We bought a chair from one graduate student -- gold and white chair, kinda worn. At the time we thought it was pretty nice, but now my memory makes me want to think it was kitschy. Anyway, we didn't have money at the time but the girl was okay with that, so we would give her the money when we picked it up. That was supposed to happen yesterday, but for a variety of reasons, it didn't. Ben and I started out pretty late, thanks to my going over to play beer pong at his place (with no small amount of him convincing me to come). We forgot to shut the garage door after loading, so we turned around; then I helped Emily move her stuff over to Phil's, and waited for Jerry to get back to get Tim's mattress. We never got in touch with this girl to tell her I couldn't make it, and I didn't ask Jerry to go over even though it was close to her place, because I just didn't think about that. I was too focused on getting the van back to my dad as quickly as possible and getting done with the long day of driving and moving crap.

Today I emailed her and apologized. She wrote me back and told me that after waiting for me for over an hour, she gave it to someone else. I'm angry as hell at her, and I'm not at all justified in that anger. We stood her up and wasted her time while she was involved in finals, and that's a shitty thing to do. I've had that happen to me and I know how angry that made me. Still, what she did was pretty crappy too, and her doing that -- though it does punish us for our injury to her -- doesn't rectify what we did. I want to write her an angry email, but I don't want to stir angry things up two days before this girl is going back home and while she's taking finals. I want to confer with my roommates, but one's out of touch and the other hasn't responded yet. A more tempting way to respond might be to accept what happened, but to point out that before she acts in anger next time, she might want to remember that other things happen to. For all she knew, I might not have come by because our van got rear-ended on Lake Shore Drive, or because I got an emergency phone call from my family. It's the way she ended her email -- "too bad!" -- that really angers me. She wrote it in anger and that's exactly what it's provoking back.

Actually, I should just tell her that -- that I understand why she would have done that, though she wasn't justified, but that the way she wrote her email was insulting and provoking, and that she's a witch who should be burnt at the stake. Yeah.

Nah. There's nothing to gain or accomplish by responding at all to this girl.

Oh! To read the grisly flies article now that it's off reuters, go to: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:yH8zIvA2-8AJ:www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L21585482+&hl;=en&ie;=UTF-8.
posted by alex at 1:41 PM

HA! "Spring is almost upon us", 3/14/03. Right. It's ten days into June and spring -- let alone summer -- is holding on for dear life as winter's guerrillas fight a vicious insurgency.

Anyway, it's back to the blog after three months, for no particular good reason either then or now. Lead off with a dream from last week:

We were all in a big room, or something. As I recall from later in the dream, it was a big rectangular room, mostly empty, but with a high (two sets of box-springs or something) bed a and TV (near and on a higher dresser than the bed) in a nook in one corner. Someone was speaking to us about something, but me and the other people by the bed were surreptitiously watching the TV, which was playing Scooby Do. I was lying on top of the bed, and depending on how I was lying, sometimes I was lying directly on top of Amanda (face-up), and I wondered (abstractly) if that annoyed her. I think Sophie was also around the bed, and there was a much older Chinese (or possibly Japanese) man sitting on the floor next to the bed. Scooby Do was regular Scooby Do at first, but then it switched to a much newer version (as I observed out loud with some disappointment) in which they featured real ghosts and goblins. It was pretty bloody. Scooby's group had a ghost like the ghost from Ghostbusters, and in the opening song he led a choir of five other ghosts in singing something (his eyes were solid white, while the other ghosts' were transparent. I remembered he had been a man who had fallen into a vat of supernatural sludge and become a ghost, which is the story of the ghost companion in Ghostbusters). In this episode, there was some sort of big, round, evil ghostly presence that the group was tracking down, with the help of some others. They chased it down to what seemed to be its lair, and were presented with a wall and what seemed to be a bunch of differently-shaped holes. Fred picked up a chair, and gave it to Shaggy, who slotted the legs onto some holes in the wall, threw his knees up against the chair, and was drawn into the wall. On the other side, he was right there by the big ghost, which was very opaquely white and semi-round and had slotted itself into the wall opposite him. It spoke to him threateningly, and then reached out a bunch of really thin white tentacles at him, Cut back to Fred and the others; he helps another one through the wall in a similar fashion (though this time a whole block of the wall slides in, allowing them to start crawling through. At times in this sequence I'm moving around on the bed trying to find some comfortable position and when Amanda is on the bed I'm wondering if it's uncomfortable that I'm on top of her.

Cut earlier to the episode, I think -- my memory is much less clear about the sequencing on this part. There is also another villain, who is controlling the ghost! We see a gigantic vase-like structure, with backlit dark-purple smoke pouring out the top. A bunch of bats fly out, and a man climbs out -- an evil vampire. He looks in his mirror, and sees the gang going one by one into the wall to help Shaggy. He takes out his sword or a knife and stickes it through the mirror. One person with the group is impaled on the ground, blood splashing out on the ground, by something invisible. It was a magician (complete with cape and turban) who was helping the group in this episode. I remember thinking, it's always the guest who gets it, never the main members. The vampire laughs maniacally just like the villains always do in Scooby Do. Tied in to my thought about the guest is a flashback in the episode. There's an inspector who occasionally helps the Scooby group (I don't think he really exists). The group is in a marsh by the edge of a river finding the way to the ghost's lair, and the inspector is watching. He sees a dark man climb onto his horse and ride away, and he thinks, "Ivan the terribe. [So that's who's behind this.]" and steals away to try to deal with him himself.

Back in the lair, it's only Daphne left on that side of the wall. She takes out her camera, and things get flickery and she can see through it the tip of a big knife pointing parallel to the body, which she can see still standing up again. It's very dark through the camera lens, and suddenly something buzzes her. She is amazed that she gets a picture of it even though it was so fast, and realizes that it was huge -- a huge bat (Ivan apparently finds her a threat because her camera can see the results of his mirror). Everyone is now trying to find the way back to help Daphne.

Then we're back in reality. Everyone's excitedly in the other room, down a short hallway from the previous room, where they've found Ivan sleeping on the bed. I run over there too, and watch in hushed (I talked a little and was hushed) silence as Seth Zenz, complete with short hair, stands next to the bed we're all crowded around. Ivan is a good-looking, in-shape man, perhaps late twenties, asleep without a shirt across the bed. He's not sleeping in a good position to put the stake through. Suddenly, he wakes up. He sits up and looks at us, he's a normal man, and I don't remember if he says something. We're not really frightened, it's as if we know he won't do anything to us now, but we did lose the chance to do away with him. While we're thinking this and wondering if Seth could get past his quick reflexes to kill him, Seth calmly takes the stake and drives it through him. There's no blood; instead there's a really cool effect where part of his chest blackens and splinters and there are a lot of glowing sparks all around his chest where the stake is impaled. I know he says something now, but I can't remember what. The sparks flicker more, and I realize he's going to explode. I run back to the other room, skid to a stop, grab someone else (Sophie?) and pull her down. I see three girls run from that room into another room (unlit) that comes off the adjoining hallway. There's a muffled thump and it appears that pieces of Ivan have flown around, though again no blood. I start to get up and go and see, a little disapointed that I made such an effort to get away and thus missed a rather undangerous explosion.
posted by alex at 1:21 PM

Spring is suddenly upon us. The weather is warm enough to comfortably walk around in a t-shirt (though it's still a little cool). It makes me wish I could work outside. I think I lost my Nalgene water bottle in the second floor coffee shop yesterday.

Did you know there are man-eating flies? Yesterday I followed a link on Google's news site to read about rights groups criticizing Jamaica over killings that happened in 2001. To my astonishment (and delight) one of the "Newsdesk" headlines on the side had the headline "Grisly Mexico factory breeds man-eating flies". Apparently there is a species of fly called cochliomyia hominivorax that eats living tissue (most eat dead flesh). It's been wiped out in the United States and a large chunk of Mexico through a damn clever trick: the flies only mate once, so if you flood the area with sterile males, the females will lay inviable eggs and the population will die out in a few generations. Extinction is usually seen as a very bad and unnatural thing, but frankly I wouldn't mind seeing this species wiped away -- they're nasty. A fertile female lays its eggs (up to 400) in a small wound, even as small as a tick bite. Within 24 hours, the eggs hatch into larvae, which burrow their way into the body of its host in a screw motion (hence screwworm, another name for them). Further egg-laying females get attracted to the wound (mechanism unknown), and if the larvae hit the vital organs, say sayonara. The larvae then drop out of the body, burrow into the soil, and metamorphosize into adults. Untreated, an infestation will almost certainly kill the host, which has usually been animals but definitely affects humans. By now I've seen far more images of infestation than I wanted to. One that sticks with me is a goat that must have been infected in the eye; half its face is normal, and the other half is a fleshy, meaty circular wound nearly six inches across.

At the end of the article, Reuters quoted an official at the factory (which produces sterile flies) saying that it could pose a bioterrorism threat. That set of wheels in my brain -- I'm now writing my bioterrorism paper on this. Even with the scant resources I've found about the fly, I can easily fill three to five pages introducing the fly and debating whether it could be a serious bioterrorism hazard. Earlier I was leaning against it, but with more thought I think it could be under not-so-difficult to achieve circumstances. A fully-functional United States could deal pretty effectively with a mass-introduction of the flies, I think, mobilizing quickly to use insecticide pastes to cure victims and and sterile flies to wipe out the invading population. Imagine, however, a large-scale introduction after a successful aerosol attack of smallpox or even worse, the plague or tularemia (which are more infectious); imagine the overstressed medical infrastructure trying to switch gears and deliver effective cure to people and animals being eaten alive by screwworms. Imagine further if at the same time, the plants in Mexico and Panama were attacked and destroyed, denying the means to contain the flies. If the flies were released into the right environment, say the suburbs (with more wildlife than a city center)...scary shit.

There are two limiting factors I see so far which would make such an attack much more difficult: one, making a huge number of flies (these plants produce nearly a hundred million flies per week) requires significant infrastructure. The flies need to be bred properly, fed, and most importantly, well contained to keep a planned attack secret. This would presumably require resources more akin to a rogue state than a terrorist group, and most rogue states (despite what President Bush believes) probably don't plan on committing suicide-via-attacking-the-US. It would also be somewhat hard to keep a secret. Two, introduction of tens of millions of flies would be a difficult task; you can't fly planes unnoticed into the United States, and multiple flights would presumably be required to release that many flies. It's not impossible, though, and sea-side cities would be especially at risk. This is a cool project, but one full of scary thoughts. Hell, I've probably just written a large chunk of my paper.
posted by alex at 1:50 PM

Jaw-dropping moment tonight. I went to Doc tonight to see Vampire Hunter D. I didn't know anyone else in the theater; I sat alone absorbing the leftover atmosphere from the Queer Heroes film. After a point I realized I was sitting just down the row from Meridith (though I wasn't sure at first it was her, my memory for faces being bad). It was good not to end up watching the film alone; she had been brought there by some of her friends from Matthews House. Vampire Hunter D was about as pretty as I remembered it, but the English dialog was more stilted and funny than I remembered, and that really took away from the film. Afterward we all talked through the intermission -- turns out she was with someone who roomed with someone else from my high school first year -- and then watched Blood: The Last Vampire, which didn't disappoint -- it was as beautiful as I remembered it and the plot came over better the second time. Spirited Away is this Saturday at Doc!

Afterward, we left the theater, and fell into talking about anime with another group in the lobby. The guy who'd sat to my left in the theater, Will (2nd year/trumpet player in the Wind Ensemble, from which I recognized him/Matthews House/from the DC area), who'd kinda come with the Meridith's group, hung around by the exit, very much not a part of the conversation. After standing there and looking left out for a while, he left, nearly unremarked by people in the group (except Meridith). I didn't think much of this then, but on the way back to Stony, in the middle of Gilbert and Sullivan's Sir Joseph's Barge is Seen (HMS Pinafore), my recollection hit me, and my jaw literally dropped. I used to do that. I used to be the one standing to the side, not involved in the conversation and not feeling like I could be involved, and slipping out on my own with just a little notice for leaving. I have no idea if the situation to Will was the same as it was to me, but it was a strange moment to realize I had probably seen what someone else acting the way I once did. I still do it, but not often. I think I've figured out (at least a little) the whole socializing thing. I hope.

I was sitting here writing this up, when out the window I saw a blinking light suspended in the sky. It was flashing red and white and seemed to be stationary but not part of anything -- it was near the lake or MSI, where there are no towers or buildings or anything. I was curious, so I asked Matt to take a look. We considered that it might be a police helicopter, a North Korean spy plane, or a UFO; we decided to go out and take a look. We walked over and discovered a light mounted on top of a crane -- a North Korean spy crane, that is. I'm gonna keep my blinds down from now on.
posted by alex at 12:19 AM

Amanda and I made dinner last night. She brought over pork loin, and we made that (with some excellent barbeque sauce she had), corn bread, and some peas. It was a good meal; we'd been talking about cooking for a while, and I'm glad we had the chance before the quarter ended. I enjoy spending time with Amanda.

After that, I went to Senior Night at the pub. I was late enough that I didn't get one of the sweet glass mugs they were giving out, but I found one later on an empty table. It was really crowded for the first hour, and I hung out with Dan Hirschberg, Liz, and Paul Johnson at the back corner way too close to the karaoke. I saw some people, as usual, that I hadn't seen in a long time (how did I let myself lose touch with so many people?). Once I got well oiled (a phrase that back in Frank Baum's time meant "quite drunk", but now has too strong a sexual connotation), I sang karaoke ("My Way") with Brock, one of my coworkers. In the end, everyone took off but Furman, Ben, and I, which meant I was drinking a lot of beer. I had somewhere north of six beers. My tolerance is lower than it once was, I think, though I never had a good tolerance for beer. The three of us closed out the pub, then went to Alpha Delt; I stayed long enough to say hi to a few people and make my jacket smell strongly like smoke, and then walked back in the light rain to Stony.

The eight-week kernel project for Operating Systems is now over; Roni made the final submission around 8:00 last night. We passed 79 out of 83 tests; I really wanted to pass 81 (two were joke tests), but I know it's good enough for our A's (hopefully) that we passed 79. The kernel project was really cool. There was always something to work on, something to build, something to debug, and it was all ours. It was without question the coolest projects I've done in school.

Woke up this morning with a hangover at 10 when I got a call rescheduling a doctor's appointment, then woke up again at 1 with less of a hangover. I missed my volunteer thing again; I've only missed twice this year but both times were in the last month. I ate breakfast and made it to campus around 3:45. Tonight I'm going to see Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust at Doc, and hopefully I'll be able to get work done on a paper before then, though I'm tempted to write today off and give in to the hangover.

My blog is a lot more about my experiences than the others I've been reading. That makes sense to me -- this blog is the replacement for the journal I no longer keep --, but it seems to stand out among the others I've seen. Amanda's and Annie's are about some of their experiences but also about random thoughts. Will's is entirely intellectual thoughts. I'm not really an expressive person; I don't talk often with other people about how I feel or what I want or what I'm thinking. I definitely feel an urge to express things (to vocalize my internal monologue, as I think I heard this described somewhere), and that's probably why I kept a journal and why I now keep this blog. It's not perfect, but it's something.
posted by alex at 3:19 PM

I went to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show last night. Phil's fiance's friend Meridith organized the trip to see the Midnight Madness cast at the Music Box; she knew some people in it. When I was starting 11th grade, I was really into Rocky Horror for some reason, as was Phil; at the time I really wanted to see it and even I think wrote letters to local theaters encouraging them to allow shows, since the show in the city was inaccessible to us. Then I moved on, dropping my original RHPS-inspired online name ("American Morgothic", also Tolkein) and forgetting the entire thing for years.

On the Red Line, I had the new experience of being drawn on with lipstick and those cosmetic pencil things; I was marked as a virgin (i.e., never seen it in the theater) by two V's on my forhead, and got my cheeks reddened and a black line down my nose. At the Music Box (side note: they'll be playing the Cowboy Bebop movie on April 4), we passed through a very trusting security check ("this lump in your jacket, hat and gloves?" "yeah" "okay"). I walked into the men's bathroom and the first thing I saw was someone in pretty well-done drag. In a split second I remembered what I was there to see, and made my amused way to the facilities; behind me I caught someone being told "No, you're in the right bathroom. This happens to me a lot." As a virgin I was dragged up to the stage (with all the other ones) before the show, but by luck we weren't given the humiliation that was supposed to come upon us for knowing a friend of a cast member's (at theater shows, there is a cast that acts out the movie as it happens, complete with props).

The MC pacing around the stage in front of a red velvet curtain in an ornate, antique theater with a fake-starry ceiling felt like a cheap copy of a David Lynch film; instead of mysterious whispered comments, he shouted that we were here to see the show. The whole movie is an elaborate and changing ritual, with the audience shouting back at the movie throughout the film; being corrupted by the University of Chicago, of course, I found myself wondering how the whole cast and shouting thing arose and evolved. Despite myself, I also found myself reading into the movie; a study of the film almost certainly could (and one probably has) read a lot of social commentary into it. Rocky Horror has an atmosphere of sexual wierdness and going against social norms, but really in the film I was surprised by how easily it could be read to be almost disapproving of that. I was a little disappointed by the audience interaction; I was hoping for more singing along (since I still remember a decent amount of the lyrics and don't get a chance to sing in a group often, not that I can sing). It was a pretty cool experience though; I'm glad I've done it once. Afterward, Meridith said it was more lively than the last time she went, and Amber said it was a lot less lively than back in Indiana. I rubbed most of the makeup off -- I didn't want to see Jorge's joy at seeing me so attired, not that he was up -- on the CTA, and we had the blind luck to catch the Garfield bus right as we arrived on that particularly cold and windy night.

Friday night, I went to the Brew and View with Amanda. Even though the movie theater switched its schedule and we had to see the Hot Chick instead of 8 Mile, I had fun. I'll have to write more about that later.
posted by alex at 12:13 PM

Dream. I started working at Deloitte. It was my first day, and I was starting late, which I knew might not be the best impression. It was midafternoon, maybe 2:30 or 3:00; I was going to my desk for the first time to do some work. I passed by the security station in a small building, then out through the large sunlit stone courtyard (kinda like the stones of the Daley Center) between the security entrance and the main buildling. Once I got inside the main building, I ran into someone, who brought me out to the security center again; I know this happened at least twice, but I only remember the second time, when one of my supervisors made me my printed ID card there.

It was getting late, and I wanted to get to work and actually make use of my time. I ran across the courtyard, which was full of people streaming into one way or the other around the central fountain, and into the building. I passed my father, who is also a consultant though in another field, talking to one of my superiors who'd I'd interacted with earlier. I ran down the hall, which was large and very well decorated (with nice carpets and wall hangings, with the walls and pillars made of nice stone) toward my office. One of my supervisors -- I couldn't remember his name, because I confused them all -- called me over, and told me that I was the only one who hadn't moved my desk out of the way. Apparently there was an event about to happen, and all the desks needed to be moved. I tried to explain that people had been taking me places and I'd had to get my ID, but I didn't think he was listening. He seemed to have had something against me from the very beginning. We went to a large (though the size also varied), similarly nice room where my desk was, and began to move it. Not a good way to start my first day.

I went to a funeral today. The younger brother of one of my coworkers was killed on Friday, shot in the head after trying to avoid a confrontation after a party. Five of us (three fulltime, another student, and I) from the office went down to the church, which was on 91st Street. We arrived at the church -- a nice if not particularly ornate wooden structure -- and found it was packed, probably with students from his high school. The five of us walked through and gave our greetings to our coworker, James, and passed the body. I only looked briefly, but I could see that he had died a bad death. His expression said that. I'd only seen one corpse before, of a high school acquaintance who had died of a drug overdose. That was much more peaceful than James' brother. I can only imagine what James is going through; I think about losing one of my brothers, and I can feel that the pain would be like nothing I've known before.

I'd never been below 60th, and I was entirely ignorant of what it is like. I imagined a vast wasteland of smashed and shuttered buildings and obvious poverty similar to the westerly areas the 55th street bus passes on the way to the Red Line. That wasn't at all what it was. It was a huge residential area filled with small houses, not affluent at by any means, but still a living community with stores, apartments, and churches, some of which were nice and most of which were in good states of repair. The architecture down there is older and much nicer than a lot of the architecture here and especially to the north, where there is a lot of newer development. When we were close to the church, it felt almost unreal: I knew we were on the south side of Chicago, but it was like driving in the suburb where my grandparents live, with block upon block of small houses as far as the eye can see. From what the head of Admissions said, there are really nice parks and areas down there. As a college student with no real inner-city experience, I feared almost all of the south side as dangerous and unwelcoming. It's really too bad that the school doesn't encourage us to take better advantage of all the unknown portions of this city. At some point in the spring, I would like to go over to the Wooded Island, a bird sanctuary behind the Museum of Science and Industry, which is not at all far from my apartment.
posted by alex at 1:55 PM