i just got my spankin’ new faculty shirts for the year. one long sleeve royal blue polo and one
white short-sleeve with a big goofy mascot emblem head on the boob. the only way i could think of to make it
cool was to get it like 2 sizes too big to rock it with big khakis like a skater (sk8r) chick. funny. my old school hoodie is actually
one of my favorite pieces of clothing ever. it’s big and snuggly.

saturday afternoon i dyed my hair. it was supposed to be a nice autumnal
change to a light golden brown, but it turned out this shitty, awful ashy blonde/brown instead. interestingly, i’ve received compliments. i’m going to try to dye
it again soon.

the state fair is this week. i have a superstar 9th grader who is out of school to perform there like a zillion times a day. she has been
described as britney spears meets leann rhimes. i am fittingly a bit scared, but i am going to go and support her rock star efforts anyway. she is 14 years old and has a cd out!
i am also anxious to sample all the new fried foods at the fair. i find it fabulous that all the advertising this year prominently features the addition of fried oreos and fried snickers bars.

the fair makes me so uncomfortably conscious of the fact that i am living in the south. similarly, this weekend when michelle and i went to
see ’sweet home alabama’ i was unsettled as the audience whooped and hollered at the line, ‘the south *will* rise again.’ i am in clear denial at being a citizen of what was once the confederacy. but the thing i think the most odd is the difference in southern sentiment in between living in NoVA and being here in central VA. i never really considered myself to be a southerner when i lived with my folks. i would swear that northern virginia is like an entirely different state than richmond sometimes.

i don’t want everyone (well, maybe only carter on this site!) to jump all over me about this. i’m not anti-south, just a bit…averse to some of the connotations of life here. it’s hard for me to dissociate certain negative elements of the society from the more charming ones, that’s all. i was trying to relate this feeling to loving germany so much… but there aren’t a hell of a lot of “german by nature, nazi by the grace of god” t-shirts to be seen when i go visit my relatives. i have to think this through a little more.

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thanks to people who are worried about me. in a way, it’s nice. but — don’t worry about me! the stuff with my mother is…well, what i’m used to at this point. we’ve been doing this for the past fourteen years of my life. not that it gets any easier. and i didn’t mean to misrepresent that situation two posts ago. yes, the oncologist has decided to stop her current treatment, but they are going to try a different form of chemo. i unintentionally made it sound like they were stopping treatment altogether.

and to move on and surely sound callous popping from one topic to the next, the party last night was really fun. not a huge turnout, but just right for what the night ended up being. there was, however, some drunk telephone usage near the end of the evening. oops. it has been awhile for that sort of thing for me – a minor slip-up. pictures will hopefully be up in the next few days. maybe someone who was there can help me figure out what was going on in the one where it seems i am leaning backwards into matt and we are *holding hands*? was the night even better than i fuzzily remember? you’d think i’d have a better memory for the good stuff…

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sunday night. well, evening really. the weekend goes by so quickly. last year i didn’t have classes on friday so maybe thats part of it, but having friday classes means i get up early so it seems like it should make the weekend longer.

annalily is currently curled up asleep on her bed with her glasses half on and a book by her head. ah doing reading for classes.

this weekend gets a thumbs up big time. i had an absolutely wonderful time.

friday after a shitty day with lots of stress tripp got here. it was really good to see him. i’d been looking forward to this visit since the last one and i wasn’t dissapointed. annalily was even nice enough to give us our space except for coming in and turning the lights on at four in the morning. it didn’t actually bother me even though i woke up.

saturday morning started off nicely, but i was really upset that our plans had to change. my computer has a hardware problem and can’t be used for editing in the state its in. i don’t like envisioning things a certain way and then having my plans change, but i got over it and we took the train to hollywood. i think the trip seems shorter now that i’ve done it before. it really only takes an hour and a half from one place to the other.

i did all of my reading for this week and took a nap by accident. dinner was nice. tasty to me. i like steamed veggies and its been a while since i’ve had any. the dining hall cooks their vegetables in oil, which seems backwards to me, and pointless since why would you use oil if you didn’t have to.

i was a little upset at having to go this morning, but i got over it in time to have a decent morning and non-weepy goodbye.

i want to gush about how nice of a time i had and how wonderful tripp is, but i don’t think that this is the space to do it in. i’ve been happier in the past couple days than i can ever remember being. so thank you, tripp.

the train ride home was fairly pleasant. the subway made me nervous. all of the women in the car i was in got off at a couple stops, leaving me with just men around. now i don’t think anyone would hurt me in a subway car with several other people around, but it made me conscious of being vulnerable due to gender size and situation, and wasn’t pleasant. i made it in plenty of time to the metrolink train at union station, and thought i saw josh (blonde josh, not the one in my hall or mohawk josh–who no longer has a mohawk, but whose room i went to on friday. we had a really nice conversation, it was quite pleasant and solidified the notion in my head that i’ve got another friend) getting on the train. i went into the same car and it was indeed him, so i sat diagonal and we talked during the train ride. he was meeting jon, one of the guys who was robbed last year, and jon was going to give him a ride back to pitzer so i joined him. it was a little odd riding in a car with them (and matt, another guy from my hall last year who i never got to know) but made me realize how many people there are left to get to know. it was kind of nice.

i’m spending too much time looking up things about this diet for tripp. its really my only outlet for being able to help him, to be informed about this possibility. i wish i could start off knowing more.

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things are going well. i’m still going to the beach on the weekends and swimming, and its almost october. eat your hearts out.

so charity is a fundamental part of islam. beggars of all sorts are found throughout every city, some mothers with children they can’t feed, some with missing limbs, some with horrible disfigurations, others too old to work without families to support them, and some blind. i often find myself giving ‘alms’, as it were, to the blind. why?

the thing is here, giving money to beggars doesn’t make you a sucker. people don’t callously think ‘its their own damn fault they’re on the street, don’t give them anything, you’ll just encourage that kind of behavior’. like people want to live on the corner, spending all day hungry with hand held out muttering prayers for passersby. their work day is fourteen hours long. i always thought it must have been one clever son of a bitch of an american who tricked people into thinking that not helping those in need was the moral high ground. you know, don’t give a beggar money they’ll just spend it on beer. what a crock.

so there’s a thing where giving money to the poor is only a selfless act when one does it without hesitation, without doing it so that others see you and thereby think well of you, or so that you can tell others of your goodness. often when i see beggars i just look past them, they’re part of my every day world now and while i empathize to a degree i know that i will do more good by staying here and studying and working than were i to give all my savings away.

but the blind here don’t have places to sleep, often. no one to take care of them. night comes and they have a familiar park or cul-de-sac they sleep in, but their brother doesn’t come and lead them home to a nice warm bath after a long day of begging for the family. they are the most ragged and dirty and helpless bunch, often ambling down the alleys of the old medina just assuming that people and cars and motorbikes will not knock them down. but, they can still smile. they are still alive and are able to eat something everyday, and they can still smile. that, i think, is a sign of a strong society despite its inherent poverty at the hands of the european union.

peace

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in times of stress my mother cleans – i am my mother’s daugther. i know i have written this before, and that merely reinforces the circuitousness of the current situation with her health. we’ve been here before, been here so many times. sometimes i can hardly wrap my mind around it.

my solace tonight came from cleaning and organizing. since the normal wreckage of my bedroom was contained for my parents’ visit this week, i hit the kitchen and dining room. then i connected and turned on my beauteous new compaq and installed, registered, and customized everything i could think of. it is calming somehow to me to now be perfectly online, to have my leopard print wallpaper stretched across my desktop, to have registered and rebated and sync-ed and gotten my shit together. it’s not coincidence, of course, that the desire to nest and organize and take care of things strikes today, right now. i guess i’ll take whatever control i can get.

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I am a moron. I went out to get a hill workout in advance of the State Mountain Bike Championships this weekend, which is on a course that suits me pretty well—really fast with lots of longish climbs. I was out scouting that course in central Missouri on Tuesday, and practiced hopping this 20-24in. log and feeling pretty good about it. Last night, back on a local course, there was this innocuous little log (perhaps 4 inches in diameter) bent over parallel to the ground, topping out at maybe 12in. high. Easy, I figured. I think I was actually grinning on the approach. A foot high, though, is high enough to stop a chain ring, and thus the bike, cold. The front shock compresses and everything (including yours truly) rotates around that front tire. After hitting hard on my left side, I rolled up onto my feet with a loud “Woo!”

Collarbone? Check!
Head? Still there!
Wrists? Sore, but okay!

All that seemed to be hurting was my right knee (bruised) and my left side (bruised rib–from the handlebar, I think). Then I got this delayed sensation from my feet. They were both stinging like I’d been rapped with a steel pipe across the tops.

Of course, I got back on the bike and rode another eight miles or so. I mean, it didn’t hurt THAT bad.

It wasn’t until I took my stiff bike shoes off that the left foot really started to hurt. By bedtime, I couldn’t seem to pick the left foot off the ground. Lying there trying to fall asleep, I was feeling that perhaps I’d broken one of the metatarsal bones.

Two days before the states. Ten days before I began the great bike vacation. Two scant weeks until the 24-hour race that I’d been training for since February. Could I still ride like that? Could they screw a cleat into the bottom of a cast? How would they get the screws to hold in plaster?

Sleep was a long time coming. The pain in my foot was constant. I finally found a position on my left side where the foot didn’t hurt. Unfortunately, this had me lying right on the bruised rib. Good grief.

I woke up at three and still felt none too sure about the foot. It took about an hour to fall back asleep. All told, I think I racked up close to 11 hours of snooze time before finally prying my ass out of bed. My amazing wife had gotten my crutches out of the storage room and placed them next to the bed. She’s absolutely the best.

Surprisingly, I didn’t really need them. The foot felt much better, thankfully. What’s more, I couldn’t use the crutches if I’d wanted to as they poke the sore rib. There’s a good size knot on the top of the foot, and I’m feeling none too flexible with it. But it’s no longer an appendage of throbbing pain. And that’s a good thing.

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tripper, im sorry youre having a bad week. mom told me about your car. i think guy’s point on the phone that he didnt make explicit enough was “dont drive your car until you get it fixed. if you dont have time, make time, or your car will break.” he didnt make that clear enough, and i think he is now annoyed b/c they are helping you with money and want you to do what they say when it comes to their money. im sorry he got annoyed with you. you clearly told him you would not take it in until this weekend and he said fine. he shouldnt be mad. i told mom this in an email so maybe she’ll relay the message to him. you should tell him why he shouldnt be mad if you havent done so.

and tripp, remember that you are doing something you love, even though life is stressful. i would love to be as stressed as you are and living a student life. im sure id bitch about it just like i bitch now. i know i dont have it bad. but i am bored at work EVERY DAY and i am not doing what i want to do and unfortunately, i dont have enough of a portfolio to get into a full-time grad program. so be happy that you are able to work your ass off in school and can do something you love. i know i bitch about trivial shit, but that’s because the major issues in my life are really sucking right now and i dont want to talk about them on this site. so i find silly things to talk about that dont matter. granted, i have it VERY easy right now, but just remember that everything is relative.

take care of yourself and your health. while everything else seems paramount since you are used to taking your body for granted, remember that without your body, you cant do anything else. be good to it. i dont want a sick brother due to stress. i know you dont want to be ill, either…but perhaps you can make some small changes in diet and time management (moving closer to school?). and as for the car for you — im waiting to see it. the lady is supposed to call me soon when she is bringing the car to work. i’ll let you know.

love you. hope the weekend improves.

c

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