Timeliness is holiness, or Vituperative Vent
I was going to wait a while to post this inevitable, digested-by-then experience of Boston.
But after days of nothing's going according to plan or coming through smoothly (which only continued too consistently today), I have finally found free wireless internet away from home (which is blind as a chapel without the little pictures I cajoled onto the wall late last night and deaf as a church bell without phone or web service). And what should I hear as I read my delicious nugget of Project Runway critique from fourfour.typepad.com in this underground graduate lair on the campus of fair Truth herself (heh) but "California Dreaming". I caught initially that it was the Mamas and the Papas (whose "Dream a Little Dream of Me" was a favourite of V's), but thought it was one of their lesser songs until that famous trumpeting of "California dreaming on such a winter's day".
Ain't that the truth.
The red corduroy jacket over pink velvet skirt with folksy oversized flower appliques at the hem worn with my new favourite knee boots turned out to be insufficient insulation from the sudden September chills. Even Holland was warmer and I am frankly surprised. But make no mistake--this is fall and classes and mossy stones unclumped from their static growths are a'rollin'.
Chestnuts, tough and new, I've learned this past week:
1. Momentary inconvenience (extreme) and longterm inconvenience (extreme) look identical.
2. No matter what the individual would like, alone, he can never effect change on a corporation (e.g., Cingular, Sprint, Earthlink, ComCast, X University).
3. People enjoy transferring calls because then it's someone else's problem. If one is fortunate enough, one will be ping-ponged around an entire cycle of ciphers and to whom it may concern's till one is referred to the initial person again. The good news is that by then, someone kind and capable will have noticed one's desperation and disappearing straws of sanity and offered to make an incisive call to track down Someone Who Can Actually Help You. I will burn makeshift incense at the shrines of those Kind and Capable Persons tonight.
4. If one is to live outside an energy-sufficient cottage in the woods complete with utter Zen-like abandonment of modern connectivity, one is free from the otherwise ubiquitous tyranny of telephone and internet firms.
5. Exchange Scholars are not as special as actual entering PhD students and are seated accordingly.
6. If one were to be patient, good, methodical, and saintly, one still has to shuttle back and forth nonsensibly between bureaucratic outposts until the great system flushes itself out.
7. If one rents a furnished apartment with some history, one inherits all the stains and damages of the previous human occupants. However, one may be surprised (pleasantly at first, then unpleasantly) that one can actually remove many of the stains with some vigourous scrubbing and chemical solution.
8. Not having a telephone is very alienating. Payphones do not allow one to call cellphones if one uses a phonecard not sold by said payphone company.
9. Activity table minders really really want people to whom they can hand things.
10. Humility is not encouraged in America.
11. Timeliness can save one's sanity, give one everything one has earmarked in one's secret dream messages to god, etc. It's worth trying to find its seams. Someone once said to me that when ordinarily ordinary processes turn out to be inordinately difficult, one has to ask: "Why is it so difficult?"
I've asked that question and gotten no answer. It would have been OK if even just an alley cat gave me a moment of his time.
12. It helps to be taller in general.
13. Retail therapy, as I've long suspected, isn't particularly therapeutic.
14. When the Postal Service mysteriously sends one a box unsolicited and it turns out to be the very sad remains of a box of beloved books one packed into a new and sturdy box only weeks earlier, it is not good news. It is the most heartbreaking news, especially as one begins to realise the darlings (with much personal history and pacing the pages through one's own honest hands, one leaf after another in real time, real contact) one has lost to oblivion. Especially when one's favourite three-part novel in the whole wide weeping world has lost its heart--the second volume that carries the pilgrims through the most spectacular tribulations after their rocky allegorical start and before their glorious deliverance to enlightenment.
Even as I write this, I am overwhelmed by sadness: heavier than Sisyphus' stone on the rib because there is no knowing where those lost stores of knowledge and personal joy have been cast. Who is reading them now, if anyone? Are they rotting somewhere in the dank corner of a vile office piled high with evidence of perdition? The a**holes at the USPS even ripped the cover clean off volume 1. There is surely a special circle of hell reserved for the abusive and indifferent towards beloved books. May those who find their murky souls there be buried alive each day by odorous pages from worm-eaten tomes, thick with web and crawling with cocoons. May their mouths be blackened by the ink of a thousand poisonous letters, a river run bitter and metallic from the scratchy points of many a miser, murderer, and malingering mailman.
Amen.
Sorry for the venomous invective this times. When things improve (many a kindlish administratress told me today that they hoped as much for my sake), so surely will the Dorian face of these letters.
Things to look forward to: pink curtains cut and sewed by yours truly to be backdrop to the bright Scandinavian bedding, the lesser known Matisses, and the hauntingly insightful Hoppers.
I miss Penguin and the rest of the potato commune crowd.
But after days of nothing's going according to plan or coming through smoothly (which only continued too consistently today), I have finally found free wireless internet away from home (which is blind as a chapel without the little pictures I cajoled onto the wall late last night and deaf as a church bell without phone or web service). And what should I hear as I read my delicious nugget of Project Runway critique from fourfour.typepad.com in this underground graduate lair on the campus of fair Truth herself (heh) but "California Dreaming". I caught initially that it was the Mamas and the Papas (whose "Dream a Little Dream of Me" was a favourite of V's), but thought it was one of their lesser songs until that famous trumpeting of "California dreaming on such a winter's day".
Ain't that the truth.
The red corduroy jacket over pink velvet skirt with folksy oversized flower appliques at the hem worn with my new favourite knee boots turned out to be insufficient insulation from the sudden September chills. Even Holland was warmer and I am frankly surprised. But make no mistake--this is fall and classes and mossy stones unclumped from their static growths are a'rollin'.
Chestnuts, tough and new, I've learned this past week:
1. Momentary inconvenience (extreme) and longterm inconvenience (extreme) look identical.
2. No matter what the individual would like, alone, he can never effect change on a corporation (e.g., Cingular, Sprint, Earthlink, ComCast, X University).
3. People enjoy transferring calls because then it's someone else's problem. If one is fortunate enough, one will be ping-ponged around an entire cycle of ciphers and to whom it may concern's till one is referred to the initial person again. The good news is that by then, someone kind and capable will have noticed one's desperation and disappearing straws of sanity and offered to make an incisive call to track down Someone Who Can Actually Help You. I will burn makeshift incense at the shrines of those Kind and Capable Persons tonight.
4. If one is to live outside an energy-sufficient cottage in the woods complete with utter Zen-like abandonment of modern connectivity, one is free from the otherwise ubiquitous tyranny of telephone and internet firms.
5. Exchange Scholars are not as special as actual entering PhD students and are seated accordingly.
6. If one were to be patient, good, methodical, and saintly, one still has to shuttle back and forth nonsensibly between bureaucratic outposts until the great system flushes itself out.
7. If one rents a furnished apartment with some history, one inherits all the stains and damages of the previous human occupants. However, one may be surprised (pleasantly at first, then unpleasantly) that one can actually remove many of the stains with some vigourous scrubbing and chemical solution.
8. Not having a telephone is very alienating. Payphones do not allow one to call cellphones if one uses a phonecard not sold by said payphone company.
9. Activity table minders really really want people to whom they can hand things.
10. Humility is not encouraged in America.
11. Timeliness can save one's sanity, give one everything one has earmarked in one's secret dream messages to god, etc. It's worth trying to find its seams. Someone once said to me that when ordinarily ordinary processes turn out to be inordinately difficult, one has to ask: "Why is it so difficult?"
I've asked that question and gotten no answer. It would have been OK if even just an alley cat gave me a moment of his time.
12. It helps to be taller in general.
13. Retail therapy, as I've long suspected, isn't particularly therapeutic.
14. When the Postal Service mysteriously sends one a box unsolicited and it turns out to be the very sad remains of a box of beloved books one packed into a new and sturdy box only weeks earlier, it is not good news. It is the most heartbreaking news, especially as one begins to realise the darlings (with much personal history and pacing the pages through one's own honest hands, one leaf after another in real time, real contact) one has lost to oblivion. Especially when one's favourite three-part novel in the whole wide weeping world has lost its heart--the second volume that carries the pilgrims through the most spectacular tribulations after their rocky allegorical start and before their glorious deliverance to enlightenment.
Even as I write this, I am overwhelmed by sadness: heavier than Sisyphus' stone on the rib because there is no knowing where those lost stores of knowledge and personal joy have been cast. Who is reading them now, if anyone? Are they rotting somewhere in the dank corner of a vile office piled high with evidence of perdition? The a**holes at the USPS even ripped the cover clean off volume 1. There is surely a special circle of hell reserved for the abusive and indifferent towards beloved books. May those who find their murky souls there be buried alive each day by odorous pages from worm-eaten tomes, thick with web and crawling with cocoons. May their mouths be blackened by the ink of a thousand poisonous letters, a river run bitter and metallic from the scratchy points of many a miser, murderer, and malingering mailman.
Amen.
Sorry for the venomous invective this times. When things improve (many a kindlish administratress told me today that they hoped as much for my sake), so surely will the Dorian face of these letters.
Things to look forward to: pink curtains cut and sewed by yours truly to be backdrop to the bright Scandinavian bedding, the lesser known Matisses, and the hauntingly insightful Hoppers.
I miss Penguin and the rest of the potato commune crowd.
posted by greenyew at 1:32 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home