Thursday, July 22, 2010

Nothing Ties This Together

I love fireflies. I'm dogsitting/housesitting for one of my professors right now and I was outside at dusk watering her flowers and there were lightning bugs all over the yard. It felt magical. It's too dry for fireflies where I was raised, and I would see them every now and then in college, but it's only since I moved up here that I see them regularly during the summer, and it still feels like a novelty. I wish there was a way to fill a room with that firefly effect and drift off to sleep watching them (I have a feeling, however, that the charm of fireflies would be lost if you literally filled a room with them). (Also, I realize that perhaps rather than fill a room with fireflies I should just sleep outside, but I'm not really the camping type. I don't think I am, anyway. I've never actually spent the night in a tent. I'll be RV-ing on my honeymoon and I'm pretty sure that's the closest I ever want to come to actual camping. I don't mind the idea of sleeping outside provided it's optional and I have an enclosed, climate-controlled RV to retreat to as needed.)

So, what has been going on around here? Some quick numbers:
3: Interviews conducted as part of dissertation research.
0: Interviews transcribed.
0: Pages of the dissertation written so far.
30ish: Pages of the dissertation that I plan to more or less copy and paste from papers/articles I have already written.
20: Pages of the dissertation I hope to have written--new material, I mean--by the end of this month.
9: Days left in this month. Gulp.

3: Florists contacted
1: Florists who have actually replied to my phone calls/e-mails and met with me to discuss my "vision" for the wedding. (So, uh, I guess the guy will be my florist.)
1: DJ to (hopefully) meet with and hire next week.

6: Summer school classes planned and taught.
23: Students in said summer school course.
18: Students in said class who are part of a special program that seeks out high-potential-low-performing students and accepts them to the university on a probationary basis for the summer term, at which point they take a core class (mine) and study skills classes and if they pass said classes they get to attend college in the fall. I hate the fact that whether or not these students will get to go to college hinges on their performance in this single course. Fortunately, they are all doing well so far.
1: Midterm I need to write this weekend.
This is the first time I have ever taught a college class--from start to finish--that I planned and controlled completely. I have taught entire units in other classes and I have guest lectured many, many times in other professors' classes. I also taught discussion sections during the first year of my PhD, and I had complete control of the grading in those classes and I had to do all of the teaching but I didn't make the lesson plans since they were pre-planned for us. I could tweak things, but I could not change the content entirely. It has been fun and eye-opening to decide what I think is important about my subject and to attempt to teach those things.

3: Days remaining on the project that I had been working on all summer. I'll be sad to see it end (perhaps only temporarily, since we'd like to pick it up again next summer). On the upside, I'll no longer be spending 20 hours a week on this project, and that's a good feeling. That's 20 hours a week I can spend on the dissertation! That's what I SHOULD do with those 20 hours, anyway.
1: Awesome review of said project. I'm proud of the people I have been working with and proud of myself for guiding them. I'm worried that we'll get more reviews tomorrow, though, and that the good one will have turned out to be a fluke.

I now have to quit this number gimmick because it won't work for the other things I want to talk about.

First of all, there have been some strange things going on around here. We had an earthquake last week, an actual earthquake that was apparently felt by most of the local population, although Penn and I both slept through it since it happened at five in the morning. I'm bummed that I slept through it, actually. I doubt I'd have realized what was going on even if I had been awake, but I've never experienced an earthquake and I have always been curious about how it would feel. I've been housesitting so I haven't been at my apartment much for the past two weeks. I stopped by for a while this afternoon to hang out with Penn who was working from home (he chose to work from our actual home, possibly because there are six dogs--yes, SIX, including mine--at the house we're watching and that can get distracting). While I was over there I noticed a jingling sound coming from somewhere in the house. It sounded like a faint old-fashioned alarm clock. I thought maybe that's what it actually was at first, like maybe a neighbor had forgotten to turn his off this morning and we were hearing it through the walls, but after wandering around the apartment I realized the jingling was coming from our china cabinet. Our A/C unit shoots air out behind the cabinet and shakes it ever-so-slightly. There had never been any jingling before, though. I reached in the cabinet and rearranged some glasses and vases so that they weren't touching each other any more and the sound stopped and I know all of this is terribly boring but, look, it's the only earthquake-related thing I actually experienced.
The earthquake caused all of the crystal in my china cabinet to shift just enough that many of the pieces were pushed up against each other, causing a strange clinking sound. I'm glad it wasn't a more intense earthquake. That would have sucked, to get a bunch of hand-me-down crystal from my mother-in-law-to-be two weeks before a huge earthquake. (Obviously, a huge earthquake would suck, period, new-to-me crystal notwithstanding.)

The other strange thing happened just tonight. Penn is staying at our house tonight instead of with me and the six-pack of dogs because he wanted to go to a jam session in a warehouse in our neighborhood. Back story time!: We were walking home from the subway one Thursday night a few months ago and we heard music coming from one of the little warehouses by the train tracks that we have to cross to get from our home to the train station. We weren't aware that there were restaurants or bars or anything in the block of warehouses so it was surprising to hear music. Curious, we wandered over to the warehouse to check it out. It turns out that the warehouse is an art consignment store. Or maybe just a place where the artwork is stored and worked on until it can be moved to the actual store. I have no idea. It's not important. The point is, it's a warehouse that typically serves another purpose but during Thursday nights the owner opens it up to amateur and semi-professional musicians who want to hang out and practice together just for fun. The night we wandered in there were five or six musicians hanging around playing and a few people lounging around watching. They let us in to watch for a while and then told us to come back sometime. Last week Penn happened to be walking home from the subway on a Thursday night again so he stopped in to see what was going on and ended up drumming for two hours! He was very excited about the experience and looking forward to going back again this week. He was hoping it could become a regular thing since he can't play his drums at our apartment and has been out of practice for years now as a result.
Well, when he got there tonight there was no jam session. Instead, there was a candlelight vigil being held for the woman who was MURDERED in the warehouse on Monday night. He called me to tell me that and I felt chills run down my spine. It's such an awful story. Apparently a woman who lived in our neighborhood rented a studio in the warehouse to do painting restoration. She had gone to her studio on Monday night to work for a while but there happened to be a man already there in the space. I'm a little unclear on why he was there. I think he had worked for the warehouse owner before in some capacity, so maybe she felt like it was okay that he was there. The media seems to be under the impression that she didn't know him well, though, or perhaps at all. At any rate, for reasons that aren't clear yet, he stabbed her to death with scissors, in the very room where Penn was hoping to play drums tonight.
The whole thing makes me feel sick to my stomach. I can't even begin to imagine what is wrong with the murderer. It scares me that a seemingly completely random, cold-blooded murder took place so close to my home. It's a fluke, I'm sure, but these are the crimes I hate most, the ones that are completely senseless. I almost hope that they establish a clear motive that doesn't boil down to her just being in the wrong place at the wrong moment. It will be easier to stomach this if there is some cause, because otherwise I'm left thinking that it could just as easily have been me or Penn in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was looking forward to going over there some Thursday and watching Penn drum. I'm not sure that that will happen now. I'm freaked out by the idea of being in that space, and I'm not sure that the jam sessions will pick back up anyway.
When I was planning to blog tonight I was initially going to tell the strange story about how two people in the building next door to ours were arrested last week for robbery and there were half a dozen police cars blocking our truck in the driveway as these two guys who were clearly on meth were led out to cop cars in handcuffs. But that story doesn't seem like a big deal now compared to this other thing.
The crazy thing is that Penn and I do not live in a bad neighborhood. We live in a "good" neighborhood, in fact, on the fringes of one of the poshest zip codes in this entire region (in the entire country, actually). I love our apartment. I hate that things like this happen so close to where I sleep at night. Then again, it just proves that bad things happen absolutely everywhere: big cities, small towns, cushy suburbs. No place is without its secret, underlying problems that occasionally burst to the surface in ways that make you think, "Maybe it's time to move." I'm not going to be nervous in my own neighborhood because I truly do believe that both of those events are bizarre, terrible flukes. It's just a bit much that they took place within such a short amount of time and so very close to my home.

Anyway, I'm off to bed. My dad comes tomorrow for a whirlwind weekend trip. Tomorrow night Penn and I are going out with him, my aunt and uncle, Penn's mom, Penn's sister-in-law, and...the limo driver who drove us around when my dad was here in April. The explanation for this is really a post in and of itself, but the short version is that back when he visited in April my dad wanted to check out some bars/restaurants in another city a couple of hours away and it turns out that if you have a big enough group it's only slightly more expensive to rent a limo than it is to take the train. So we rented a limo to drive us there and back one night and for whatever reason my dad bonded with the limo driver. I sort of think the reason was Too Much Gin plus the fact that my dad not only paid and tipped the driver but also bought him dinner AND invited him to hang out in the bar with us (he didn't drink since he was driving the limo). At one point on our trip home that night I looked out the window when we were getting gas at a rest stop and my dad and the limo driver were standing there together, arms slung around each other's shoulders, laughing like crazy as if they'd known each other their entire lives. The visual was made even funnier by the fact that my dad is a six-foot tall graying white man and the limo driver is approximately a foot shorter and black. They are exact physical opposites. At any rate, my dad inexplicably exchanged phone numbers with our driver and ever since then the driver has been calling my dad to chat. He called him the day after our trip to make sure my dad was okay (we had all had a lot to drink that night; nobody had to be a designated driver!), and he has also called him to say hi on all major holidays since: Easter, Father's Day, 4th of July. So now my dad seems to think that they are genuinely buddies and he invited him to hang out with us tomorrow night.
I hope that they genuinely ARE buddies and that this guy isn't some weirdo who is just using my dad. The whole thing is baffling to me and seems like the exposition to an Odd Couple-ish play or a reality TV show. Then again, my dad really is good at being friends with absolutely everybody and tends to be a pretty good judge of character, so I'm trying not to be too skeptical of the whole thing.
I'm just not sure how Penn's mom is going to react tomorrow night when I'm like, "This is my aunt and uncle, and this is my, um, limo driver?" Thankfully she has met my father once before, so this won't be the first impression. It's going to either be a disaster or a hilarious comedy.
I'll try to remember to let you know how it goes.

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