book rack on the elliptical!) but it fills me with lust for things I can't afford, like a little black dress by some British designer with an Arabic name, which would probably set me back around $1000 if he would even deign to sell it in Ohio. Sadly, I will probably never own this dress, as a) Virginia is no chicer than Cleveland, and b) asking one's parents, grandparents, boyfriend, boyfriend's family, and assorted other acquaintances to all chip in to buy you a dress is uncouth.
However. I know just from looking at this picture of this dress on a six foot one model who probably weighs less than I do that this dress would be fantastic on me. It would make me look like sex on legs, in a demure Audrey Hepburn sort of way. The neckline shows off the collarbones but no cleavage. The bodice is fitted but not too tight. The skirt is the perfect length and has the perfect amount of volume. It is, in short, the little black dress that every girl should have, and I can't have it because I'm not married to some weathly old fart or born into money.
Life is so unfair sometimes. It'd be more unfair, I suppose, if I didn't have friends who are artists with a sewing machine....
On a completely different note, here are two of my favorite literary quotations ever. Criteria: must be from a published novel/play/poem/whatever, and generally ring through my head at everyday moments.
"The twenty-five years I had lived since then tapered to a palpitating point, then vanished." Nabokov, Lolita
You might as well put the entirety of the novel down as quotable, really; I don't think Nabokov wrote an awkward sounding sentence in his life. But this particular sentence echoes through my head on a weekly basis, mostly because I like the way it sounds and I love the physics of it, of time drawing itself into a point and then disappearing. It resonates to the "tesseract" of L'Engle and the drawings in A Brief History of Time.
On another note, I don't think I've ever loved anything or anyone quite as much as I love an unreliable narrator.
"stange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? remember'st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Knew none before us, self-begot, self-raise'd,
By our own quick'ning power"
Milton, Paradise Lost
The thing I love second most in the entire universe is a good epic battle between good and evil, bonus points for angels and demons, double bonus for Satan. I've made it all the way through Paradise Lost; even with my love of stuffy epic poetry I can't bring myself to do it again. But from what I remember Lucifer emerges as somewhat of a sympathetic character, akin to Kevin Smith's angels shouting about "where was His infinite fucking mercy THEN?" The part about this speech that I really, truly love, aside from its gorgeous cadences, is that Lucifer is the very first evolutionist.
and here are some more of my favorite words/phrases:
enrobed, conceit, symmetrical, "forever and forever," caramel (pronounced "care-ah-mel"), pomegranate, forbidden, silken, strut, cryptonomicon, pedantic, wanking, pompous, word-hoard, valediction, bubble, invagination, thirteen, dignity, grey-spelled-g-r-e-y, gnocchi, burnt.
Which means that I need to cut my grocery bills by about $4.50 every month, by not purchasing Vogue. Not only is it a pretty useless expenditure (it usually doesn't even fit on the book rack on the elliptical!) but it fills me with lust for things I can't afford, like a little black dress by some British designer with an Arabic name, which would probably set me back around $1000 if he would even deign to sell it in Ohio. Sadly, I will probably never own this dress, as a) Virginia is no chicer than Cleveland, and b) asking one's parents, grandparents, boyfriend, boyfriend's family, and assorted other acquaintances to all chip in to buy you a dress is uncouth.
However. I know just from looking at this picture of this dress on a six foot one model who probably weighs less than I do that this dress would be fantastic on me. It would make me look like sex on legs, in a demure Audrey Hepburn sort of way. The neckline shows off the collarbones but no cleavage. The bodice is fitted but not too tight. The skirt is the perfect length and has the perfect amount of volume. It is, in short, the little black dress that every girl should have, and I can't have it because I'm not married to some weathly old fart or born into money.
Life is so unfair sometimes. It'd be more unfair, I suppose, if I didn't have friends who are artists with a sewing machine....
On a completely different note, here are two of my favorite literary quotations ever. Criteria: must be from a published novel/play/poem/whatever, and generally ring through my head at everyday moments.
"The twenty-five years I had lived since then tapered to a palpitating point, then vanished." Nabokov, Lolita
You might as well put the entirety of the novel down as quotable, really; I don't think Nabokov wrote an awkward sounding sentence in his life. But this particular sentence echoes through my head on a weekly basis, mostly because I like the way it sounds and I love the physics of it, of time drawing itself into a point and then disappearing. It resonates to the "tesseract" of L'Engle and the drawings in A Brief History of Time.
On another note, I don't think I've ever loved anything or anyone quite as much as I love an unreliable narrator.
"stange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? remember'st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Knew none before us, self-begot, self-raise'd,
By our own quick'ning power"
Milton, Paradise Lost
The thing I love second most in the entire universe is a good epic battle between good and evil, bonus points for angels and demons, double bonus for Satan. I've made it all the way through Paradise Lost; even with my love of stuffy epic poetry I can't bring myself to do it again. But from what I remember Lucifer emerges as somewhat of a sympathetic character, akin to Kevin Smith's angels shouting about "where was His infinite fucking mercy THEN?" The part about this speech that I really, truly love, aside from its gorgeous cadences, is that Lucifer is the very first evolutionist.
and here are some more of my favorite words/phrases:
enrobed, conceit, symmetrical, "forever and forever," caramel (pronounced "care-ah-mel"), pomegranate, forbidden, silken, strut, cryptonomicon, pedantic, wanking, pompous, word-hoard, valediction, bubble, invagination, thirteen, dignity, grey-spelled-g-r-e-y, gnocchi, burnt.
Organic Chemistry Will Not Make Me a Happier Person
(except for the fact that all chemistry labs make me incredibly happy)
clips and phrases from my life:
Dear Sean, if you're reading this:
If you would, please, tell your brother I saw his show and that he is more talented than any one person has any right to be.
love,
jk
Finally heard back from grad school #3 the day I mailed my acceptance to grad school #1.
If you post away messages like this: "Am I really such a horrible and ugly person that no one will even give me a chance to be anything more than a friend? I thought I wasn't anymore, but apparently everyone else thinks so." don't expect suitors to be knocking down your door. Unless they're guys with a fetish for low self-esteem and high levels of self-pity.
I still don't believe in true love.
clips and phrases from my life:
Dear Sean, if you're reading this:
If you would, please, tell your brother I saw his show and that he is more talented than any one person has any right to be.
love,
jk
Finally heard back from grad school #3 the day I mailed my acceptance to grad school #1.
If you post away messages like this: "Am I really such a horrible and ugly person that no one will even give me a chance to be anything more than a friend? I thought I wasn't anymore, but apparently everyone else thinks so." don't expect suitors to be knocking down your door. Unless they're guys with a fetish for low self-esteem and high levels of self-pity.
I still don't believe in true love.
22 February 2007
Touch My Tra La La
Since my comics class is, technically, a SAGES course, we have to have guest speakers every now and then. Our first guest speaker was awesome--he runs a comics shop and was telling fantastic stories about comics he's bought and sold, including a story that sounds like an urban legend:
I got a phone call one day asking me to come out to this house and look through some comics. I get a lot of these calls, so I didn't think too much of it, but it was Christmas Eve and I wanted to get home, so I closed up shop and hopped in my car. I drove up to this five story mansion--no, I'm not kidding. And I'm looking at this place and I know, I just know what I'm going to find inside. The guy comes out on the front porch to meet me, and says "The comics are up in the attic." Of course the comics are in the attic. They always are.
The first floor is crammed full of newspapers. All newspapers. The kind of pack rat stuff you only ever hear about on CNN when some old lady dies, smothered by all her old issues of National Geographic. The second floor is board games--board games! Stacked to the ceiling. The third floor is like books or something, I don't know, the fourth floor is jam-packed with army stuff--clothing and weapons and even unopened MREs. It's disgusting, but I can't help but wonder what he's got up in that attic.
We walk up and the first thing I see is the pile. A six foot tall pile, like a haystack, of comics. As I get used to the light and the cold, I see comics up on the unfinished attic walls, and they're good ones--all the really iconic cover art from the 60s and 70s. I look a little closer and I cringe--he's just nailed them to the walls, a single nail right through the entire book. "Um, why are these comics nailed to the wall?" "Oh, I like to look at them," he says nonchalantly. I could probably get a couple hundred bucks for each of those books, without the nails.
I walk over to the pile and see another, smaller pile next to it. I blink. I have to be hallucinating. Right there, on the top of this other pile, is Action Comics #1. I blink again. It's not going away. I grab it and flip through it--it's in pretty decent shape. I look at the pile again. It's all great, great stuff--classic issues of Fantastic Four, more Superman, all sorts of stuff. This pile is worth about a million and a half dollars. The guy comes over and takes Action #1 out of my hands. "That's not what I called you about." He gestures to the large pile. "That one is." Of course it is.
The bigger pile's not bad, but it's nothing wonderful. I make a stack of things I know I'll have buyers for, and we agree on the price. As we walk back down the stairs, my arms full of slithering comics, I ask him if he won't let me make him an offer for some of the books in the smaller pile. He says no--a little angry. It turns out he only sells them when he needs the money to keep up the rest of his collecting habits. He branches off to the kitchen as I walk the comics out to my car, then come back inside for the rest. I walk up and down four flights of stairs, cursing myself for not hiding just a few books in my pile. I pack the comics neatly in a box and come back inside to pay him--in cash, of course. The guy's standing over the stove making dinner. I pay him, and make to leave.
"What, I'm not good enough to eat with? I'm good enough for you to buy my things but you won't sit down and eat with me? Tell you what, if you don't eat dinner with me this whole deal is off!" Now, in retrospect, I should have told him I'd eat with him in exchange for some of the smaller pile of books. But I just wanted out of there. So I sat down in his newspaper-covered kitchen, on Christmas Eve, and ate his nasty dried up pork chops, then hightailed it out of there back home. I've always wondered if I could have done anything differently there, but I've never heard from him since.
I got a phone call one day asking me to come out to this house and look through some comics. I get a lot of these calls, so I didn't think too much of it, but it was Christmas Eve and I wanted to get home, so I closed up shop and hopped in my car. I drove up to this five story mansion--no, I'm not kidding. And I'm looking at this place and I know, I just know what I'm going to find inside. The guy comes out on the front porch to meet me, and says "The comics are up in the attic." Of course the comics are in the attic. They always are.
The first floor is crammed full of newspapers. All newspapers. The kind of pack rat stuff you only ever hear about on CNN when some old lady dies, smothered by all her old issues of National Geographic. The second floor is board games--board games! Stacked to the ceiling. The third floor is like books or something, I don't know, the fourth floor is jam-packed with army stuff--clothing and weapons and even unopened MREs. It's disgusting, but I can't help but wonder what he's got up in that attic.
We walk up and the first thing I see is the pile. A six foot tall pile, like a haystack, of comics. As I get used to the light and the cold, I see comics up on the unfinished attic walls, and they're good ones--all the really iconic cover art from the 60s and 70s. I look a little closer and I cringe--he's just nailed them to the walls, a single nail right through the entire book. "Um, why are these comics nailed to the wall?" "Oh, I like to look at them," he says nonchalantly. I could probably get a couple hundred bucks for each of those books, without the nails.
I walk over to the pile and see another, smaller pile next to it. I blink. I have to be hallucinating. Right there, on the top of this other pile, is Action Comics #1. I blink again. It's not going away. I grab it and flip through it--it's in pretty decent shape. I look at the pile again. It's all great, great stuff--classic issues of Fantastic Four, more Superman, all sorts of stuff. This pile is worth about a million and a half dollars. The guy comes over and takes Action #1 out of my hands. "That's not what I called you about." He gestures to the large pile. "That one is." Of course it is.
The bigger pile's not bad, but it's nothing wonderful. I make a stack of things I know I'll have buyers for, and we agree on the price. As we walk back down the stairs, my arms full of slithering comics, I ask him if he won't let me make him an offer for some of the books in the smaller pile. He says no--a little angry. It turns out he only sells them when he needs the money to keep up the rest of his collecting habits. He branches off to the kitchen as I walk the comics out to my car, then come back inside for the rest. I walk up and down four flights of stairs, cursing myself for not hiding just a few books in my pile. I pack the comics neatly in a box and come back inside to pay him--in cash, of course. The guy's standing over the stove making dinner. I pay him, and make to leave.
"What, I'm not good enough to eat with? I'm good enough for you to buy my things but you won't sit down and eat with me? Tell you what, if you don't eat dinner with me this whole deal is off!" Now, in retrospect, I should have told him I'd eat with him in exchange for some of the smaller pile of books. But I just wanted out of there. So I sat down in his newspaper-covered kitchen, on Christmas Eve, and ate his nasty dried up pork chops, then hightailed it out of there back home. I've always wondered if I could have done anything differently there, but I've never heard from him since.
21 February 2007
People Who Draw Comics Shouldn't Run Down Cleveland
Cleveland--my city where worried wearied feet
in steel-toed boots walk the same uneven sidewalks
as the white coats, sons of bricklayers who forget
their fathers, their callused hands, lost in textbooks
and sterile steel, forgetting who pours the steel, who
laid the tracks, who built the cemetary where they
jog twice a week, rain or shine. My city of the student,
the struggling artist, bitter comics about the VA hospital,
the city that fosters Superman and supermen, home to
my lady of asymmetry. The doctors live in post-industrial
buildings with views of the lake and buy the art from the
people who live above their shops, who can't afford insurance.
Cleveland, my city of the future, lying like an ex-boyfriend
next year, the Browns, three years, Euclid, ten years, who knows
I always believe your voices; I'll always believe in you
because when the apocalypse comes, Cleveland, I want to
brace myself in your doorways, listen for the shear of steel and
falling brick, wait for the sirens to start.
in steel-toed boots walk the same uneven sidewalks
as the white coats, sons of bricklayers who forget
their fathers, their callused hands, lost in textbooks
and sterile steel, forgetting who pours the steel, who
laid the tracks, who built the cemetary where they
jog twice a week, rain or shine. My city of the student,
the struggling artist, bitter comics about the VA hospital,
the city that fosters Superman and supermen, home to
my lady of asymmetry. The doctors live in post-industrial
buildings with views of the lake and buy the art from the
people who live above their shops, who can't afford insurance.
Cleveland, my city of the future, lying like an ex-boyfriend
next year, the Browns, three years, Euclid, ten years, who knows
I always believe your voices; I'll always believe in you
because when the apocalypse comes, Cleveland, I want to
brace myself in your doorways, listen for the shear of steel and
falling brick, wait for the sirens to start.
17 February 2007
I'm Weak When You Miss Me, When You Roll Me On Your Tongue
So it's comfortably post-Valentine's Day, and I'm proud to say that last year's Godiva-and-roses extravaganza has been topped, big time. This year, I received probably the second-best present of my life: (second to a signed copy of Science Verse)
R bought me a comic book.
Last year he was all about "winning" Valentine's Day. He thinks it's a competition between men to see whose girl can tell the best story. He won, last year. Chocolates and roses and treasure hunts and fancy dinners translate well, girl-to-girl. Comic books don't translate so well, but he still won this year.
He won because he bought me something I really, truly wanted, something that meant more to me than overpriced candies. It takes a very special guy to buy a comic book off eBay for Valentine's Day, because he knows that every time someone asks me, I'll tell them the truth: He bought me a comic book. The one comic book I've always wanted to read and couldn't, because it's still under copyright and copies are scarce.
He bought me Amazing Spider-man #121: The Night Gwen Stacy Died.
Just so I can geek-wank here a second, this is #6 on the all-time great Marvel comics list. It's revolutionary. It's got great art, and a great story. And it's historic--Gwen Stacy was who Peter Parker dated before Mary Jane Watson, his college girlfriend who was smart and hot and into science and into Peter Parker. It was a relationship free of hero-worship. And they killed her off.
Well, actually, Peter killed her.
That's why this comic is so hard to get. Not only did the writers kill off a popular character, the hero's girlfriend, but she died, accidentally, by the hero's hand. No mistaken identities, no sterotypical comic book plot devices. Just a toss off a bridge by a villian, and a too-quick stop by Spider-man. Broke her neck.
And now I have it. It's in decent condition, really. And it means so much more than the chocolate and roses and tricks. Those were nice, yeah, but this--this is me. This is a gift for me, not for people who ask. It's a gift that says "I see your geekiness and I enable it."
I bought myself some tulips at the grocery yesterday. I bought myself some good dark chocolate last week. I'm rapidly turning into the kind of woman who doesn't need Valentine's Day. But damn, it's nice when it turns out well.
R bought me a comic book.
Last year he was all about "winning" Valentine's Day. He thinks it's a competition between men to see whose girl can tell the best story. He won, last year. Chocolates and roses and treasure hunts and fancy dinners translate well, girl-to-girl. Comic books don't translate so well, but he still won this year.
He won because he bought me something I really, truly wanted, something that meant more to me than overpriced candies. It takes a very special guy to buy a comic book off eBay for Valentine's Day, because he knows that every time someone asks me, I'll tell them the truth: He bought me a comic book. The one comic book I've always wanted to read and couldn't, because it's still under copyright and copies are scarce.
He bought me Amazing Spider-man #121: The Night Gwen Stacy Died.
Just so I can geek-wank here a second, this is #6 on the all-time great Marvel comics list. It's revolutionary. It's got great art, and a great story. And it's historic--Gwen Stacy was who Peter Parker dated before Mary Jane Watson, his college girlfriend who was smart and hot and into science and into Peter Parker. It was a relationship free of hero-worship. And they killed her off.
Well, actually, Peter killed her.
That's why this comic is so hard to get. Not only did the writers kill off a popular character, the hero's girlfriend, but she died, accidentally, by the hero's hand. No mistaken identities, no sterotypical comic book plot devices. Just a toss off a bridge by a villian, and a too-quick stop by Spider-man. Broke her neck.
And now I have it. It's in decent condition, really. And it means so much more than the chocolate and roses and tricks. Those were nice, yeah, but this--this is me. This is a gift for me, not for people who ask. It's a gift that says "I see your geekiness and I enable it."
I bought myself some tulips at the grocery yesterday. I bought myself some good dark chocolate last week. I'm rapidly turning into the kind of woman who doesn't need Valentine's Day. But damn, it's nice when it turns out well.
I am one sleepy kitten today
Last night's emotional binge led to an emotional hangover this morning. I think sometimes I get tired of being so rational and just completely overreact to one little thing, to be reminded how it feels to feel.
Anyway. Jefferyt did a list of his favorite words, and it brought back memories of English 150 (remember those days, Case kids? before SAGES?) and Brad Ricca asking us for our top five favorite words. Here are mine:
5) kiosk
One of my favorite words to say. The io vowel combination is fun, as is the ending -sk.
4) queue
Not only is it a Britishism, not only is it fun to say, but try spelling it out loud.
3) evocative
Sounds beautiful. Feels lovely in the mouth. Has fantastic connotations. Just an all-around great word.
2) Lolita
Any book that starts with phonetic rambling about the title is good enough for me.
1) Adamant
Noun form only. I have a deep and profound love affair with this word and the lovely, lovely images it conjures up. In Paradise Lost, Satan sends out his armies armored in "gold and adamant." What an image--crystal and gold and wings. It's a shame no one uses this word in this form anymore.
Anyway. Jefferyt did a list of his favorite words, and it brought back memories of English 150 (remember those days, Case kids? before SAGES?) and Brad Ricca asking us for our top five favorite words. Here are mine:
5) kiosk
One of my favorite words to say. The io vowel combination is fun, as is the ending -sk.
4) queue
Not only is it a Britishism, not only is it fun to say, but try spelling it out loud.
3) evocative
Sounds beautiful. Feels lovely in the mouth. Has fantastic connotations. Just an all-around great word.
2) Lolita
Any book that starts with phonetic rambling about the title is good enough for me.
1) Adamant
Noun form only. I have a deep and profound love affair with this word and the lovely, lovely images it conjures up. In Paradise Lost, Satan sends out his armies armored in "gold and adamant." What an image--crystal and gold and wings. It's a shame no one uses this word in this form anymore.
16 February 2007
No More Bailing Boats For Me
I took a friend to the Algebra tonight for her very first time. I neglected to inform her that trips to the Algebra, for me, average about four hours. She had a good time, nonetheless, and we came back, watched Mean Girls, and she headed home. I went back looking for chapstick, and found buckets all over the floor.
I'd known about the leak; it'd been there for a while and it was supposed to be fixed. However, a record amount of water was now coming through the ceiling and threatening to flood the place, ruin the original wood flooring, the countertop, the beautiful stupid kelley green and purple pressed tin ceiling. I ran around for a while with Phil putting buckets under drips, and then I turned tail and fled. I ran away from Phil, from Mark with his guitar, from a roaring fire and a night just like every other spent at the Algebra after closing. I ran away from the Algebra. My place. My second home, the place where I feel most comfortable. Just smelling the Algebra--wood smoke, tea, wood--calms me down. And I ran away.
I ran away because I felt like I was going to hurl. I mean, I am Scarlett fucking O'Hara and this is my Tara, and it's completely at the mercy of the tons of snow threatening to collapse its roof and I can't stand it anymore and the thought of leaving the Algebra and Cleveland and graffiti and cobblestone streets and free premieres for stupid movies and museums and markets and the smell of exhaust and unshovelled sidewalks and poems and trains and shopping bags and everything, everything, everything is pressing down on my roof and tonight I started to leak.
I'd known about the leak; it'd been there for a while and it was supposed to be fixed. However, a record amount of water was now coming through the ceiling and threatening to flood the place, ruin the original wood flooring, the countertop, the beautiful stupid kelley green and purple pressed tin ceiling. I ran around for a while with Phil putting buckets under drips, and then I turned tail and fled. I ran away from Phil, from Mark with his guitar, from a roaring fire and a night just like every other spent at the Algebra after closing. I ran away from the Algebra. My place. My second home, the place where I feel most comfortable. Just smelling the Algebra--wood smoke, tea, wood--calms me down. And I ran away.
I ran away because I felt like I was going to hurl. I mean, I am Scarlett fucking O'Hara and this is my Tara, and it's completely at the mercy of the tons of snow threatening to collapse its roof and I can't stand it anymore and the thought of leaving the Algebra and Cleveland and graffiti and cobblestone streets and free premieres for stupid movies and museums and markets and the smell of exhaust and unshovelled sidewalks and poems and trains and shopping bags and everything, everything, everything is pressing down on my roof and tonight I started to leak.
15 February 2007
Short Skirt, Long Jacket
I am seriously dragging ass today even though I slept something like 10 hours last night. I could be getting sick, or I could just have the sleeping sickness that hits me at random and leaves me needing 14 hours or more of sleep a day. The drag-assed-ness is not really helping work today. First, I believed someone else in the lab when they said they'd checked the cell expression (meaning the amount of luminous protein the cell is making) and it was a little low but fine. It was not "a little low," it was nonexistent, and I spent two hours dilligently looking for images that just weren't going to show up.
So I switched to a different probe (same shiny proteins, different places in the cell) and mixed up some new drugs because I can't do the same experiments with this probe, and now here I sit, sifting through bacterially infected pink fluid to find a single cell that will do what I want it to do. Oh, the glamorous life of research.
The good thing about being this sleepy is that because my brain is dull, it's letting slip through all sorts of sensory information that usually gets stuffed way, way back on the priority list. For example, today I learned that the hallway with the ice-cruncher-thing smells like puffed rice, the kind of rice that ends up in a tea they sell at Osiyo. The entire floor smells a little bit like a locker room, from all the animal tissue and dampness-tracked-in that ends up here, and a little bit like a butcher's, for obvious reasons. Muscle tissue has a smell all its own; it doesn't smell like dead meat, but warm and not entirely unpleasant. There's an incubator full of muscle tissue where my cells are kept, and I enjoy the unique way it smells when I open it.
The bad thing about being this sleepy is that my brain is dull. I burned my hand today making lunch, and it's blistered up quite nicely. I then capped off my day by sticking my fingers directly into the viral-infected cell culture. If I happen to be glowing blue and yellow by the end of today, I will have to recant everything I've ever said about the implausibility of science creating superheros. I hope I don't have to. Glowing is a pretty stupid superpower to have.
So I switched to a different probe (same shiny proteins, different places in the cell) and mixed up some new drugs because I can't do the same experiments with this probe, and now here I sit, sifting through bacterially infected pink fluid to find a single cell that will do what I want it to do. Oh, the glamorous life of research.
The good thing about being this sleepy is that because my brain is dull, it's letting slip through all sorts of sensory information that usually gets stuffed way, way back on the priority list. For example, today I learned that the hallway with the ice-cruncher-thing smells like puffed rice, the kind of rice that ends up in a tea they sell at Osiyo. The entire floor smells a little bit like a locker room, from all the animal tissue and dampness-tracked-in that ends up here, and a little bit like a butcher's, for obvious reasons. Muscle tissue has a smell all its own; it doesn't smell like dead meat, but warm and not entirely unpleasant. There's an incubator full of muscle tissue where my cells are kept, and I enjoy the unique way it smells when I open it.
The bad thing about being this sleepy is that my brain is dull. I burned my hand today making lunch, and it's blistered up quite nicely. I then capped off my day by sticking my fingers directly into the viral-infected cell culture. If I happen to be glowing blue and yellow by the end of today, I will have to recant everything I've ever said about the implausibility of science creating superheros. I hope I don't have to. Glowing is a pretty stupid superpower to have.
11 February 2007
Rutherford Hayes in the Morning
"From a biological perspective, the interconnectivity of our brain structure is just amazing. It's what allows us to freely associate loosely connected concepts, leads to sudden bursts of understanding, and creates many, many different ways to approach the same problem. Neurons can form a number of connections that has never been determined to have an upper limit, as far as I know. Someone once estimated it as three hundred. That's a lot of associations to make. Could I make three hundred associations with the same single idea?"
Rutherford Hayes in the morning
is sailing into San Francisco
it's the first time a president has ever been to California
"It's amazing how just one thing, the particular wavelength of sound, the piling up of so many sinusoidal waves, can bring back so many memories. Probably not three hundred, but a lot. Just the sound of this voice makes me think of summer, summer in the freshman dorms, with bright sunshine outside the window. The way the floors smell in the humidity, and the coolness of the wooden desks. The feeling of missing someone. Being happy to be in love, and loved. And the sunshine, on the grass, just outside the window. Scents of lavender and ginger, clean cotton slightly damp under my hands."
Sometimes science can't save you from your own brain.
Rutherford Hayes in the morning
is sailing into San Francisco
it's the first time a president has ever been to California
"It's amazing how just one thing, the particular wavelength of sound, the piling up of so many sinusoidal waves, can bring back so many memories. Probably not three hundred, but a lot. Just the sound of this voice makes me think of summer, summer in the freshman dorms, with bright sunshine outside the window. The way the floors smell in the humidity, and the coolness of the wooden desks. The feeling of missing someone. Being happy to be in love, and loved. And the sunshine, on the grass, just outside the window. Scents of lavender and ginger, clean cotton slightly damp under my hands."
Sometimes science can't save you from your own brain.
07 February 2007
Sleep in Heavenly Peace
My research, my job which I love, causes the death of an animal every time I go in, and I don't care about that. I was in the store with my roommate while she smelled shampoos and ruled one brand out because of animal testing, and I informed her that it was either animal tests or someone's scalp falling off down the line. I have no heart when it comes to things like these.
I am graduating and going off to graduate school without looking back. I am moving to a new state and leaving everyone behind. This only bothers me a little.
Most days, I feel cold. Not me personally, but that others might view me as cold. Ruthless. Unyieldingly practical when it comes to my personal and professional life. This, also, only bothers me a little.
Today I don't feel cold. Today I feel like my efficiency is a mantra to get me through the days. Today, for the hundred thousandth time, I miss Doc Oc.
I was never anything to Doc other than one of his beloved students, but that was plenty. I remember talking to him when I had a crisis with physics and was thinking about switching to chemistry and he told me to get a B.S. in chemistry, I could "go anywhere for grad school, they'll kiss your feet!" I stopped by his office for help upon occasion, but I've always been too proud to regularly ask for assistance. I rarely missed his class, even though I'd already had almost everything he covered in high school and chemistry always came easily to me.
I remember his explanation for the phases of water: "I don't know why water forms two bonds when it's liquid and four bonds when it's solid. You die, you go up there, you ask him." Every time I turn on the distilled water tap (and swallow my guilt for washing dishes with distilled water when some people can't even find clean drinking water) I think about Doc demonstrating the wrong was to use distilled water in the beginning chem lab, splashing it all over himself as he sang and danced about.
I worked orientation this summer, and a lot of kids (aspiring pre-meds, usually) come in with questions and fears about chemistry. Every time I tried to answer or reassure them, all that would come out of my mouth was my own grief. Speaking to his friends among the faculty and students, hearing their sadness and frustration, made me want to do something more permanent, something to last.
After this class of 2007 graduates, with the help of a lot of people, there should be a permanent Doc Oc memorial on campus. If it can be done through sheer force of will, it will be done. I'm putting my clinical detachment to good use.
"One of the oddest justifications I have heard for religion is when people wish there is a God because some people are so evil there needs to be a hell. But tonight as I sit here I am wishing the opposite: I wish there was a heaven just so Doc could be there. Even if it ends up I'm wrong and I wake up in a land of brimstone it could never be truly horrible because I'd know Doc got to go to heaven."
~Yvette Cendes
I am graduating and going off to graduate school without looking back. I am moving to a new state and leaving everyone behind. This only bothers me a little.
Most days, I feel cold. Not me personally, but that others might view me as cold. Ruthless. Unyieldingly practical when it comes to my personal and professional life. This, also, only bothers me a little.
Today I don't feel cold. Today I feel like my efficiency is a mantra to get me through the days. Today, for the hundred thousandth time, I miss Doc Oc.
I was never anything to Doc other than one of his beloved students, but that was plenty. I remember talking to him when I had a crisis with physics and was thinking about switching to chemistry and he told me to get a B.S. in chemistry, I could "go anywhere for grad school, they'll kiss your feet!" I stopped by his office for help upon occasion, but I've always been too proud to regularly ask for assistance. I rarely missed his class, even though I'd already had almost everything he covered in high school and chemistry always came easily to me.
I remember his explanation for the phases of water: "I don't know why water forms two bonds when it's liquid and four bonds when it's solid. You die, you go up there, you ask him." Every time I turn on the distilled water tap (and swallow my guilt for washing dishes with distilled water when some people can't even find clean drinking water) I think about Doc demonstrating the wrong was to use distilled water in the beginning chem lab, splashing it all over himself as he sang and danced about.
I worked orientation this summer, and a lot of kids (aspiring pre-meds, usually) come in with questions and fears about chemistry. Every time I tried to answer or reassure them, all that would come out of my mouth was my own grief. Speaking to his friends among the faculty and students, hearing their sadness and frustration, made me want to do something more permanent, something to last.
After this class of 2007 graduates, with the help of a lot of people, there should be a permanent Doc Oc memorial on campus. If it can be done through sheer force of will, it will be done. I'm putting my clinical detachment to good use.
"One of the oddest justifications I have heard for religion is when people wish there is a God because some people are so evil there needs to be a hell. But tonight as I sit here I am wishing the opposite: I wish there was a heaven just so Doc could be there. Even if it ends up I'm wrong and I wake up in a land of brimstone it could never be truly horrible because I'd know Doc got to go to heaven."
~Yvette Cendes
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