i wonder who and how and why. well, we may never know.
in other news, i stayed up really late last night with my friend stephen, who is now nocturnal. we went to have coffee. coffee was had. it was a wild and daring thing for me to do, because normally i stay home all the time and am boring and antisocial.
so be proud of me, i socialized, and stayed up late, and left my house. it's remarkable.
i'm tired and i don't want to go to work. maybe later tonight. yes... late at night. that'll be nicer. it's too hot in the afternoon.
have a nice nap, world. it's good for you.
this morning i woke up early. i went for a walk. tucson is really lovely at 7am in the summer. it was overcast, not too hot, and smelled like city. i'm sure that was pollution trapped in an inversion layer, but it reminded me of boston. i miss jia jing and am anxious to visit her once she stops being on opposite sides of the world from me. early in the morning there are lots of ants and they move about. the ants reminded me of new york, as did the humidity. i miss new york, too. i only spent 2 days there, and it imprinted on me. i needs be go back there.
this morning i visited grandpa schneider in the hospital. he has acute lymphocytic leukemia, which needless to say isn't fun. but he's doing better and went home today so he can start chemo tomorrow. (fun.) anyway, his words of wisdom are "of course college boys are the population segment most prone to obesity! all they do is drink!" my mother asked "drink what?" ... grampa says "drinking beer! at their college parties! don't you know?"... he's remarkably in touch with my generation. ;)
since geocities is silly and limits the length of a page, i'll have to start paginating my journal. probably in weeklong segments, but it seems i can only fit 3 days on a page. (geez. i should write shorter.)
speaking of writing shorter, that seems what i must do.
teaching dozens of kids next week.
let's hope the maternal instinct kicks in. ;)
the snake bridge has now been officially fed. it's grand. lovely. wonderful. exciting, at that.
jesse has some pictures posted on his site. go look at them and see how i act weird around a rat, and just how cool the rat is. hooray.
as of 6am it was still in the belly of the snake. also, another friend reports it was still there a little later (somewhere around 9 or 10) and that it's only visible from the road if you're looking at it. (well duh! very few things are visible when you're not looking at them.)
it turns out the original dead rat idea belongs to GREG, not me. greg told nate, nate told me, i told a bunch of people over the span of 2 years. this time, it seems i told the right people, including jesse and my neighbors.
also, even tho last week i heard the first cicada in my parent's yard, today i heard the first cicada in MY yard. go cicada, go! summer truly is upon us, which mostly means that the UA library now is NOT open 24 hours, at the very time when i would LIKE to go to the library at 2am. oh well. i'll just have to live with it, now won't i.
speaking of the library, my slides are overdue and i bet they're charging me a billion dollars since they're a media item. drat. must go.
so anyway, here i am, typing. it's almost exciting. but not really. i'll probably keep this journal updated decently throughout the summer. and then i'll go to school again and forget about it and stop caring.
the cats keep sitting on my catnip plant. i suppose that's what i asked for, growing a catnip plant. but it's supposed to repel mosquitos. and i haven't had any mosquitos on my porch since the catnip got decently large. now, if the cats would stop sitting on it, it could continue to repel the mosquitoes.
i started writing again.
everyone was on me about how i had just abruptly stopped "feeling like it" anymore. so i was told to snap out of it. and then, i finally told MYSELF to snap out of it. and i did. i wrote for a while last night and totally fell back into the stream of the universe... and then i was called on to help build a giant papier mache dead rat. and so i did.
now that may not seem like a brilliant spiritual experience to most of you, but to me, it did. i wrote, a moth said hello, and then i went to help build a big dead rat.
meanwhile back at the ranch..
my bike is still being pissy. i can't get the gears calibrated right. it's really annoying because it's potentially dangerous, especially if the gears were to crap out while i'm turning left across a busy street (which they did previously) and then i have to hop off my bike and run like hell while swearing profusely.
last night, to finish my bicycling voyage, i had to tune down 3rd to be more like 2nd, and i rode on it all the way. i don't want to die. i also hope my poor bike isn't dying. it's really old. it's probably at least 40 years old, and it's from austria. and the gearbox had a little broken bit floating around in it about a year or so ago, and that was fixed, but i hope that whatever goes on in the gearbox of a 3-speed isn't slowly disentegrating on my little precious bike.
i'm also almost considering learning to drive this summer.
but that would involve waking up early.
hmm.
i'm just not that motivated about this whole CAR thing.
i mean, most people as soon as they're 15 years old are counting down the days until they get their learner's permit. well, i got my learner's permit at 16. and then i drove a few times. and then i stopped driving. well, after 3 learner's permits over a 4 year time span, i finally just got a permanent state ID card. which looks like a license, but doesn't expire.
which means that i can't drive, and i can't use my ID to apply for credit or buy things online, because no computer system in the world believes that my driver's license # (that's the ID #) isn't accompanied by an expiration date. i mean, even i myself will expire. but my ID won't. isn't that neat?
well, anyway, i'm paying the $4 on my birthday (june 26, hooray!) to get my ID turned horizontal so i don't look like an under-21 dweeb anymore.
ever notice how very few people use the word "dweeb" anymore? exactly.
i leave you on that note.
-the carie