Mavis will save us

i lived through an earthquake yesterday. i didn't know, actually, until all the girls on hall poked their heads out of their doors to say "did you feel that?" ("feel what?") and i started getting concerned texts from the east coast. (i'm fine guys!)

another life milestone.

who talks about girls like that? have you ever talked to a girl before? you even have a sister. do you at least talk to your sister? then you'd know no one is impressed when you call the girls who bother to flirt with you fat or old, or insinuate that they're sluts.

ew

came back after the staff meeting today to take a nap and immediately remembered why i never take morning naps here: they're widening a roadway right outside my window. from here i watched a steam shovel work ever so delicately on a beech at the edge of the deepening ditch: the shovel nuzzling the tree's neck, peeling away strips of grey bark, bending (the tree seemed caught unawares) the hard resistant body toward the ground, coaxing, pushing, until the the roots gave out and the tree tumbled onto the ground.

i jumped out of a plane last saturday. i'm going to crib a description from an email to cx: "skydiving was beautiful and not even that scary - just supremely disorienting. i gasped like a fish, because you feel like you shouldn't be able to breathe, even though you can. by the time i learned to inhale again he had opened the parachute and we were gliding. definitely a weird experience, but no where near as intense as i imagined."

also they gave me a free tee shirt (a steal at $189!)

when a boy flirts with me i just flip out. i should admit it. i flip out and freeze out and drop off the face of the earth. i used to say to myself (the other fourteen times), well it's because he did this annoying thing, i just don't want to lead him on, i'll just lay low a couple days, etc. etc. but wow do i need to chill. wow.

i'm not sure how i feel about re-entering the blogging world. deleting my livejournal two (?) years ago was cathartic. and already i'm updating way more than is cool.

so let's pretend my blog has intellectual content. i like the new beck album. all the soft voices going "ahh" in the background of gamma ray. beck's voice going "ow." that's the final vowel sound in every line of the verses, and it sounds nice with whatever effect they've run the vocal through. he emphasizes it each time but then really goes to town on the second "arounnnnnnnd," and the last syllable stretches out and swings back like a boomerang. i guess it's conventional to like the single but i think gamma ray is my fave. maybe because of the video, which you should look up because i'm too lazy to post the link.

two more days left in the session - only one of my girls will be back for the next one, and she won't be mine anymore. i'll miss them a lot. i haven't written about them much, because of all these pesky confidentiality agreements they made me sign before i came here, but i pretty much wish i could adopt the whole hall.

sniff.

i'm sitting at my makeshift desk by the window - two bookshelves shoved together for a table; for a seat, the minifridge on loan from Tom, our dorm's resident priest. (comfy except every two minutes or so the thing revs up again and vibrates my butt.) kids are gone for the day - or until my mandatory class visit at 1 pm to watch them dissect rats. (ooh.)

i'm wondering: why does no one write pop secular ethics books? i mean, there are a lot of self-help books about how to make you feel better, but not that many about how to be a better person. why is it in our culture that only christians [and maybe peter singer] write comprehensible books on how to live an ethical life? i guess most novels carry implicit ideas of how to live a good life, but i mistrust my tendency to read them that way. they're art not an instruction manual... where do we atheists look for guidance? (TV?)

unrelated: in the dining hall today, a crowd of 5-year-old boys from soccer camp were lining up to go outside. i think the littluns must have chosen their own team name because as they fumbled their way into single file their instructors were shouting "i'm not going to tell you again! snakes of darkness, line up! line up!"

the moral is,
5-year-old boys = heaps of awesome.

mm, testing out the new blog.
Los Angeles is not at all what i was expecting - everything tan and everywhere low, a sprawling PCP suburb, dry and timewarped, where somehow every car trip is twenty minutes, regardless of distance. where grass is always green when it never rains. all those associations of los angeles with artifice, sunset boulevard, mulholland drive, sense of dislocation, human beings in a desert.
this would be a really creepy place to live.