sweating in Houston ------ Monday 2 August

I hadn't intended it to be so long till my next post, but my week kept getting busier and busier. That's finished now-- in a big way, since Friday was (el-hamd-il-allah) my last day at my job in Admissions. That afternoon when I left the office I checked my cell phone and found a message from the physical therapy clinic asking if I was still interested in working there. (If?) I start there on Thursday morning. I'm in Houston right now and will be leaving Wednesday morning to be back for photography class that evening. My much-anticipated vacation is turning out to be quite a bit shorter than expected, but since starting work on Thursday means that I'll be paid for two more weeks than I had originally planned, I'm coping admirably well with the change.

Today was my lazy day here. Saturday night, after driving down from Norman, that morning and afternoon, I went to a friend's personal shower (she's getting married in September) and then also spent Sunday with some of the girls. In the afternoon we went to Kemah, which is a tourist-trap-type harbour area in southwest Houston, and I'm planning on leaving here early tomorrow morning to go back there (and possibly all the way down to Galveston Island) to take pictures-- probably more of the marina and such than of the tourists, given that I'll almost certainly beat the crowds. Sunday I didn't have the telephoto zoom lens I needed to get good shots of the boats in the harbour. By the time I've finished that, gone to pick my mother up from class and had lunch with her, located and purchased some suitable frames for a few of my photographs, it will time to figure out plans for the evening-- and then go to bed at a fairly early hour (i.e., by midnight) so that I can get up and drive back to Norman the next day... to start up my new routine there. And start getting ready to move.
Why does time off always end up being at least as busy as the daily grind of work?

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.

It's that post-lunch lethargy time of the day. I tried working, but perusing applications quickly (within about two minutes) became difficult and unsatisfying. So I'll type and post and then try again.

I had, quite honestly, completely forgotten about my blog. Life got busy, schedules became stretched, and gradually the whole thing drifted out of sight and out of mind again. I'm not even sure what made me think of this again.



I've run out of things to say.

Last week I began training in the processing of transfer student applications, which keeps me away from my desk and thus my computer, leaving me little chance to email or blog. Training has continued, but we quit a little early today, and I've just finished all the other work on my desk. I'd rather do this for a few minutes before searching out more work to keep me occupied.

I did attempt to go camping over the weekend. But with all the last-minute rush on Saturday afternoon to procure a tent, we perhaps neglected a few of the details of preparation. After driving down to the Wichita Mountains (we had decided to camp at the wildlife refuge there rather go to Turner Falls) and taking our pick of the campsites (we had the place to ourselves), we fought against the rising wind and rain and cold temperatures to lay the ground tarp and spread out the tent-- only to discover that we had no stakes or poles for said tent. A bit of a problem, especially given the weather, which hadn't been pleasant all day and was rapidly getting worse, and also the darkness which inevitably ensues shortly after six o'clock during January. Really, I thought we'd been lucky to have light as long as we did. So we got back in the car, drove back to Norman, rented some movies, and had a slumber party with our sleeping bags.

But, as I told Amy, one of the reasons I love to camp (in addition to the communing-with-nature-cooking-over-an-open-fire bits) is that it's the closest thing to traveling overseas that I've found within the U.S. The unexpected can, and usually does, happen at any moment, your belongings are pared down to only the essentials, and a change in the weather almost inevitably effects a significant change in your plans.

And we did have our road trip-- about six hours of it, all told-- which is the thing we were really wanting anyhow.

The plan was a road trip to Boulder, Colorado next weekend. After the last OU hockey game before the holiday break, we realised that there wasn't another home game until the very end of January. What to do for the next nearly two months? So we decided to drive up to Boulder for the series against CU. Leave Norman Thursday evening, arrive in Boulder Friday, cheer at a hockey game that night, ski Saturday, cheer at the second game Saturday night, drive back to Norman on Sunday. One of the best parts of the plan was that the next day, Monday, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. So we'd have a day off to recover.

But now we've chickened out. Cost, time involved, cold, lack of sleep-- too many reasons not to go right now. Maybe in March, if we still really want to go to Colorado. Or we'll find another away series and head out for that. My mother is probably vastly relieved that I won't be going skiing. I said I'd be careful, though.

So now we're thinking maybe a camping trip in the Arbuckles next weekend. A little rock climbing, perhaps. Don't worry, Mom. I'll be careful.

I need goggles. I'm finally beginning to work on the breast stroke (all I've been able to do thus far is kicking and an elementary backstroke), and I'm getting a crick in my neck from trying to keep my eyes out of the water for the whole lap. My goal was to quit procrastinating (the usual goal) and acquire goggles before swimming again this evening. Accordingly, last night I left the warm comfort of my couch and the warmer comfort of a good book to set out on a shopping expedition. And wouldn't you know? Apparently neither Target nor Wal-mart (yes, I even tried a Wal-mart) carry swimming goggles during January. How unreasonable.
I suppose I'll actually have to venture out before 9pm and visit a sporting goods store. Such a cramp in my schedule of evening relaxation. The trials and tribulations we poor convenience-obsessed Americans must sometimes suffer.

CICS is down again. (Hmm... that sounds familiar.) So I've spent the time redesigning my blog template and, in doing so, experimenting with cascading style sheets. Much better programming (if HTML can be called such) technique than the old way.

Incidentally, "IT" stands for Information Technology, the oft-discussed but rarely seen blackhole of OU that is supposedly responsible for keeping the university's computer systems running smoothly. (Right. We expect that from computer geeks, let alone the computers themselves?) So no, that wasn't an allusion to the nightmarish clown of the Stephen King novel.

CICS is down again. (CICS = that darn all-important interface constructed by now mostly dead (in all senses) programmers in the nearly archaic language of COBOL)

Long live IT.

It's been a few days, I know, but this past weekend was anything but conducive to blogging. A couple of friends came into town-- one of them stayed with me-- and so I was unusually social from Saturday morning on, culminating in the big game on Sunday night (boomer sooner <sigh>). Though for the first half I wasn't very social at all, since I quickly became completely uninterested in the ball game (bored to the point of irritability). Thankfully, about half-way through the third quarter I convinced some of the group to walk across the parking lot with me to play some pool. Much improved. And we could still watch the game on the big screen. But occupy ourselves at the same time.

I'm at work, which is a nice place to blog between applications, since I'm already sitting here at a computer with great internet access. Our campus-wide computer interface just went down yet again, so there's not much official work I can do right now.

Unfortunately, there's also not much I can think to write right now.
end of discussion

Okay, so actually the tower o' scratching and climbing fun for the cats (or should I say cat, since Emily has yet to touch the thing, though Edgar races up and down it and hangs off the side of it and sleeps at the top of it-- which probably greatly contributes to Emily's avoidance of it) has a far more concrete existence than my lackadaisical attempts at re-birthing my blog. But today is the first day of a new year (Happy New Year!) and, accordingly, I will endeavor to begin again. (poor old Michael Finnegan)

My warning to anyone who needs to be cautious about what words or topics they read via the Internet (and you know who you are): I'm not going to edit this for a level 3 clearance. Or even level 2. I'm just not going to edit this. Given the months that have passed since I last posted here, this shouldn't be an issue. You've all given up on me, and I'm not going to tell you I've started blogging again. But just in case.

What do these three things have in common: a snowstorm in Florida, a hula hoop with a nail in it, and the U.S.S. Adams?

Think about it. Don't read on yet. I'll give you the answer (because if I wait until a later post, then it will appear on the actual blog page above the question and that's not very fun). Think hard. It stumped me.

(blank space)

(more blank space... are you thinking?)

Given up? Figured it out? It must be one or the other, because here's the answer:
They're all navel (or naval) destroyers.
Ponder that for a while.

Pre-New-Year's-Resolution: Start blogging again.
That's one of my goals for the break. Another goal is to design and build an absolutely fantastic tower o' scratching, climbing fun for the cats-- something that looks like William Blake and M.C. Escher each put a little more than their two cents into the planning-- but blogging is a much simpler (and cheaper) goal to attain. At least in the short term.

I should be packing.