Prepoceros

After weeks of holding my ground, standing firm against the forces determined to break my resolve, I finally gave in today . . . and turned on the air-conditioning in my apartment. On the 30th of July.

If your jaw hasn’t hit the ground yet, you probably don’t live in the South. News flash: it’s hot here. The humidity is usually close to 100%, as well, which gives the atmosphere a dank, oppressive feeling that I’ve heard compared unfavorably to the inside of a gym bag.

This summer has been relatively mild so far, at least for the time I’ve been home: this week, at the end of July, the temperatures are holding steady in the low 90s, and I have yet to see triple-digits. I am also aided in my A/C standoff by the fact that my apartment is on the first floor and, though it does have west-facing windows, they’re somewhat shaded by another building nearby. During the day the temperature inside is in the low-to-mid 80s, I would guess, which isn’t half bad.

“Still,” you say, “why not be more comfortable? Are you on a ridiculous moral crusade against all things air-conditioned?”

Yes and no. I’m a fan of A/C, really I am—several weeks of the summer here would be absolutely unbearable without it. In cars it’s an absolute necessity, though I still use mine as little as possible. A/C is good and wonderful, and life in the South would be a bitch without it (just ask anyone who lived here before the 1950s or so).

The thing is, friends, that I have long suffered from *abuse* of air-conditioning. People here go NUTS with the stuff, cranking the thermostat down to 72 or some ungodly temperature like that. Seventy-two is great for wintertime, yes, but when it’s 90 degrees outside, I tend not to be dressed in layers, so having to sit or shop in a 72-degree building is fucking torture.

People must like that sort of thing, though, because I bet it’s damn expensive to keep your books in a big ol’ icebox (I’m looking at you, Barnes & Noble). I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the heat, or maybe my metabolism is just slow as molasses, but I HATE BEING COLD. Really really. If I’m cold I can’t concentrate, I can’t sleep, I can’t do anything—my body goes into survival mode, focusing its precious energy on (1) shivering and (2) thinking about all the fun things it might do if it ever thaws out.

Where was I going with this? Oh right, my apartment. So, yes, the bitterness resulting from my being forced to freeze my ass off in the middle of July has led to my refusal to admit that wretched conditioned air into my home until the heat has so thoroughly permeated every nook and cranny that I can water the newly-sprung-up rainforest plants with my sweat*.

This luddite** practice does also save me a wee bit of money, energy prices being what they are, but that’s not the point. It’s the principle of the thing. Harrumph.

Today I flicked the switch from “Off” to “Cool,” not for my own sake—I’m comfortable at 85, both because of the aforementioned syrupy metabolism and because I don’t see the use in wearing non-essential clothing when I’m home alone***—but for Sammy’s. It’s been taking him a long time to cool off after we come in from walks (he splays out on the linoleum and I feed him ice cubes), and I figure he needs a cool place to come home to. I’ll start wearing more sweaters if it means my dog won’t die of heatstroke.

So, a small moral defeat. The bloody A/C has won again, but I never expected to make it through the whole summer anyway. I’m proud to get this far. If all goes well I’ll be able to turn it off again in a month, and the month of August will be my only concession to the seasons. During the other eleven months I will bask in the much-maligned Houston heat and revel in the joyous fact that IT’S NOT BLOODY COLD. Huzzah!

[Before anyone comments that I should set the A/C to 85 and quit making such a fuss over it, duh, that’s what thermostats are for, I would like to note that you have not met my A/C. I tried that back in April when it started to get hot and found that the machine knows nothing of 85—once that thing cycles on, it’ll keep blowing until it’s cold as balls (65, in my probably-overdramatic estimate), even if I set the temperature to 90. So I have to choose between too hot (A/C off) and too cold (A/C on) . . . which isn’t even a question. I *could* turn it on and leave the windows open to balance the chill, but that would be stupidly wasteful.]

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* Don’t worry, I take extra showers in the summer anyway. When there’s no A/C I wash my face like four times a day because it just feels gross.

** This is indeed the adjectival form of the word, says Merriam-Webster. Sounds awkward to me, but I can’t improve on it.

*** I share this not to titillate but to explain. I’m almost always decently attired, if only because my windows (with blinds usually half-open) face the parking lot.

aleatoric: characterized by chance or random elements (M-W, 2002)

I’ve made a “trailer” of sorts for the remainder of my vacation videos, in a style I’ve always wanted to play with. (I won’t embed the video here since it’s not really a part of the “Holland” series, but I’ll link to it on YouTube if anyone wants to see it.)

Aleatory is usually associated with music, and especially with the work of mid-20th century composer John Cage, whose Wikipedia biography has an extensive list of links worth exploring.

To create a “random” preview from the 4+ hours of unedited vacation footage I have lying around, I used a random number table to select twenty clips, each starting at a random time in some segment of the raw video and lasting for a random number of seconds (between 3 and 12). It’s like a paint-by-number in video form—even more tedious than normal editing. I’m pleased with the way it came out, though. The clips have no correlation to each other, but the randomness gives it an interesting flavor nonetheless.

Look at me, talking about a two-minute crap-ass homebrewed video as if it were a culinary masterpiece. I think my inordinate pride might be a subconscious attempt to justify the nine solid hours I’ve just spent* on it and its companion video, so don’t take my word for it**. It’s nice, if you like that sort of thing. If you don’t, well, at least it’s short.

Links: the random video, the video that explains the random video (four times as long)

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* It is now 6:00 in the morning. The timestamp disagrees because I’m waiting to publish this post until I’ve slept and am coherent.

** Name that ’80s children’s TV show!

Trimming hour-long video segments down to five-second clips in Windows Movie Maker takes WAY longer than you’d think it would. Teeee. Diiiiii. Ous. Not to mention bad for one’s wrist.

I’m going in a minute, I swear. I’m sick, you see. It started out as a throat tickle, then there was some snottiness, and now I’m losing my voice.

It’s not completely gone—I can still squawk and gurgle enough to make myself understood—but it’s not a pretty thing to listen to, and it has become rather difficult to teach, talk on the phone, or order waffle fries broccoli from the drive-thru at Chick-Fil-A the health food store.

It’s such a strange sensation, wanting to speak and being physically unable to. This is only the second time in my life I’ve lost my voice, the first time being a few months ago, during which time I performed in a choir, silently.

It hurts. My throat hurts, my ears hurt. My head feels a little congested, but my chest is pain-free, which I think is a good sign. At least I’m not pneumonic, right?

I would really like a lozenge right now, but there are none in my apartment even though I was AT THE GROCERY STORE this afternoon. I bought tea, crackers, hummus, spinach dip, plastic baggies, and cookie dough (shhhh), but no lozenges. I am a moron.

Ok, Sam is giving me pathetic sleepy puppy-dog looks, so it’s really really bedtime. This post probably makes little sense, but there will be no editing tonight. NO EDITING. PUBLISH. GO TO BED.

Finally, I’ve finished editing the next chapter of my travelogue. Yes! It only took a few hours, but now that I’m home again and relatively unemployed (against my will—don’t get me started), I’ve gotten lazier. My goal is to have the whole project done by the time school starts in a month, because I certainly won’t have hours of free time then, and I don’t want this to drag out for months until the tiny audience I have has completely lost interest.

This one comprises clips from an outing to the small vissershaven (”fishermen’s harbor”) of Veere (pop. ~1500) and the larger town of Middelburg (pop. ~50k). Veere is quaint and adorable, and therefore rather popular with tourists, especially German tourists, apparently. The menus at the cafe we lunched at were printed in Dutch and German.

Hier is-ie! Filmed July 6.

I have at least two, maybe three more videos to make from the footage of this same day…with another 12 days’ worth of vacation after that. This is gonna take a while.

Note: If you are one of the small number of Americans who insist on pronouncing the first syllable in “Roosevelt” to rhyme with “shoe,” cut it out. You peeve me.

If you pay attention to the ‘Recent Comments’ section, perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve been getting tons of comment spam lately. This hasn’t been a big problem for most of the last twelve months, but in the last week or so I’ve been getting maybe fifty fake comments a day, and it’s a bitch to go through and clean them all out.

Unfortunately, to keep the spammers out of my face, I’m going to have to mildly inconvenience some of you nice people along the way. I’ve switched the comment settings so that it sends each commenter’s first comment to moderation. If I deem your comment worthy to appear on this hallowed page (the bar is really low here, folks—all you have to do is not be a dirty spammer), then you are considered an “approved” commenter and may comment freely for all eternity.

I don’t know whether those of you who have commented on previous posts will be labeled “approved” or whether your first comment will go into the moderation queue. If you’d like to use this post to test that out, go nuts. Let me know what happens.

I’m sorry to do this, and maybe I’ll be so sorry that I’ll switch back to open commenting in the future. I *could* block individual spammers as they come up, but that feels like a stopgap solution. Right now I have more new spammers than new commenters, so I think this will save time on my end. Spambots are poo-heads.

I’m still working on editing my vacation footage, and I’ll post more videos soon, I promise.

Right now I’m working on getting back on Houston time . . . and getting sick. Yesterday morning I spent a solid hour feeling horribly nauseous. My throat tickled off and on all day, and tonight it’s full-on sore. Now my ear hurts too, so that’s promising.

I feel like I’m coming down with a cold, or at least I hope I am. I can handle a cold. Having recently flown internationally, though, I’m afraid of something more exotic.

If it turns out to be a cold, this will be the third time I can remember being sick in the last six months, which is A LOT. I don’t get sick often, a luxury for which I credit the “dirtiness” of the house I grew up in. I put “dirtiness” in quotes because our house wasn’t grimy or covered with actual dirt, but at the same time we didn’t go nutso with the Lysol and antibacterial crap like some folks do, and I think I’m better off for it. I have no allergies (that I know of), and, like I said, I rarely catch colds or the flu or whatever else may be going around.

The evidence for this link is a combination of anecdote and wishful thinking, which I realize is none too solid, but I’ll believe it until I have a good reason not to. I’m not a fan of all the sanitizing wipes and sprays and whatnot that are advertised as ways to protect your children from those evil, evil germs. Kids need germs! Yes, they should wash their hands and not sneeze on people, and no, I’m not saying you should feed them moldy bread or rub their toothbrushes in the cat’s litter box in the name of strengthening their immune systems. But if your kid eats a cookie off of your unsanitized floor, it probably won’t kill her. It might even help her out in the long run.

My kids will have a Recommended Dirt Allowance to ensure they get enough filth and germiness every day. If they don’t get a full RDA’s worth into their mouths on their own, they’ll get heaping spoonfuls on their dinner plates, and they won’t be allowed to leave the table until they’ve finished every bite. Mmmm, now that’s some good parenting.

Leaving for the airport in a bit. We almost extended our vacation by a few days, but I’m glad we didn’t. As much as I love it here, I’m ready to get this last little bit over with. Ready to see (the rest of) my family, ready to see my friends, ready to play with my puppy, ready to sleep in my own bed, and, most importantly to me right now, ready to not have to get on a plane again for a long, long time.

I’m expecting the flights back to be better than the flights over, mostly because I flew just a couple weeks ago. Still, I’m concentrating very hard on how annoying it is fly. Isn’t it annoying? You have to sit in a cramped seat for hours on end, the food is gross, the movies are boring, the turbulence is *uncomfortable* (not scary), it’s too loud to carry on a normal conversation, someone’s bound to be kicking your seat back, and there’s no internet. What an inconvenience! How boring and tedious flying is!

I doubt that I will ever be *happy* to get on a plane, but if I can convince myself that I’m *annoyed*, that’s a victory in my book. Being annoyed is ten trillion times easier to deal with than being afraid.

Looking forward to touching down on a Houston runway, but until then I will be VERY ANNOYED.

EDIT (18 hrs later): Home! Huzzah!

No video tonight, sorry. The next one is half done, but I don’t want to spend another two hours finishing and posting it, so I’m gonna quit and go to bed.

I’m tired right now. Yesterday we went on an afternoon-long bike ride around Amsterdam, and today we took a little walk through Utrecht. That plus getting less sleep than I should a few nights in a row has left me exhausted.

I’ve had wonderful dreams the last three nights, though, so that almost makes up for it. The night before last I dreamed that I flew in the space shuttle. I was supposed to be in the shuttle garage (which looked rather like our garage at home) at 6:30 for the 7:00 liftoff. I called at 6:52 to let them know I was running a bit late, but it was all good. We had to delay the launch anyway because the crew compartment kept filling up with water. But even though the whole shuttle threatened to fall apart, I flew anyway because I was very, very brave.

The other two dreams were too complicated to explain, but they were so, so good. I was horribly broken-hearted each morning to find that none of it was true, and that I had to get up and face the real world again. That’s one of the worst feelings in the world, I think. I’m not going to say it’s the worst feeling ever—I know there’s a lot of terrible shit out there—but it’s for sure the worst feeling of my day-to-day experience. Worse even, perhaps, than the I’m-going-to-die-someday / the-world-is-incomprehensible-and-uncontrollable feeling, because facing the real world automatically means re-realizing all of those things. Ok, I don’t want to think too hard about which feeling is more gut-wrenchingly awful, so we’ll call it a tie.

Sorry, didn’t mean to go there, but I’m beyond sleepy and don’t care enough to delete it and write a proper ending. What I did mean to say eventually was that I hate waking up so very much, but I also hate going to sleep, which is odd. Right now, for instance, I keep typing and typing, even though I’m rambling, because I feel driven to put off bedtime as long as possible. I’ve fallen asleep twice in the course of writing this post. That’s dumb. Good night.

After reading about the nasty Israel-Lebanon thing on CNN.com this morning and again this evening, I hopped over to Wikipedia on a whim to see if anyone had put up anything about the attacks yet. Boy, had they ever. I’m impressed.

The part I find most useful and enlightening is the long list of reactions by foreign leaders at the bottom of the article. What little sense Bush’s comments make is far out of line with the rest of the civilized world (with the exception of Canada), but I guess that’s to be expected. Ugh. Living in Europe is looking better and better.