denied

I was gonna post a comment in (my and) Dave's buddy Corey's blog, but it wants me to become a member of MySpace, and given as I've never even heard of MySpace before, much less had any reason to join it, I'm unlikely to do that just to leave a comment.

I only had assaholic things to say anyway, like "you know, honesty's not as important in a blog as writing in it regularly is, and 'interesting' is just all relative anyway", and "what color is jaded? is it like jade? But white jade or green jade?"

So i don't think i'm going to join MySpace. Sorry, Corey. You get no comments from me.
I also wanted to say, man, stick to your guns! If you feel like using big words, use big fuckin' words! It's your goddamn blog! Stand up for your overuse of arcane language, because that is something you are entitled to in Your Space!

But I digress.

So, the car. The temporary inspection sticker doesn't expire for another week. So, i drive it home to Dad, give it back to him, let him decide if he wants to fix it. He could fix it for about $300-500, because his labor is free. However. His labor is also busy, and slow. He said he feels he ought to fix it for me, so he'd do that (he sold me the damn thing, after all, and I actually paid him money, unusually enough).
But perhaps I don't want that. I figure, I drive it there, leave it with him. He can look at it and evaluate for himself how much it will cost him to fix it, in time and money, and if it's worth it. If he thinks it'll take too long, he can give me back the pittance I gave him for the thing, and keep it on his back burner as a project for himself-- he had said he missed having the van, and could use it if he still had it. So he can fix it and keep it. (It's invaluable for moving kids to college and from house to house. I know this.) And I'll take my tiny amount of money and start formulating a plan to get a new car.
Otherwise, he fixes it for me, and I get by without a car until then. Upside: cheap. will probably have car before the worst of winter. don't have to shop for new car or take out loan or make new plan.
downside: don't have car for undetermined period, and dad has to bust his ass to fix the thing. He's got other stuff to do.

Meh. I'll go get the car today, and then I have to decide about when I drive it home. If I wait until friday, Dave can accompany me, to help me push-start the car. If I don't, then I have to either hope I can make the whole trip without once stopping the engine (as I have no starter), or I will have to rely on the courtesy of some total stranger to help me push-start it. (Unless I'm in a big parking lot and can push it and then leap into it and pop the clutch. Which might be the case at a Thruway rest stop / gas station. ... Might.) It's a 310-mile journey, door to door, but it's an easy one. The car can go about 350 miles on a tank of gas, as well. So it's feasible.

Another consideration: Scout goes home on or around Friday. So if I want to see her again, I have to arrive before she goes. Tempting. But possibly silly.

life is stupid, universally

I'm currently still debating whether I should drive across the state solo in my push-start-only car. I *could* stop to stretch my legs or pee, if I left the car running. But I couldn't get gas. They make you turn your engine off to get gas.
And if I do make Dave come with me, should I have him drive separately, or should I let him nap on the way (trusting that my car will make it) and then both take the train back out here?
Much to ponder.

In the meantime, Dad's car also failed inspection-- rust in the frame where the steering gear is bolted on, making it structurally unsound, plus the brakes and the tires need replacing, plus the clutch cylinder is going. Additionally, Mom's car needs the rear suspension replaced.
He tells me he's thinking of getting a horse. Which, I must confess, is precisely what I was thinking, only in his case he already has a barn... he could get all Amish in his old age.

But. there is some good news to relieve all that. Mom ordered me bulbs from Burpee as a surprise (though she had to tell me, so I didn't order my own; she just hinted, though, so it was a surprise to open the package)! It's my very first garden of my own. So I have 25 snow crocuses (ultramarine), 20 assorted daffodils, and 20 mixed tulips (should be 40 but Burpee forgot a bag). As a bonus, when I went to dig in the front yard to put in the bulbs there, I found a bunch more crocus bulbs that I'd never suspected were there (I've never seen this house in the spring. Poor things had multiplied and were crowded, so I dug them up as I was turning over the earth, and am redoing my plans to accomodate them now. Funny thing is that when I went to turn over the earth in a spot where I thought crocuses should go but most gardeners wouldn't put them, lo and behold-- there were already bulbs there. So, one of the previous occupants of this house thought like I do. (I suspect Dave's sister Krista, as the bulbs had obviously been there a few years but not long enough for it to have been Matilda. Though it's feasible Jennie put them in over the last what, four years?)
I have never had a yard to landscape before. I need a lilac bush, because no house should be without one. I also think I need a forsythia, but that may be ambitious of me-- you don't generally see forsythias in this neighborhood and that might be because they don't do well. I also need a tree of some kind but can't decide what. (Deciduous, certainly. But should I buy a cute dwarf one-- a fruit tree of some sort, perhaps? or should I collect a specimen from my parents' tree farm-- Dad has a black walnut he needs to move, and i know he has a half-dozen chestnut seedlings going, and there are always the inevitable local sugar maples...) It's made more difficult by the fact that I don't know how long we'll be in this house, but I'm determined to leave it better than I found it at least. If only we could find jobs, we'd stay here...

I did some more puttering, and was all in all quite busy today. If I don't embark on a cross-state kamikaze mission tomorrow, I'll put the rest of the bulbs in, and then be ready for winter. One way or another, our skins will be ready for winter: i got all our sweaters down out of the attic, aired them all out, and retrieved a nice wooden trunk labeled Heinrichs Siefers (Matilda's late husband), washed it, and dried it in the sun to put all the sweaters in it. It's in the corner of my room opposite the trunk with all my trousers in it, which makes for a cozy nook with two seats, by the window so there's decent light. My room is almost put away now-- only took me a month and a half, right?-- and then the living room will somehow miraculously fall into place. I swear, my furniture is all so damn awkward, and doesn't fit anywhere. I just don't know how to organize the stupid room. And I have far, far more books than I do bookshelves, and don't know what to do about that either. I either need a new love-seat or a massive floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. The room is awkward without an entertainment center, but we've decided not to get a TV, and I like it that way. I wish I could think of a way to set the room up so that the entertainment center's conspicuous absence made a nice statement instead of just making the room impossible to organize. I wish I had some design sense.

So, OK, stupidity is universal but not unremitting. My house is nice; now if only I had wheels to leave the house once in a while...

now this is coping with adversity

Dave, as you all know by now, is much cooler than I am, and copes with adversity much better. Tragically, he is also a much pithier and wittier writer than I, which is UNFAIR because I am a writer and he is a computer scientist. I have been trying to convince him that he needs to publish flash fiction (short-short-shorts, typically under 1000 words, much in demand especially when humorous), but he is still convinced that he's a computer scientist. Bah.

Anyway. He is taking a distance-learning chemistry class. This means he has to watch four hours of tapes per week. These tapes are live recordings of an 8 am chemistry lecture taught by THE WORLD'S MOST BORING HUMAN. My lord. This man speaks indistinctly (so that Dave has to turn on the closed captioning to understand what he's saying-- which means that when he mixes chemicals, the results are invisible because they're obscured by the black block of closed captioning), pauses midsentence for no reason, repeats himself, makes irrelevant asides that have no conclusion, and tells the world's WORST jokes. I mean, they're not even funny.
And of course, he begins every lecture (it being 8 am) by asking: "How many of you got up this morning?" [Pause for inaudible grumbling] "How many of you didn't get up this morning?"
Groan.

So I present you with two contrasting short pieces of writing.

The first is one of the professor's jokes. Understand that this is one of many in the genre of "I was driving my car in the country and I hit a..." jokes. He seems to have... shudder... a collection.

I was driving my sports car one day in the country, on this nice windy road. I had the top down, the wind in my hair, all that. So I'm driving along and around the corner comes another sports car with the top down, with a woman driving it-- in my lane. I swerve, and get out of her way, and she speeds by and shouts, "Pig!" I'm offended by this, and am reflecting on how rude that was of her, given that she was in my lane, when all of a sudden I hit a pig.

[ed note: You only wish that were the punchline. It's NOT. Cower, ye wretches, for half an hour remains of this tape and you haven't even addressed stoichiometry yet. AUGH.]

So I get out of the car and go up to the door of the nearest farm house. "I need to use your phone," I say. "I just hit a pig out in the road."
"By all means," the farmer says. "Who are you going to call?"
"I was going to call the police to come and take care of it," I say.
"The police just arrived," the farmer says, pointing. I look out and sure enough, there's a patrol car.
I go back down to my car. "How did you know to come?" I ask.
The policeman looks at me, and says, "The pig squealed."

Aren't you sorry you read that?

Now imagine you had to listen to that four hours a week, without even the benefit of having it be IN PERSON so you could groan and know he heard it.

So this is Dave's response, posted to the class's online forum:

As indistinct as the events of that long, horrible night were, I can remember with photographic clarity what happened before, down to the ticking of the wall clock. I was lying on the floor, staring at the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The man on the television was mixing chemicals behind the closed captioning, but for all I cared he could have been mixing cement. A moth fluttered around the room. Though the drone of the television sounded a million miles away, the words made their way through the static of indifference: 'I was driving my car through the country one day...' But not this day. This day it was going to be different. My fists tightened. My pulse quickened. 'Wait for it,' I heard myself say. The clock slowed. The moth flirted with the light bulb. The pig squealed.

I don't remember what happened next. I woke up in a clearing in the woods, surrounded by broken bits of printed circuit board, my knuckles bloodied. The battered corpse of my VCR was hanging from a tree like the rotting remains of a medieval highway robber. A broken videocasette lay on the far side of the clearing, the tape pulled out and trailing off through the forest. I followed the tape back to my house, my living room, my television — oh God, my television — surrounded by broken glass, with the aluminum baseball bat still sticking out of its cathode-ray tube. On the floor nearby lay a dead moth, its wings singed.

How many furry animals must die before it's over? How many bad one-liners must I endure before I don't get up in the morning?

How many, indeed?
It infuriates me that he writes better than me. See my fury!!
But I don't have to watch those tapes. i've watched two with him, out of boredom, but I left the room both times. HORRIBLE. Ugh.