If I were less convinced that I would absolutely hate living in a big city, I would move to New York just to gambol about in Central Park with hundreds of total strangers.
The best part, I think (though they didn’t show much of this in the video) is that for the most part, people who weren’t playing couldn’t hear a thing and only saw crowds of folks dancing around perfectly coordinated, but in silence.
I was all set to get up on time and actually go to my 8:00 class this morning. Before going to bed at an almost-reasonable time last night (12:45-ish), I set two alarms on my phone and the alarm on my alarm clock, which sits all the way across the room. Six hours of sleep is much less than I need, but I figured I could do it for one day, right?
I assume the first phone alarm rang, though I don’t remember turning it off. When the alarm clock turned on at 6:45, I woke up, grabbed the phone, and grumpily chucked it across the room in the clock’s general direction. My sleepy aim was way high, so it hit the wall, knocking the battery out (ensuring the second phone alarm would never go off), then fell on the lever* that turns off the clock’s alarm.
I woke up again at 10:07 and made it to my *12:00* class just in time.
———
* It’s this big weird Nickelodeon clock I’ve had for years. The snooze button is enormous, and the on/off lever is likewise comically large and easily smackable. This is why it’s across the room in the first place.
The current contents of my crockpot include one gigantic cockroach and a generous dousing of poison.
He (she?) was hanging out on the wall of my kitchen, threatening the cookies I’d left out on the stove and just generally being enormous. Like, not as big as my cell phone, but PRETTY DAMN CLOSE. I know I’m being such a girl, but ohmygod ewewEW.
I didn’t have any Raid because my bad-at-planning self doesn’t usually keep the apartment stocked with the necessities of comfortable living. I ran out to SuperTarget to fetch some, and when I got back he was still there, thank goodness. So I sprayed him, he fell into the crockpot, there was more spraying, etc.
He’s finally stopped writhing. I mean, I haven’t looked, but there aren’t any more scrabbly noises coming from the kitchen.
The problem now, of course, is how to get his buggy body from crockpot to trash without looking at it or touching it. I might have to rethink this whole no-boys-allowed thing; it’d be handy to have one around for crises like this one.
I think I’ll have to throw those cookies out now, too. Damnit, roach, not only do you make me kill you, you have to take my cookies down with you. Bastard.
A short while ago I realized that I had gone more than a day—about 30 hours—eating nothing but ice cream. Seriously, nothing. No sandwiches, no crackers, no cookies…just ice cream. Blue Bell mint chocolate chip, mmm.
And it wasn’t even very much ice cream. I think I’m only a third of the way through the half-gallon tub. Somehow I’m still alive, and I don’t feel sick or tired or hungry or anything. Ah, the joys of being young.
Don’t worry, I made myself some pasta once I realized what I’d done, so I’m not going to starve or die of an electrolyte imbalance*—it’s all good. Plus I always get the “chunky-style” pasta sauce because, you know, it’s almost like eating real vegetables.
———
* One of my biggest fears. Shut up.
…when you *know* you’ve seen something a million billion times, and in fact you walk past it every day, but as soon as you need it, you can’t find it? If you’ve ever seen my apartment, you can probably guess that this happens to me all the damn time.
I sat down to write a post this evening, and after discarding one particularly horrible, easy-to-write but depressing-to-read idea*, I realized I couldn’t think of a thing to talk about.
This is not to say that I don’t *have* things to talk about—I’m coming up with potential blog ideas all the time, but since I never write them down, most of what ends up on Prepoceros either is the result of a chance triggering of memory or happens right here in my computer alcove.
About a year ago I bought a lovely little Moleskine** to deal with this exact problem (and to make my life more coherent in general—I see so many interesting things, only to forget them within hours). Though I’ve only used it sporadically since then, I’ve always thought of it as something the “ideal Natalie” would carry with her everywhere, jotting down names, new books to read, brilliant world-changing ideas, etc.
So when I went searching for a topic and came up empty-handed (empty-minded?), I decided to fetch my Moleskine and put it in my bag RIGHT NOW so I wouldn’t forget.
Now, I swear to you that I have seen this nondescript little notebook every single day since I moved here three months ago. I promise you (though I don’t know why you’d care) that it is sitting in some very prominent place in my apartment.
And yet.
I feel like I’ve seen it in a drawer, but it’s not in either one. I know it was behind my old CPU just a little while ago, but it’s not there either. I remember shuffling it around constantly in order to pile up unopened mail on the bar, but ten minutes of picking through every old marker and scrap of paper in the whole bar area failed to turn up any sign of my precious Moleskine.
I’ve even checked the non-obvious places like my nightstand, the bathroom drawers, and the top of the refrigerator. No dice. Frustration.
Perhaps I’m misremembering the seeing-it-every-day thing because this plain black square-ish object vaguely resembles so many other things in my apartment—phone charger, PDA, small books, camera tripod, computer cables—that I recall seeing its various attributes without ever having seen the object itself. Does that make sense? Does it sound like a complete load of pseudo-cogsci crap? (Hint: it is.)
Long story short, I can’t find the notebook. Looked and looked. Really, my apartment isn’t very big, so I imagine it’ll turn up eventually, especially if I, I dunno, clean up around here or something, but dagnabbit, I could’ve *sworn* I saw it on this very desk just the other day . . .
———
* I cannot walk my dog at night any more without at least briefly considering death, meaninglessness, yada yada. After being pretty good about ignoring it for the last couple of weeks, I came close to totally losing my shit on tonight’s walk, and it was not at all fun. Ugh.
** Mine is the plain notebook, pocket size. I absolutely can’t stand writing on ruled paper. Gives me the ickies.
P. S. I did finish the paper, but not without a lot of unfocused staring into space and related time-wasters. It’s not pretty, but it’s done. I have an A in that class anyway—apparently the TA likes my writing.
As for the midterm, I spent all my time working on the paper and still haven’t cracked the book for the other course (nor have I, um, gone to any classes at all since the last test). I got a 70. The class average was 63, and my score put me in the 67th percentile. My 72 on the first test turned into a B with the curve, so I’ll have to ace the final (worth 50%) if I want a decent grade in this class.
It’s amazing how utterly unproductive I can be. I won’t indulge myself by reveling in it here, so it will suffice to say that today blew absolute chunks, mostly because nothing happened.
On Thursday I have a midterm and a paper due, in different classes. I still have not cracked the textbook for the class the midterm is in (I got a 72 on the first test—class average 58), and I’m *almost positive* I have the book the paper is supposed to be about.
Needless to say, I won’t be spending much time at home tomorrow. After school I’m going to schlep myself over to some public place and crank out this paper. Let’s hope it goes at least as well as the last one.
True, the strangers at Starbucks or wherever I end up won’t get on my ass if I’m staring off into space or reading blogs instead of working, but they might notice if I sprawl out on the floor for a while or decide to take “just a quick nap,” so it’s an improvement over my apartment.
I’ve got a bitch of an afternoon ahead of me, but hey, it could be worse—I was scheduled to teach tomorrow evening, before my boss found someone else to take the class (I was only subbing for a while). Earning money is overrated, really.
Reading an animated weather map is one of the most abstract tasks we humans are able to perform.
First there is the concept of a map, an impressive abstraction in itself. From a few scratchy lines on a 2D field, we can figure out where we are and where other places are relative to our current position, even though most maps have few natural landmarks, the scale difference is tremendous, and the map’s directions are rarely aligned with the real ones (unless your computer or TV screen is lying face-up on the floor). We can do this even if we have never been to those other places, and in fact we’re quite good (some of us, anyway) at using maps to navigate unfamiliar landscapes.
On top of this we add blotches representing rainfall, color-coded by severity. From this mass of information we pick out “cells” and “bands,” and a meteorologist (or a regular TV-news watcher) can see indications of the motion of a storm, even in a still image.
When all these blotches are set into motion, we are still able, amazingly, to track these changing, amorphous, abstract patterns and to extract useful information from this. I can look at six quick frames of colored pixels superimposed on a barebones map and say, within seconds, “By golly, that red line of severe weather is coming straight toward us, end-on, so there’s no use in trying to go back to sleep for the next half-hour or so.”
I think computers will be able to clean my house, cook me breakfast, and drive me to work long before they’ll be able to glean more relevant information from an animated weather map than I can.
Whether we’ll ever be able to teach Radar the Weather Dog to do any of this, on the other hand, is anyone’s guess.
Tomorrow I’ll be spending 2.5 hours of my Saturday afternoon solving puzzles. Not jigsaw puzzles, but the fun kind. Puzzles with numbers and lines and scrambled-up words.
This is the Google US Puzzle Championship, an online contest to select part of the US delegation to the 2006 World Puzzle Championship in Bulgaria in October.
No, I’m not special*—registration is free and open to all US citizens. The format is simple: 15-ish puzzles with varying point values. You print them all out at noon, submit the answers online as you come up with them, and the two people with the highest score at 2:30 win. The difficulty of the puzzles varies enough to make it both enjoyable and challenging for puzzlers at all skill levels.
I participated in both the 2004 and 2003 championships, but I think last year’s was held while I was in Chicago, and I missed it. I would’ve missed this year’s, too, if my friend Paul hadn’t reminded me last week. (Thanks!)
Hooray for puzzles! Hooray for any sort of mental stimulation, really! Summer can be really boring!
P.S. I’m going to try to flea-bomb and -powder the apartment again tomorrow. Wish me luck.
———
* Yes I am. But for other reasons. For instance, I ate a whole pint of Cherry Garcia frozen yogurt today. Mmmmm, special.
Still working on a post about that movie. I’ve been trying to write it during class, but the professors are always talking and breaking my concentration*.
I think it’s the number one or two rule of blogging (on my imaginary list) that if you ever promise to post about something, that post will NEVER HAPPEN. I’ll finish it tomorrow, really.
Anyway, the reason I’m here now is to bitch about computers, and how I wish I knew how to use them.
I’m trying to edit a video I’ve shot, but before I can upload the video from my camcorder to my computer, I need to get all the other videos that are hogging the rest of my hard drive off into some form of external storage. Ok, I have a DVD burner—no problem, right?
Turns out I actually have a CDRW/DVD drive, which apparently burns CDs and reads DVDs but does NOT burn DVDs***. What use is that? Why would I buy something that *plays* DVDs but doesn’t burn them? I don’t watch movies! Stupid!
So now I have a CD writer, a DVD reader . . . and 50 blank DVDs. I’ve opened the package, and they were hugely discounted, so I don’t think I can take them back. I don’t have any blank CDs, so I suppose I’ll have to go get some.
My idea: Every new computer sold to a non-techgeek should come with a little laminated card that says what’s on the computer. The gigahertz, the megabucks, what all the holes in back are for, etc. Then, when I want to buy something computer-related, I take my little card to Best Buy, I give it to the friendly people in the blue shirts, and they lead me to the shelf where the things-that-work-with-my-computer are located so I can pick out the color I want. Is that so hard? Criminy.
———
* Kidding. I totally pay attention the whole time**.
** More than half the time.
*** Every time I put a blank DVD in the drive and fire up any sort of burning program, it tells me the drive is empty and would I please put a CD-RW in? Thanks.
[I’m still working on my AIT reaction. I should have taken better notes (i.e., any notes at all)—right now I’m trying to get everything written down before I forget it.]
Last night I went to the opening party for the Sabine-to-Bagby Promenade, a brand new mini-park along Buffalo Bayou.
The food was great, the temperature wasn’t too sweltering, the bugs didn’t come out until late, and the fireworks were nice, as fireworks go*. But the films. Oh god, the films.
The bulk of the five-hour event was occupied by the “Floating Cinema,” a screen and projector on a barge in the bayou. They showed three films, reviews of which you can read here. (Be forewarned: the second review is at best embellished and at worst a pack of lies.)
The first film, Two Rivers, was fairly dull. I suppose it was a documentary of some sort, but there was no talking, just shot after shot of silent, dreary riverscapes and rusty boats. I only recall one shot with actual people in it.
Now that I’ve read the blurb, I have a vague idea of what we were supposed to be seeing, but there was no explanation in the film itself. To my artistically-unsavvy eye, it appeared to be a 35-minute slide show of water and trees. A good time, it seemed, to find the port-o-potties and refresh our margaritas**.
The second film, we thought, would surely be better. What fools we were.
Ten Skies was precisely what would you would expect from its name, but much, much longer. Imagine a shot of the sky. Just sky, no scenery. The shot is in real time, as if you were lying on your back staring up at the sky. Do that for ten minutes. Then do it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
Oh, and the “soundtrack”? Not stories, as the blurb suggests. No talking, just the background noise of the outdoors—a low, dull roar, the occasional bird. Monotonous.
I don’t have a problem with “minimalist” art in general. If I’m in a museum and see a completely blue canvas, I think to myself, “Wow, that took very little time and effort to create, but it says something interesting about the nature of art, blah-di-blah.” AND THEN I MOVE ON. The blue canvas has taken up maybe ten or fifteen seconds of my life. This film, by contrast, took SIX THOUSAND of those seconds—cruel and unusual punishment, imho.
Sure, we could have gotten up and left at any time*** during that first two-and-a-quarter hours, but we stuck it out in the hopes that the Andy Warhol film, at least, would be worth watching.
It wasn’t.
Sunset was a 33-minute real-time shot of, you guessed it, a sunset. This one *did* have words, but those words were spoken vveerryy sslloowwllyy by the disembodied voice of a woman on some serious downers and were along the lines of
The sea . . . is black. Black. The sea is black. His skin . . . his skin . . . is white. I am . . . infinity. Infinity . . . is here. Here . . . death. Death . . . death . . . wants to be here. The sea is white . . . is white.
My blanketmates (Wendy and her mom) and I are pretty snarky people, but by the end of the night our once-overflowing fonts of sarcasm were more or less dried up. There are only so many ways to say “I wish those people in front of us would sit down—I’ve only seen this riverbank forty-three times,” or “Gosh, that sky is completely different from the sky I see EVERY DAY.”
If I’d remembered to bring my camcorder, you could have witnessed my slow, three-hour descent into sanity insanity (Freudian slip?). There was much wailing and tearing of the hair. Also writhing. Perhaps it’s better that you don’t witness it.
I don’t know what the organizers were thinking when they scheduled the evening’s entertainment. Is the Floating Cinema producer somebody’s brother? These films might have played well to an artsy crowd in a more snobbish venue, but to the general public (and the general public’s children) sitting on the grass drinking beer? Hardly.
People were crammed in blanket-to-folding chair all up and down the bayou for the fireworks show, but at least half the crowd packed up and left five minutes into Two Rivers. By the end of the Warhol film, you could roll a good-sized boulder down the hill and have only a fifty-fifty shot of hitting anyone.
The park is beautiful, the new blue lights are cute, the food (I had chicken and sausage etouffee) was scrumptious, but the entertainment was disappointingly dull, to the point of being ridiculous. Next time we’ll bring a deck of cards. Or more booze. Or both.
———
* I don’t like loud noises, and I don’t like things that startle me. Fireworks shows generally rate pretty low on the list of “things Natalie enjoys.”
** They were blue. The alcohol made the films *slightly* more bearable. Only slightly.
*** There was apparently an orchestra playing on the opposite bank, though we never heard it. We could have gone and listened to that instead, but I guess we didn’t think of it.