You're Getting Very Sleepy...

I just got a letter from my landlord letting Penn and I know that we can renew our lease for another year. And she's not even increasing our rent! Hooray! That's a huge weight off my shoulders. Our current lease is up October 22nd and if we had to move next month the timing would be terrible. I'm writing my exams until the first week of October and I know these exams are going to be so time-consuming that it's going to be hard to find time to eat and sleep during the next three weeks, much less keep up with my assistantship and tutoring work. House-hunting would have been almost impossible. Then we would have had only a couple of weeks to pack and get situated in between my exams and our upcoming trip to Europe. [I'll have to talk more about that in another post; we're almost definitely going to Europe in November but almost all of the details--even seemingly obvious things like "where?" and "when?"--are still to be determined.] Basically, moving next month would have been a logistical nightmare.

Plus I just don't want to leave this condo yet. I really, really love it here. The location has proven to be even better than we anticipated. It's quiet, Penn and I both have very easy commutes from here (he can bike to work in five minutes, it doesn't get easier than that!), we can walk to the grocery store, our neighborhood is full of every variety of restaurant you can possibly imagine (Chinese, Thai, Japanese, seafood, Argentine, Italian, Peruvian, barbecue, pizza, wings, hamburgers, kosher, amazing Honduran taco trucks...), we can bike a mile to a path that takes us into the center of City A, we can walk or bike to the subway station and be downtown in 25 minutes or in our town center in 10. The biggest complaint I have about any of our neighbors is that one of them occasionally smokes on his balcony and on cool nights when our windows are opened we can sometimes smell the smoke. Big deal. I still love the way the owners painted this condo, and I'm really cooking regularly for the first time in my life, something I attribute almost entirely to our awesome kitchen that I love to use. And just last month I finally finished hanging all of the artwork Penn and I never took the time to frame when we first moved in together or aquired over the past year. I hung up all of our art (note: I'm using the term "art" loosely, as our art mostly consists of free postcards I brought home from Russia and maps and album covers) and now it feels even more like home here. Oh, and our new (to us) fifty-inch (!) TV was delivered the other day and I definitely don't want to carry that beast downstairs for at least a year.

Knowing that we can stay here for another year is a relief. And who knows what will happen by this time next year. There's a possibility that Penn's office may move locations and we may opt to move closer to it. We took a homebuyers' class over the summer and determined that we aren't ready to buy quite yet but we may be ready a year or two from now. Basically, being here for another year should be perfect, and I think by this time next year I may be ready to move somewhere else. But for now I'm just really, really glad we don't have to move this year!

And now for a fun conspiracy theory: last night Penn and I were talking about the job he had when we first met (which he hated) and he said, "Did I ever tell you about how they tried to hypnotize us?" I started laughing and said, "Nooo..." and he proceeded to tell me a story about a particular training session he had to do at his old job. I don't want to say what exactly his old job was, but it was a job working for a, um, conservative branch of the government. He was stuck working with a bunch of redneck guys. You know the type, guys that have "These Colors Don't Run" American flag stickers on the back of their trucks and can't believe anyone wouldn't want to own a gun and refer to anyone with brown skin as "the Mexicans." He used to come home from work with t-shirts that said things like, "Support the Troops, Support Each Other" and featured screenprints of soldiers wearing gas masks and stick figures shaped like policemen and nurses and 1950s businessmen. Oh, and I think there was a shirt that pictured a ripped Uncle Sam with, like, missiles or something in the background (I never actually saw that one, Penn just told me about it). Anyway, that job was SO WRONG for him and we always joked about how so much of the job was an attempt at brainwashing, so I was amazed the hypnotism story had never come up before. But last night (interrupted by tons of laughter on my part) he described a training session where all the employees had to go into a room full of comfortable folding chairs and put on virtual reality-esque goggles that covered their eyes and ears completely and watch a film about having a positive attitude in the workplace. He said before the film started the trainer said, "Now, don't fall asleep! You'll want to fall asleep, but stay awake!" and then the movie started and at first it showed bad actors in a workplace scenario of some sort but then it switched to scenes of meadows and waterfalls with single words like "trust" or "unity" superimposed over them as soothing music played. And then Penn fell asleep and he woke up to the sound of the trainer saying, "Wake up! The movie is over!" After the training he talked to all of his coworkers about it and nobody, not one person, stayed awake for the movie.

Doesn't that make you a bit suspicious? It sounds like the video intentionally made everyone fall asleep. Why else would there be soothing pictures and music and key words to focus on? I don't know much about hypnosis, but isn't picturing soothing places and repeating mantras a big part of some versions of it? And I don't think there was any discussion about the lessons supposedly taught by this video after it was over. Just a simple, "Wake up! Go back to work!"
I told Penn that they probably were hypnotized and that at some point while everyone was asleep the trainer put some sort of code word deep in their subconsciences. And suddenly one evening at 9 PM the code word will be broadcast around the country via all radio and television signals and Penn will turn to me with a glazed look in his eye and slowly say, "Must. Attack. Red. China," and then he'll stalk out the door to buy his army fatigues and I'll be all puzzled, alone on the couch, and I'll never see him again.

In all seriousness, though, isn't that story sort of bizarre? I've been to a lot of training sessions in my life, but they always had clear objectives and they never involved personal video equipment.

Anyway, I'm going to the beach tomorrow for the last time this season. I'll be with Penn and his friends and the other girlfriends and I'm going to enjoy this vacation because it's the last free weekend I'll have for three weeks.