Prepoceros

As much as I moan and complain about the piddly aggravations in my relatively cushy life, I have to say that 2005 has been pretty damn good to me. Compared to the mess that was 2004, 2005 kicked serious annual ass.

In my last “Year in Review,” I christened 2005 “A Year of Transition and Transformation,” which turned out to be more or less spot-on. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that in the space of twelve months I’ve become “a whole new person” or some crap like that, but it has certainly been the most changing-est year of my short life**.

Since I spent most of the time “on leave” from Mudd and/or half-ass enrolled at HBU, there hasn’t been much book-learning. Life-lessons, on the other hand, have been coming hard and fast, the most important such revelation being that *there is a world outside of Harvey Mudd College*. There’s even a world outside of math and physics, believe it or not—a world in which people work and eat and shop and travel and do things besides homework. A world in which stress and sleep dep are not badges of honor, but rather reasons to seek medical help. A world in which I want to shove hot pokers through my eyes fewer days than not.

I want to make very clear that I’m not dissing Mudd, or math, or Mudders, or physicists, or sleep-deprived people. You know I love you guys, and I have tons of respect for Mudd and everyone who sticks it out. It’s just not the life for me—a fact which I was at best unsure of and at worst completely oblivious to at the end of 2004. I used to be terrified of the real world, but now…eh, it’s not so bad.

This year has been all about work, friends, teaching, blogging, puppies, living on my own, and frappuccinos. Oh god, the frappuccinos. Every time I start to get sick of all the frozen calories, they come out with a new flavor. Sneaky bastards.

So, for your digestive* pleasure, I will now proceed to recite the major events of the past year (in historical present tense, for added intensity!) in list form.

January: I have recently taken a leave of absence from Mudd and am living with my parents. Before I start looking for a part-time job to supplement my tutoring, I call the tutoring folks to see if they have any work for me. Lo and behold, there’s an open part-time position in the office. Huzzah! I begin work on MLK Day (one year ago today). I attend my first wedding as a grown-up. I discover the yumminess that is Project Runway. I sign a lease on an apartment in town, five minutes from the office (instead of over an hour with traffic). I begin teaching my first SAT class, though I was never trained as a teacher.

February: I move into my apartment. TVMax doesn’t hook up my internet connection for five. long. weeks. I still love my new job to bits. My brother is accepted to Vanderbilt.

March: I meet Wendy—what’s this now? A real-life, honest-to-goodness classicist? Be still my heart. My washing machine floods the kitchen. I try to cook things.

April: I try out for Jeopardy! but don’t make the cut. Sigh. Wait for me, Alex…I’ll make it to Culver City someday. I file a tax return for the first time. I register for fall semester at Mudd. I see Andre Agassi play in person. The “spring test season” makes it hella busy at work. Millie, the Jack Russell Terrier whose perkiness knows no bounds, spends her first weekend at Camp Natalie.

May: Coworkers discover my blog and create their own blog ‘rating’ it. Theirs goes dead after two weeks. Turns out blogging is harder than it looks. *smirk* Also, could I be any busier? Still loving it, though. When my car dies as I’m leaving to teach a class, I borrow Toni’s truck and immediately drive it into a pole. Expensive, but comedy gold. My brother graduates from high school.

June: I lose my cell phone for a couple days, and it is INCONVENIENT. I take my first vacation from work, during which I accompany my brother’s Quiz Bowl team to the national championship in Chicago as a pseudo-adviser, then visit my cousin at his hotel internship in Minneapolis. This is my first ever trip to the Midwest; I cross four more states (IL, WI, MN, and IA) off the to-visit list. I unplug my television. It’s been 200 days since then, and I’ve never once regretted it. I start taking Zoloft***.

July: I purchase my very own domain (yes, this one right here), but don’t do much with it for a while. I turn 21. Half-Blood Prince. Mood swings like whoa, especially as I consider whether or not to return to Mudd in the fall.

August: I make up my mind to stay in Houston, though not without a metric shit-ton of angst. I spend a lot of time lying on the floor, trying to block out the world. I add a little Wellbutrin to the mix. I take on yet another part-time job as a question writer. My brother goes off to college. Katrina sends a good portion of New Orleans our way.

September: Prepoceros is officially up and running. I enroll as a transient student at HBU just for the heck of it. That 8am Modern China class? Kicking my ass. Rita comes roaring in to an anticlimax, with the threat of wind causing more damage (snarled traffic, stranded motorists, gas shortages, looting) than the wind itself. Made for some damn fun blogging, though.

October: The mood swings are still going strong. I still suck at school. I can’t stand the Wellbutrin, so I stop taking it*^. I begin teaching LSAT, again with no real training. As a result, my first class sucks balls^.

November: My first attempt at NaNoWriMo tanks almost immediately. Prop 2: marriage now unquestionably exclusive; Texas 1, homos 0. A bummer, but not unexpected. I realize that the thought of going back to California in the spring upsets me, so I apply to UH. As a Classics major. GRE.

December: Puppy! Samson comes home and does a superb job of being adorable and cuddly. I am accepted to UH and officially transfer out of Mudd—this should be shocking and disconcerting, as it goes against any plan I’ve ever had for my life, but I’m surprisingly ok with it, which leads me to believe I made the right decision. Time will tell. Sam gets sick, then better again. Sam meets Fez: instant BFFs. New Year’s Eve at the beach.

So there you have it: transition, transformation, the whole shebang. I’m happy with where I am right now. I’m glad to be in Houston, I like my job, I love my friends, I can’t get enough of my puppy, and I’m satisfied with the direction my life is heading. Things don’t look nearly as dismal as they did twelve months ago.

It’s a little odd, though, that both last year and the year before I’ve made Major Life Changes™ near the end of the year. It’s probably just coincidence, but who knows where I’ll find myself in November 2006? A convent? Jail? Canada?

As for the coming year, I haven’t made any specific resolutions yet, but I feel the theme should be something along the lines of 2006: Settling In and Taking Control. This is a different life than I’ve been accustomed to: living in Houston as a full-time student with a part-time job, majoring in humanities, for chrissakes. I’ve had a while to play around and experiment with things in 2005 when most of my life was in flux, but now that I’m heading in a solid direction, it’s time for me to grab this new life of mine by the horns and make it truly my own. Focus. Commitment. Courage.

Okay, maybe ‘courage’ is a bit over-the-top, but you get the idea. My life. Mine mine mine. Time to start getting things done around here.

Bring it, ‘06.

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* As in Reader’s Digest, silly. Don’t eat Prepoceros.

** This does not include 1984 (or 1983, depending on how you count it), in which I went from not-existing to existing. Hard to beat that.

*** Did I mention that I’d been mopey, disconnected, anxious, and unmotivated for the better part of the year, and that I’d been in therapy for several weeks at this point? I don’t remember exactly when I started going, and I’m too lazy to look it up. I’ve quit now—both the therapy and the medication—but I don’t remember when that happened, either. October, I guess.

*^ I neglected to inform my psychiatrist of this fact, however, so now I have lots of extra pills. It would be so wasteful to throw them all away…. Kidding. Sort of.

^ I’m teaching my second LSAT class right now, and it’s actually going rather well. Phew! Still feel bad about the first one, though. [Edit: I should not blame this on my lack of training—it makes it sound like work doesn’t give two shits about me or their students. It was mostly my inexperience and lack of familiarity with the lesson book, and I did agree to teach the class, after all.]

As you’ve probably inferred, the power at our house went out for good shortly after I put up that last post. I tried to stay up in case anything exciting happened, but staring into the pitch-darkness gets boring quickly, and I eventually fell asleep.

Apart from the power outage we had no real damage, just tree parts all over the place. Everyone I know is safe and sound. I’m back at my apartment, and I heard from my mom that our house got power back soon after I left, so it was only out for maybe 18 hours. People are beginning to trickle back in, and several businesses have announced that they’ll be reopening tomorrow. The office won’t open until at least Monday, and HBU is off until Tuesday, but I still have three lessons scheduled for tomorrow, so life is almost back to normal…except for all that lost time I (we) will have to scramble to make up for in the next week or two. But let’s not think about that right now. I only got five hours of sleep last night, so I’m going to bed.

The power has blinked off twice in the last half hour. The first time it happened I thought I heard a transformer blow, but that might have just been my imagination. Even though we haven’t had a measurable amount of rain yet, the gusty wind might cut out our power before the worst of the storm gets here.

Apart from the threat of losing my precious, precious internet, the storm is so far a few notches below an ordinary summer thunderstorm, as scariness goes.

The real excitement tonight has been on CNN. Look who’s in Beaumont:

Anderson Cooper, my favorite real* journalist, is less than 100 miles away from me! Not only is he reporting from a city directly in Rita’s path, but at the time we were watching he was ANCHORING THE NATIONAL NEWSCAST from a wind-battered sidewalk in Beaumont. Hard. Core.

How is this man still single, I ask you? HOW?
———
* a designation which excludes Tina Fey and Jon Stewart

Rita sure is taking her sweet time getting here. Up until about ten minutes ago, I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me a major hurricane was gonna blow through tonight. But now the trees whoosh around occasionally, so it’s getting a little more exciting.

One way we’ve been keeping ourselves entertained is by making fun of our least favorite news reporters.

“Field correspondent” on windy boardwalk: So, ma’am, you’ve decided to ride out the storm in your house?
Lady: Well, I tried to evacuate, but we moved 12.2 miles in 14 hours, so we turned around and came home.
FC: And where will you be sheltering during the storm?
Lady: In my house.
FC: …
Lady: In Kemah Oaks.
FC: No, I mean where in your house will you be sheltering?
———
My dad: You know that sofa? The green one? I thought I’d go sit on it.

Most of the newsanchors are doing a better-than-decent job, though, given the monotony of the task in front of them. Twenty-four-hour continuous coverage of *anything* has to be tough to keep up for more than three days. There are only so many different ways to describe the difference between the clean side and the dirty side, or emphasize the need for people in low-lying areas to evacuate, or sympathize with the folks stuck in their cars in triple-digit heat. We only turn the TV on for five or ten minutes every hour—any longer and your eyes glaze over.

Fun thing: One of my favorite news anchors from when I was little, Channel 13’s Shara Fryer, has come out of retirement to help cover the storm, and she’s rockin’ the newsdesk like she never left. (Wtg, Shara—make ‘em pity the day they let you go.) Ah, just like the good old days before all this internet stuff came around, when we could sit back and get all our news read to us from a TelePrompTer.

Still no rain, but we’re expecting it any minute now…

This morning one of our neighbors from down the street came by and told us they were having a quick five-minute communion at their house at 3. Well, my mom thought she said ‘communion,’ but I thought she said ‘meeting,’ so we went. Turns out Mom was right.

Not that I have anything against communion, but my family isn’t very religious. We only go to church on Christmas Eve, and even then it’s mostly for the sake of tradition. During the service my brother will sometimes go take communion…if he’s hungry. I personally am not at all religious, though I do spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about religion, mostly in the context of, “How can anyone seriously be religious at all when there are so many different flavors to choose from?”

But that’s a topic for another post, when there’s not a hurricane on its way. The point is that we went to this communion-thing. It was all very pleasant and friendly—reading some Bible verses, praying a little, eating Jesus crackers—and I haven’t seen most of my neighbors in a long, long time, so it wasn’t bad overall. I’m glad I went. It was a little eerie, though, when we all threw back the Dixie cups of wine in unison and I imagined that *this* must be what it was like to be in a cult.

Most of the people on our street are staying. A few tried to leave but got nowhere, so they gave up and came home. We’re mostly out of the storm’s way (see below), so I’m expecting all of our houses to survive with minimal damage. I heard that when Alicia came through, our neighborhood didn’t get power back for seven days, and needless to say I’m hoping Rita won’t repeat that performance.

Anyway, five minutes turned into forty-five, and by the end of the party I was wishing they’d given out refills. Making small talk with people I barely know is NOT my idea of good time. But we’re home now, and we’re finally seeing some cloud cover. No rain yet.

Our water district sent out an email this morning instructing us to limit non-essential water use after 6:00 this evening in case the power goes out and they have to turn on their backup pump. Mkay. We’ve still got power, and water, and cable, and I’ll be here blogging until the lights go out (after which I’ll grab pen and paper and go old-school). I’m a little bummed that Rita keeps getting weaker, but still…isn’t this exciting?! Yeehaw!

I thought you might like to see a map of the places I’m talking about, especially if you’re not familiar with the Houston area. My apartment is near Rice Village/West U/Reliant Park, and my parents’ house (where I am now) is in the Champions area, just north of 1960.

If you’ve been anywhere near a television in the last three days, especially if you live in SE Texas, you’ve probably heard all you want to hear about this damn hurricane. All the same, here are a few other local blogs I found on Technorati as examples of some other Houstonians’ perspectives on Rita.

• Linen Rose — Tried to evacuate but turned around
• Amp’d Up — Evacuated, but only got as far as Sugar Land
• Jonathan Watmough — Staying in Spring, near me
• Rita from Pearland — Sheltering in place in their pantry
• abc13.com — Local reporters’ hurricane blogs

As for me, the wind is picking up a tiny bit around the house, but it’s still mostly sunny. The biggest difference is that the temperature has dropped to 87 (from 100 yesterday), which is lovely.

The storm is weakening, but this evacuation is quickly turning disastrous. Early this morning a bus carrying evacuees from a nursing home in Bellaire caught fire and exploded on the way to Dallas, shutting down I-45.

Not that there are many people still trying to get through. Most of the people on 45 have run out of gas and pulled off the freeway to ride out the storm wherever they are. The state is sending fuel trucks around to all the shelters, escorted by police and National Guardsmen who “are armed and will shoot.”

One of my mom’s friends in The Woodlands, north of Houston along 45, says that the (enormous) mall parking lot is completely full. The mall itself is closed, but everyone who ran out of gas nearby has pulled into the parking lot to camp out.

Meanwhile, the weatherfolks are predicting that Hurricane Rita, which has dropped almost to a Cat 3, is still on track to make landfall around Beaumont, near the Texas-Louisiana border. Many of the coastal communities further south have learned from New Orleans and are already implementing curfews to protect their mostly deserted communities from looters.

Overall, it seems that all the hype and overreaction of the last three days has been just that. The politicians, in their hourly press conferences, have changed their message from “Get out right now unless you are living in a bomb shelter and/or are crazy,” to “If you’re still home, don’t leave unless you’re in a mobile home on the beach.” I exaggerate, of course, but the change has indeed been dramatic.

It’s safe to say that most of this mess was caused (or at least worsened) by Katrina. The officials are attempting to avoid the criticism that has plagued the NO, LA, and federal leaders by urging everyone to leave, and the people themselves are panicking slightly more than necessary and exacerbating the shortages of food, fuel, and roadspace. You can hardly blame them—Katrina’s impact on NO was terrible, and we want to learn from our mistakes.

Climatologists are warning that global warming will make violent hurricane seasons like this one increasingly common. If their dire predictions come true, the monster stormclouds set to devastate the Gulf Coast may have a silver lining: with any luck, we’ll be able to Goldilocks our way to an effective disaster-mitigation plan. Katrina’s evacuation was too lackadaisical, and Rita’s is too frenzied, but Alpha’s may be juuuuuust right.

Yes, yes, it’s a cliche, but it really is strangely calm around here. The weather was gorgeous today—blue skies, little puffy clouds—and unless you got near a freeway, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot going on. It’s strange to think that in 24 hours or so things will begin to look a lot different…more hellish, perhaps.

So far, I’m glad I stayed. I’ve had a relatively uneventful day (and even taught a lesson!), spent mostly in the air conditioning taking care of a few last-minute things and relaxing. Many of the people evacuating, on the other hand, are having a rough time of it. The ones who left early yesterday are mostly to their destinations by now, but people are running out of gas all over the place. TXDOT has said that they’ll only be able to get fuel trucks out to people on the “recommended” evacuation routes (I-45 and I-10), so anyone else who runs out of gas is basically screwed.

Hurricane Rita is definitely tracking to the east of the city now, which is good for us, but bad for Beaumont (where it appears to be headed now) and Louisiana. I imagine the folks from further down the coast, where the storm was originally predicted to make landfall, the people who gutted their homes in preparation for a direct hit and have been sitting in traffic for the last 24 hours, are getting mighty pissed right about now. Or maybe they’re happy their homes won’t get blown over. All I know is that when it’s all said and done and everyone’s got their blame-fingers out, evacuation-route management is going to be our levee-maintenance.

My parents were supposed to fly out of IAH at 7:30 tomorrow, but Continental cancelled their flight. My dad wanted to try and drive to Nashville, or maybe drive to Dallas and catch a plane to Nashville, but my mom wasn’t so keen on sitting in traffic, so it looks like they’ll be riding out the storm here with me.

I’ve been fiddling with this computer thingy for a while, and I still haven’t figured out where WordPress is keeping my images after I upload them, so I’ve put them all on my Flickr account (which I should really be using more anyway). You can see my pre-Rita photoset here.

I made it…in just under two hours for a 25-mile trip. Well over an hour of that time was spent travelling three excruciating miles. But I shouldn’t complain; those poor folks out on the highways have it much, much worse.

I ran in and took pictures of our neighborhood grocery store before it closed at 4:00 today—it was a madhouse in there. As soon as I figure out where to find the pictures I’ve uploaded, I’ll show you.