apolitical still? ---- Tuesday 27 July

Last night I was feeling a trifle under the weather, so I ended up spending the evening on the couch, crocheting while I watched the first night of the Democratic National Convention. I wouldn't generally regard this as the best way to educate myself (at least in an efficient and unbiased-- if such a thing exists-- manner) for the upcoming presidential election, but I was flipping channels and caught a blip of Al Gore cracking a joke. I was intrigued. So I left the TV on PBS and began to listen.

I found the whole thing a rather disturbing experience. Yesterday at lunch I was reading about vegetarianism (veganism, at that) and actually considering it as a sensible lifestyle. Not that I don't enjoy foods often considered "vegetarian", but trust me-- I relish my meat. And then last night there I was finding myself agreeing with the Democratic party-- with Bill Clinton------- I was raised (whether or not anyone intended this) to be so against these things that I never even considered them options. At all. It has always been a part of my worldview that the Republican party and its leaders stand in the right (no pun intended) on any issue. (Though it is a measure of how far I've already come that to admit that frightens me. A lot.) That vegetarians are tree-hugging liberals threatening to destroy some un-named but incalculably precious element of the American way of life-- which is, of course, The Right Way of Life. I was so indoctrinated into this ideology that, changed though I thought my worldview had become, my gut reaction to many of these terms and names-- "liberal", "Bill Clinton", "Democrat", "left-wing", etc.-- is still one of unthinking self-righteous disgust. I am disturbed by this. (And rightly so, I know many of you are thinking as you read this.)

The crisis I suddenly faced last night was not so much whether I would consider myself Democrat or Republican, but rather the unsettling feeling of having my more recent convictional tendencies conflict so strongly with "beliefs" so deeply laid they seem nearly instinctive. Caught in the middle.

But I also look back at the past few years and am astounded by what I have been living through. The first presidential election in which I could vote was 2000, Bush vs. Gore, and I chose to abstain from voting, still convinced then that Gore was a "complete scumbag" but at the same time not entirely sure I was willing to vote actively for George W. I was 21 years old, struggling against and through Southern Baptistdom and a fairly typical Oklahoma-Buckle-of-the-Bible-Belt upbringing. Less than a year later, during my final semester of undergrad, the Twin Towers fell and the world changed. The country changed. The first anniversary of 9/11 found me living in Egypt-- where I was still living when the war in Iraq began the following spring. A bus accident and resulting nasty injury moved me back to the U.S. only a few days after Bush declared an (overly optimistic) end to major military conflict, and after a few months I found an office job (which did not require my college degree) and joined the ranks of working-class Americans muddling through poor health care-- a service which I sorely needed as I continued to recover from my shoulder injury. Several months later I decided to return to school to pursue a career in physical therapy, greatly influenced by own various trials and successes in rehabilitation. And here I am, just now beginning to see how profoundly these past four years have affected me-- and hopefully changed me. My life does not run in the same temporal cycles as the national government, but listening to Gore, Carter, and the Clintons speak last night highlighted this past presidential term for me. The confusion I, like so many others, felt following the 9/11 attacks as the U.S. government began its "crusade" against terrorists and "evil-doers" and then a year or so later sallied forth with its policy of pre-emptive war. The unforgettable experience of being an American living in the Middle East, living with the constant questions from my Arab friends and with the possibility of evacuation looming every day. A loss of faith and a subsequent onslaught of questions I had never before been allowed to think or ask.

I don't have a resolution for this rather long post. Just a lot of questions. Thoughts. Things to continue pondering.

things that go sting in the night-- still Thursday

Last night my roommate Amy found our first scorpions of the summer. We'd been warned by the homeowners that they were around and sometimes found their way indoors, but so far we'd seen nothing but the usual spiders, june bugs, ants, sowbugs, and other miscellaneous, mostly harmless members of the creepy-crawley world. Scorpions, however, even to me, are an entirely different matter. The first one we saw last night was scuttling around on the back patio, and then within a few minutes Amy had discovered another one on the rug in the foyer. That one I smashed with a shoe-- scorpions are a bit messier than your average arachnid, I've now learned-- but I refused to bother the one outside, though Amy shrieked at me to kill it too. (It still lives, unless something higher on the food chain has eaten it since-- she was too jumpy to go dispatch it herself.) I twitched occasionally as I lay in bed reading, partially convinced that some eight-legged, barbed-tail beastie was crawling up my leg, but nothing was ever there.
Still, given the biting ants we've had visiting us over the past few days, it seems that we're going to have to find more effective means of preventing further invasions. I'd hate to have to give up walking around barefoot.

I'm munching on dry roasted peanuts and listening to "Free Bird" as I write this. Trying not to count the hours I have left at this desk. Contemplating plans for this weekend. Wondering if I have time to go to the grocery store tonight. In short, avoiding starting this next pile of applications.

wasting time?-- Thursday 22 July

Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.
--Tock, The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster

I do waste time. At least sometimes. But then I also often think that the times when I (or, more likely, others) say that I'm wasting time are perhaps, to me, the most non-wasteful times I spend. I don't consider blogging or reading or sleeping (within reason) or relaxing or thinking or any of a hundred other of my regular activities (I've left most of the nerdier ones, like studying languages, off the above list; I'll try to spare you as much as possible) a waste of time. What I do consider a waste of time is spending 8 hours a day sitting in front of a computer screen at a desk in a cubicle doing mostly-mindless data entry and evaluation of transcripts and test scores. Really, I suppose this activity is not a waste of time in that every month I receive a paycheck in compensation of all the time I've spent being mind-numbingly, stultifyingly bored during those four or so weeks, but that's small (though unfortunately necessary) justification for subjecting myself to this. This, I believe, is a waste of my time, a waste of what I've learned and done before this, a waste of all the potentialities within me. Which is why I'm quitting and going back to school in preparation to do something else-- something that I do believe is more worthwhile. And hopefully more challenging.

Knowing that at least a few people are actually reading my blog again makes me feel slightly bad about the Arabic dates. I know I would want to know the date of a post I'm reading. Wrapped up in my own happy world of blogging, I have a tendency to forget how incomprehensible these date headers must be to nearly everyone else. So I'll try to remember to include the date-- in English-- in the post itself. Perhaps I'll activate the Post Title option and use that. Either way, today is Wednesday, 21 July 2004. Happy reading.

My goal on Tuesday was to waste almost as much time as most other people here do. I had to include "almost" because I wasn't sure I was capable of wasting fully as much time. I'm not entirely sure that I achieved "almost" either, though that's obviously a rather subjective term. My problem is that I don't want to socialize for very long with most of my co-workers, and if I'm wasting time, I don't want to be here wasting time. I want my wasting of time to involve a couch and a book and solitude and some strawberries... possibly covered in chocolate. Still, I was reasonably effective on Tuesday, and I seem to be resuming pursuit of that lofty goal today. Partially because my entire end of office is empty except for me and the assistant director of international students-- and he hides in his office and is rarely noticeable except that he likes to sing old jazz tunes. I find it difficult to work on dull folders of final high school transcripts when I am constantly distracted by the thought that my co-workers are relaxing by the pool or setting up camp in the Wichita Mountains or even just spending a simple quiet day at home. Hence the post.

Before starting this I spent several happy minutes reading all of my January 2003 posts. [To help some of you (most of you) out there, that's the eighth link down from the top of the Archives list. There. You've learned your first Arabic word. That means "January".] That month brought some rather entertaining adventures as I was settling into my new home in Alexandria--- including that wonderful trip to the downtown post office. My life has changed so much since then. <sigh>

Still-- my last day at this job is in only two weeks, and that's a blindingly bright spot in my life. I'll have about two weeks of freedom-- some of it probably spent in Houston, a good deal of it in the darkroom as my class ends and loss of access to the darkroom looms large. And then-- insha-allah-- I'll start some training for my new job at the physical therapy clinic a week before classes begin (23 August), and after that the starter's gun will fire and the furor of the school year will begin. Three years after my last semester at OU. But-- school is something I know how to do and know how to do well, so the approaching familiarity lends a touch of serenity to my days as I prepare to make my life over again.

Update on the weekend: The peach festival was successful in that I took a lot of pictures. I'll develop the film tomorrow evening and see what I got. But other than that, I can't report much. I went by myself and did nothing but shoot, so I was oblivious to everything except potential photos. Including the very hot sun turning the back of my neck a dark shade of red.

My photography instructor and I are occasionally butting heads-- he wants me to print for 12 seconds, I want to print for 11; he wants me to cut out my test print and make a burning tool, I want to burn using my hands; he says my lighting was too poor and that my picture is flat, I think it's one of the best pictures I've taken. I'm learning a lot, but my most precious hours in the darkroom are the ones outside of class.

A friend just emailed me about her new proverb calendars-- hence the mess in the box to the left-- which supply a Greek or an English proverb for each day with the addition of a simple line of javascript to one's page code. Unfortunately, my blog likes to display non-Latin-alphabet languages properly only in previews; once I've published the page, they come out as symbol gibberish.
And I still haven't fixed my comments issue.

I'm leaving in a few minutes (hallelujah!) and am off to a peach festival and game night in Weatherford, Texas. I may end up going to the festival by myself (though maybe not), but I'm mostly just looking forward to lots of wild and wooly photographing opportunities. Texans covered in sticky peach juice should provide the potential for at least a few good shots.

The point at the moment, however: I said I would post today, and now I have.

I'm tired of messing with this today. Perhaps tomorrow I'll come in tomorrow and all will be fixed... magically... over night. Maybe everything just needs to marinate for a few hours.

I came into work early this morning. I'm off at 4:00 today. Yippee!

I think that I've enabled comments. So here's a small post to see if that's actually the case.

Apparently I was without anything to say for a very long time. Surely there was something during all that silence, but I can't possibly remember what it might have been.

Small baby-step goals: Add another, slightly more substantial post by the end of today.
Add another tomorrow.