Ginger's follies, foibles and fixations.
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| You Listen to Me, Mr. Kick-Ass Ginger's follies, foibles and fixations. |
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Friday, July 19, 2002 Today's Friday Five: 1. Where were you born? Bryan Hospital, Lincoln Nebraska. 2. If you still live there, where would you rather move to? If you don't live there, do you want to move back? Why or why not? I don't still live there, but I'm there right now. Every time I'm back I'm reminded what a great place it is, and at the same time I am reminded of the many reasons why it is not the place for me to live--at least for now. Here's an example--in the "Local" section of today's paper, the opening sentence of one article: It nagged Tom Dierks for a long while, the feeling of walking into convenience stores and seeing adult magazines that offend him. When I read this I felt that it summed up in so many ways the reasons why I don't belong here. 3. Where in the world do you feel the safest? "Home." Where ever that happens to be or however I happen to feel it at any particular time. 4. Do you feel you are well-traveled? Yes. And I get more and more addicted to it every year. If I don't have a plan for a trip in the future, I get jittery. Update: At least 32 states and 11 countries, as far as I can recall. Favorite cities: Barcelona, Prague, New York, London, Berlin, Seattle, Lincoln NE, Venice, the Cinque Terre (Italy), Nice, Amsterdam. 5. Where is the most interesting place you've been? I can think of so many, but the first thing that popped into my head was Portugal. I stayed a week by myself in this tiny fishing village, watching the tide roll in and eating pizza every day. I was also having severe panic attacks, so that made it pretty interesting. posted by Ginger | 1:32 PM Thursday, July 18, 2002 A Thoughtful E-Mail From Mr. Boss to various colleagues: Our office building was evacuated today due to a serious fire downstairs. As the building is without power, it's unlikely that the office will re-open till at least Monday. In that period, the phone will ring out. We apologize if you tried to email or call us today and received no response. I guess I picked a good week to go out of town. posted by Ginger | 11:11 AM Tuesday, July 16, 2002 And I I feel Feel like I am In a burning building And I gotta go. --Laurie Anderson O Superman ====================== It is not every day that you think you could die. I would suppose, generally speaking, that this sort of feeling is more common in New York than most places, in that there are just too many ways one could expire at any moment: a crazed driver plowing through an intersection, a commercial airliner crashing into your neighborhood, or (as so aptly demonstrated in a recent film), a gigantic alien worm eating your subway. The fact is, The City is very old, very chaotic and full of a great many angry and troubled people. So you just never know. But first, I want to make clear that the feeling I'm talking about is that you could die-- to be differentiated from the feeling that you're going to die, which I imagine carries its own unique unpleasantness. I was going to say that the feeling of going to die is more rare, but now I wonder if it is in fact the universal thought that we all share, eventually. No, here we are discussing the feeling that you could die. This is the sense that, from what you know (that is, your knowledge of the world combined with your immediate senses), the situation is Bad. And, at some point in the very near future you are going to learn just how Bad it actually is, and at that point there is the possibility that Bad would turn in to Life or Death, and at that point you aren't sure quite where you are on the whole life-death continuum. And it is there, there in that little pocket of time between knowledge and understanding that you think that, perhaps, this could be the day, the hour, the moment where it all ends. It could be a Bad end (as I would guess ends often are), and you really didn't have that in mind that morning when you were standing in front of the closet deciding what to wear. The blue-and-white madras, you didn't ponder, because just in case I burn to death in a fire at my office building, I don't think any of my next of kin would be interested in wearing this particular shirt. It's just not practical--otherwise we'd spend our whole lives wearing ugly clothes. It is only twelve hours ago that I had that feeling for the first time in my life. I could die. Not in some metaphorical, philosophical, "we are all steps from death at any moment" kind of feeling, but a solid, tangible, and yet very simple and--frankly--rather dull thought. And it went like this: 1) I am staring into a pitch-black hallway. 2) There is lots and lots and lots of smoke in the pitch-black hallway, and it will only get thicker as I move forward. 3) If there is lots and lots and lots of smoke, then something must be burning. 4) Whatever is burning is directly in front of me, thorough the pitch-black hallway. 5) The pitch-black hallway is my only way Out. 6) If I walk into fire, I will burn to death and die. 7) If I stand here, I will breathe a lot more smoke and I will die. 8) If I go up, I will be going back up into the burning building I am currently trying to get out of. 9) Hm. I could die. That last thought, while not un-scary, seemed mundane after the other ones. I mean, death being the vague and unknown concept that it is, the dull logical thud of it didn't seem like much after the notion that I might soon be walking into fire. Or, worse, that the fire could be marching ever-closer to where I was. But I think the key here was that, Bad as the situation seemed to be, my real problem is that I didn't know what was really going on. I knew there was fire, yes. Because of the smoke and all. And I knew there were firepersons coming--because I had heard the sirens. But beyond that I didn't know--I didn't know how close we were to the lobby (I hadn't bothered to count the flights as we were creeping down the mostly-pitch-black staircase from the eighth floor), I didn't know if the firepersons knew there were people in the stairwell (although now that I think of it I suppose in fireperson school they teach them to check for that kind of thing), and, most importantly, I didn't know where the fire was, except that it seemed to be somewhere between me and Out. So my real problem was that I lacked information. And like any good New Yorker, I had my cell phone. I was told today that I failed the geek test, in that when the fire alarm went off at work, I only thought about taking my laptop. I put my hand on it and asked Mrs. Boss (the decidedly un-geekiest of us all) "Should I take the laptop?"--half-joking really, because none of us at this point thought it was a real fire anyway. I mean, how many times have you experienced a fire alarm? And how many of those were real fires? So, ha ha, might as well not, we'll all be back up here in a few minutes anyway. First failure: never ask a non-geek anything about computers. Mr. Boss said he might consider leaving the power adapter behind, but he'd definitely take the laptop. But I feel that in some small way I redeemed my geekness quotient, at least by a little--not by bringing the cell phone (it was in my purse, and as a girl I could hardly leave my purse behind)--but that I remembered I had it precisely when I was pondering my own imminent mortality. That's pretty geeky. So I called 911, which was kind of exciting. Not only was it a real crisis, it was my own real crisis, and after establishing where I was, they confirmed what I already knew--that the trucks were on the way. "But there are people here--we are stuck in the stairwell, there's smoke, and we can't get out." Perhaps I was being dramatic here. I mean, I didn't know that we couldn't get out, but it certainly seemed that way at the moment. I think I was a little panicky, though I would like to think I was being calm. I remember sort of talking over the people who were talking to me and neither of us hearing the other. But in the course of things I heard "manhole fire." Manhole fire? That sounds kind of like somebody's sandbox caught fire--like some stupid city problem and not my certain doom. At that point I started to breathe a little easier (except for the smoke, which was pretty nasty). "Yeah, it's some sort of electrical fire, we're checking it out now." "But are they checking the building? We're here and we can't see to get out, it's totally dark." A pause. "Uh, okay we'll send someone in." And at that moment, a light appeared in the hallway ahead, and we just went--through the smoke, around the corner and suddenly we were blinking daylight in the lobby of our building. "Thank you, we just found a way out." Beep. Perhaps it says something about the resilience of the human spirit--or maybe only the tranquilizing power of alcohol--that not fifteen minutes after our brush with Doom, we (meaning myself, Mrs. Boss and The Interns), were sitting around a table at a divey Spanish restaurant, sipping Pina Coladas and laughing, even as we blew black soot from our noses into our napkins. posted by Ginger | 11:26 PM From the New York Times (requires free registration) QUOTE OF THE DAY ========================= "America must get rid of the hangover that we now have as a result of the binge, the economic binge we just went through. We were in a land of endless profit. There was no tomorrow when it came to the stock markets and corporate profits. And now we're suffering a hangover for that binge." -PRESIDENT BUSH ========================= Anyone else think it's funny that Bush uses an alcohol-related metaphor for our economic woes? posted by Ginger | 10:29 AM Monday, July 15, 2002 The MAD GRANT DASH I just stopped working on the grant I have been working on non-stop since 10 this morning (and a bit this weekend and the tail end of last week). Whew! I don't know if it's any good, but I think it's about the best anyone could do with only one full working day. If we get any money out of it, I'll be thrilled and flabbergasted. I'm typing this now (at work) because I'm not taking my computer home. As this morning taught me, carting a computer AND a cat on the subway during rush hour just isn't worth the bother. posted by Ginger | 5:49 PM Sunday, July 14, 2002 Oh geez, and Happy 89th Birthday Grandma! You'd think I'd be a more thoughtful granddaughter by calling or sending flowers or something. I guess I figured since I'd be there (meaning Nebraska) shortly we could do kind of a belated well-wishes kind of thing. So, um, that means it's okay that I didn't send a card, right? I thought not. Now I feel rotten, on top of the rotten I was already feeling. I am looking forward to getting out of town! posted by Ginger | 11:05 PM Go to the Family Circus website (really, trust me). Then choose 7/11/02 from the pull-down menu under "archives." Look at the top of the totem pole on the right. What the hell is Zippy the Pinhead doing in Family Circus??? [Tip o' the pin to Andy's Chest!] posted by Ginger | 11:02 PM Aw crud, I completely forgot to do The Friday Five.... but then I go to the site to find out there was no Friday Five this week, so never mind! Back to work. Sigh. posted by Ginger | 9:37 PM Happy Bastile Day! Well, the computer has been resurrected. Or more accurately, saved from death for the time being. In preparation to refinagle the operating system, I deleted a handful of third-party software and suddenly the booting prblms were gone-daddy-gone. I still suspect corruption lurking in my machine's guts somewhere, but until I get my work done and everything important thoroughly backed up, I'm not going to worry about a full cleanup. Whew (knock knock). Speaking of work, I have a lot of it to do, and must be finished by midafternoon tomorrow, the same day that I deposit my cat at the vet for a happy fun tooth-cleaning. Work which I should be getting a good head start on now, because there is an impossible lot to do, and I should have done it yesterday but I spent the whole day sleeping. It's one of those maybe-I'm-sick-maybe-it's-allergies things which demands I take allergy and/or cold medicine and I feel foggy and weird the whole day. So, working now, really, I'm off to it. Yessir, working hard. And you Nebraskans out there--I'll see you in a couple days! posted by Ginger | 4:21 PM |
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