For the past couple of weeks, the neighbors of my southeast neighbors have been setting fireworks off nightly, at the same time (about 8:15), like clockwork. For a long time, I thought they just wanted to annoy me, and disturb my quiet, spinsterly sewing with their raucous fun. Now I realize that they are otherworldly beings, who operate on a timescale very different from our own. For them, every mortal day is equal to 365 demon/elf/goblin/whatever-they-are days, and 8:15 (human time) is when their Fourth of July strikes.I would really like to see their faces sometime, and find out if they have pointy ears.
I won this. (There is no real analysis. There was a topic I could have chosen which would have given me the chance to do more than argue a point, presenting quotations as evidence, but, in the end, I chose this one because it took a lot less time to write. Do not judge me on this.)I am sleepy. I no longer have control over my eyelids.
There are all sorts of restaurants in Boulder promising healthy, organic food. They serve meat made of soybean curd, bread made of rice, and milk made of things that are not milk.However, nobody has yet exploited the pocketbooks of those people who detest healthy eating and would rather throw their significant others into an active volcano than eat a veggie-burger. That is why somebody should start a theme restaurant (the theme would be "meat") in which everything, from meat to bread to tofu, would be synthesized from animal flesh. Though I must admit, gentle readers, that the idea is nauseating, the profit potential is enormous, and enormous profits are very effective cures for ailments of all sorts. (As evidenced by Dick Clark, who is startlingly old, startlingly healthy, and rich.)
Tomorrow morning, I am going to go and carefully collect up all of the kitchen utensils, the paperclips, the little metallic springs from my gel pens. I will disassemble the dishwashers, the iron, the toaster, my beloved espresso machine, and my computer. Then, I will take all of these metallic pieces to the living room, where I will build a radiation-therapy device, the likes of which the world has never seen. It will not bring about any harmful side effects--no hair loss, no taste-loss, no loss at all. It will pack thirty days of treatment with a normal machine into approximately forty seconds. The treatments it administers will feel like cool breezes after a day of exercise--nothing too nice, though, as I do not want anybody to become dependent upon it. And, it will be a hundred percent effective.After I have administered this medical treatment to anybody in need of it (starting, of course, with those people who are nearest to me), the world will be immensely grateful. They will throw tickertape parades made out of biodegradable materials. All these tickertape parades will attract the attention of a gigantic alien monster, which will descend upon our peaceful blue planet with a firm intent to kill. Fortunately, I will have included a setting on my device ("monsterectomy") that is perfectly suited to the vanquishing of monsters (for I am a practical girl), and I will vanquish the hell out of the monster.
Then more celebrating, and then everything will be back to normal.
Let it never be said that it is impossible to be close to someone, even though you do not know them well.
Six sore fingers and several lost needles (I fear one or two still languish in the carpet somewhere) later, my hat is completed. I think that it's the sort of hat an elf would wear if the elf where into 1940s fashions.
Next, I want to make one of those oversized black hats that female spies wear. And when that hat is done, I will take to wearing sunglasses indoors and smoking european cigarettes in a painfully aloof manner.
It would be fantastic if we could swap dreams the way businessmen swap business cards. When you met someone, you'd give them a copy of your favorite dream, which would be both a pleasant gift and an introduction to your personality, and they'd give you their.I wish I knew what the insides of other peoples' minds looked like.
When I become a genius, I'll build a machine that actualizes (perhaps that's not the right verb, but I'm on a tight schedule, so it'll do) literary characters. If the character is well-developed and complex, it'll be indistinguishable from a normal person, and will be able to carry on conversations (albeit on a limited number of topics). If the character is, on the other hand, hastily characterized and two-dimensional, its physical manifestation will be flimsy and two-dimensional, and it will wobble around like a cardboard cutout, trying to make sense of things.I will be away from home tomorrow. Please vote on what book I read. Do I read:
Please e-mail your suggestions to me, and I will respond as soon as I get back.
- The Double by Dostoyevsky
- Vanity Fair by Thackeray
- L'etranger by Camus, in French (in combination with a dictionary, of course)
- Death of a Salesman by Miller, in combination with a really fucking cool book on anachronistic evolved features
You know, from this weblog, you would never guess that I am such a seething cauldron of anger and loneliness. (Though I doubt loneliness seethes. I bet loneliness oozes.)
A fox lives in my neighborhood. It comes out around dusktime to do foxlike things, and it is usually very shy and elusive. However, as I was walking to Alicia's house the other night, I saw it staring back at me, nine feet away, from the a neatly manicured lawn. It was dauntingly calm, and I felt vaguely like I was in the presence of aristocracy. I played it a quick rendition of "home on the range" with the toy accordion I was carrying, but paused when I remembered that wild animals are not supposed to act so tame. As I was standing there watching it, it lay down on the lawn, in open view, and curled up. This is decidedly un-foxy behavior, and it makes me think that something is wrong. For one thing, I usually see rabbits (generally only the tail-ends of them, as they flee from my clumsy human sounds) during the seasons in which I see foxes. Not so this year. For another thing, I've read that predatory animals generally only venture into human areas when food is scarce elsewhere. And, for a final thing, this fox was very thin and frail-looking, thinner and frailer-looking than any foxes I've seen before. I don't know if I am making too much of this, but I worry that this fox is starving, and is starving because it is incompatible with the short, sprawling green lawns that we suburban humans seem to love. (If prey-animals can neither eat the pesticided grass, nor hide in it, I think it is reasonably safe to assume that there will not be many prey-animals around.)Conflicts between human and animal lifestyles seem to be coming up more often than usual in conversation. A friend of mine found a deer trapped in his yard. It panicked and broke a large mirror trying to escape. Some Coloradan housing community has been poisoning prarie dogs because the animals eat their garden-matter.
I understand, you know, that it is natural for things to die. Humans are the only the only animals that consciously practice birth control (if their religious sect allows it, that is), as far as I know of. Everything else just breeds as much as it can breed, and the weak or unlucky ones die. So it may be tragically naive for me to get upset over toxic golf-course pesticides and the like. But, unlike meteors, hurricanes, and various other natural and climatic conditions which cause things to die, humans are a thinking force. (Not to insult meteors, I simply know of no evidence stating conclusively that meteors are capable of thought.) It seems like we should be able to curb our consumption, and avoid becoming a sustained natural disaster.
So, if I end up a biologist, I want to be a suburban ecologist. Then I can mount a crusade against these artificial lawns (which require an unreasonable amount of water to maintain, you know) and encourage moderation in development and consumption, and people will listen to me because I will have a PhD.
I found the best line ever on page 161 of my copy of Madame Bovary:"...human speech is but a cracked cauldron on which we beat tunes for dancing bears"
It's a strange line to find in this particular book, a deviation from his usual style (which is very traditional, relying on pastoral and romantic imagery to describe most everything). I suspect that Flaubert simply shares my passion for dancing bears, and wished to pay homage to their grace and majesty in his masterpiece. Someday I'd like to write a literary masterpiece in which I liken everything to dancing bears. They are such a versatile (and comical) metaphor.
And, when you think about it, aren't we all just dancing bears, clumsily swaying to the rhythm of existence? (It's so true!)
Around six o'clock this evening, I attempted to write an e-mail. First, I noted that the shift key did not work. A few words later, my backspace failed. By the time my e-mail's topic had shifted to the crazy doings of my keyboard, the space bar was gone and I was unable to type numbers. Thus, I was forced to clean my keyboard. Of course, I hadn't cleaned my keyboard once during the four years that I'd had it. Every six months or so, I'd bang it against a convenient hard surface, and that was that.I set about the task with a stout heart, but, several filthy paper towels later, my morale had plummeted. I have looked beneath the familiar surface of my keyboard and seen the horrors that lurk, well, beneath. I've seen things that would make a grown man recoil, and hurry to the sink to wash his hands. I still have no idea how I got honey beneath the keys.
I'm thinking of joining one of those veterans' clubs. The other members there will talk about the tragic deaths of their close friends in battle and I'll talk about "that one time I cleaned out my keyboard."
If there is not specific word for "the ominous feeling that one should be doing something," there should be. And they should name it after me, in the same way that you get a butterfly named after you if you find it and kill it and exhibit it first. (Or a mountain named after you, if you climb it first. Or a child named after you, if you name a child after yourself.) It can be called "Alexaption," as in:Yesterday I woke up filled with powerful and indelible feelings of alexaption. I knew I had to do something immediately, but I was not sure what I had to do. It struck me suddenly that I had to impart a piece of vital information to James. I hurried to my computer and began to write an e-mail informing him that you can put a TV Guide in a bucket of water and take it out, and it'll be completely dry. As I tried to figure out why this happens when you submerge a TV Guide in a body of water (futuristic paper? witchcraft? some sort of business agreement between TV Guide and water?), I realized that I had gotten this information from a dream, and it was completely false.
I have been seized by a desire to teach myself ancient Greek. I am not overly ambitious, I don't hope to become conversationally fluent (though I have been daydreaming recently about some vague situation in which Homer is brought to modern-day Colorado via a mysterious time portal, and I am the only one who can communicate with him). I would just like to be able to read simple things, and correctly pronounce the names in Euripedes' plays. Is that too much to ask for?I doubt these desire-attacks are good things. It seems that I dissolve into microscopic depressed particles whenever I am not being forcibly urged on by one random ambition or another.
I need sleep. My mind has been about as sharp as a bowling ball, of late.
Yesterday was my first day of interning and it went just wonderfully, if you pretend that I did not come down ill and did not constantly fall into daydreams as a result of the four hours of sleep I got the night before. Everybody was very gracious about showing me around, and I will have my own cubicle next week. I proofread a table of contents and corrected four mistakes, which was strangely satisfying. And, I was shown to the free-book bookshelves. which I will struggle mightily not to pillage.I'm making a hat, too.
Words cannot express the level of eagerness with which I anticipate the upcoming movie version of The Iliad. I want to go dressed up as a character from Greek mythology, maybe a nymph or a manticore (a sexy manticore!). Or Medea, as she was Asian and overly emotional, just like me. (I want to start a Trojan War Recreationists League, and do those battle-recreation things that Civil War aficionados do. It'd be great fun, I get the impression that looting and concubining were better in those days.)I don't know what I'd do if I were expected to cast someone in the role of "most beautiful woman on earth," but, when placed in the very same situation, the casting directors chose Diane Kruger to play Helen. While she is very beautiful, I don't exactly think I'd fight a ten-year-long war for her, if you know what I mean. (High standards, yes, but they were set by Homer, not by me.) She is, however, far more attractive than most middle-eastern terrorists, and we seem to be fighting a rather permanent war against them, so perhaps it's okay.
When I am reading a book, I like to find actual people who could resemble the characters I am reading about, so as to create some sort of connection between reality and the text-people in the book. It's never so trying to do so as when I am reading classical literature, for I know only three Greek people, all of them female, and it seems a little strange to think of my AP Literature teacher as a dryad, and such.
I went to a graduation party last night (masquerade, hence the sailor suit in the photo to your right). It was fantastic, because I got to dance. (I prefer to take my physical exercise in the form of dancing, sprinting for short distances, or walking around for hours; dancing being my top priority). I spent a good deal of time observing peoples' default dances: the gyrations that they use when they first begin dancing, unsure of the rhythm and their own skill, the moves which they fall back on when they get tired or realize they have been doing the same sequence for too long. The prototypical dance seems to be wiggling the shoulders and buttocks as one makes running-type motions with one's arms. If the scientific community were to resuccitate a caveman, I imagine they would find its default dancing nearly identical. (I have a whole theory on the evolution of dancing, and it fits nicely into the whole "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" thing, but I think I'll save it for publishing in a reputable scientific journal. (Or an irreputable joke-scientific journal! Someone should start one of those.))I also discovered that listening to "I wanna be Sedated" by the Ramones makes me want to do things in a montage-style, and "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper (apologies to Ian for repeating myself) makes me want to go shopping, but not necessarily shopping, just dancing around a mall carrying shopping bags.
Earlier in the year, we high school students were given catalogs of graduation-related things we could order. Most of the products were relatively normal: t-shirts, coffee mugs, picture frames, decorative tassels in your school's colors, etcetera. What caught my eye, though, was the wallet-sized diploma--a laminated, miniaturized version of your real diploma, shunk down for convenient carrying. What in the name of Tartarus do you do with a miniature copy of your high-school diploma? Do you take it out when you get pulled over by cops, and attempt to start up a friendly alumni-to-alumni chat? Do you casually place it next to your Blockbuster card on the counter when renting movies ("My rental card...oh, and my high school diploma") and then wait for the compliments and admiration? Do you attempt to pass it off as a credit card? I just don't understand.What's more, it cost something like fifteen dollars.
I fear I will have to resign myself to being thoroughly unattractive tomorrow, when I go to Boulder High for the last time as a student. Yesterday morning, a mosquito bit me squarely on the upper bridge of the nose, giving me a large welt that looks suspiciously like I am beginning to grow a unicorn-horn. I've been cutting my hair very poorly recently, for I have been cutting it with very small scissors. My lips are not pouty.Furthermore, I was up until 2:15 tonight/this morning working on computer stuff, and then up from 2:15 to just-before now (3:00 am) lying in bed, humming "brown-eyed girl" against my will. (I don't know what it is about that song, but there is no way to evict it once it has taken up residence in your head. I have tried, but that song is catchier than smallpox.) If there's one thing I've learned about beauty from reading fashion magazines, it's that sleep (and starvation and makeup too) is good for your sex appeal, and tossing around in bed mutteringly singing "hey, where did we go, days when the rains came" is not. (If it's not beneficial, it must be...maleficial.)
I'll post graduation pictures sometime. I'm the first in my immediate family to get a high school diploma. (Strange, considering both my parents have PhDs.)
