fox

(I mean. There are many things I don't understand. But some of them I'm not ready to talk about today.)

Say you're building a house. It has the usual things houses have: walls, floors, ceilings. And windows! But it only has windows in some of the exterior walls. That is: if you're going by the outside of the house, one whole wall of the house utterly lacks windows.

I'm seeing more and more of this in new construction lately and I do. not. get it. Anyone want to take a stab at an explanation?

Good thing one's plans are vague enough that an unscheduled 3.5-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon doesn't throw them into disarray.

I think I am now ready to gather the laundry and get to it.

Woke up. Want to go back to bed, and not sure I will be able to. Wah.

who invented pillows?  god, what a genius.  [loves new pillows liek yay]

so okay, my totally contraband refrigerator electric cooler that i keep under my desk has up and quit cooling things.  i don't know why; there's a fan bit on the back that looks pretty dusty, and i thought vacuuming it a bit might help, but it didn't.  the manual is not at all helpful -- but it does say the thing is guaranteed for twelve months from the date of purchase against failure due to faulty materials or workmanship.  so, hey!  but:  i don't have the receipt anymore, like an idiot.  grr.  oh!  but!  i do have (a printout of) the visa bill that shows i spent an amount of money equal to the purchase price of this thing at the relevant store on the relevant date.  is that good enough to get it replaced?

i just called the store and they said yes.  w00t!  (£39.99, yo.  that's a lot of money for a thing that only worked for four and a half months.)

[eta: and, i just found a whole box of tissues i didn't remember buying!  things are starting to look up.]

have acquired supervisor's signature; form is at the moment in the office awaiting college stamp, at which point it will be ready to (photocopy and) submit.

funding app lacks only transcripts.  will get copies of these from office, or, failing that, use unofficial ones from online.

not sure i haven't just buggered one of my contact lenses, which is a strenuous pain in the ass.  i have the prescription right here!, though, so maybe it wouldn't be that hard to fix.  (actually it's been something like a year and a half -- hey, i have the scrip, lemme look at the date; july 31 2004, so, yeah, almost exactly a year and a half -- since i had an eye exam.  maybe i should do something about that.)

trip home uneventful.  yuletide coming right along.  must turn attention to thesis at some point, but not right this minute.

zzz.

a man has just come and cleaned my windows, in the course of which he knocked a palm-sized chunk of moss off the bottom corner of my north-facing skylight.

1.  when the end of my nose itches like crazy and nothing will make it stop.

2.  the state of near-unconsciousness at which i can hear the alarm when it goes off, but not understand what's making the noise.  this is a level of alertness a notch or two above the one where the sound of the alarm works itself into a dream; i somehow know i'm in my bed, and there's a noise bothering me, but i've spent all the available synapses on being annoyed so i can't even try to wonder what the noise is, much less work out how to make it stop.  i generally manage to hit the snooze somehow, at some point, when i'm like this, and on better days i remember the sensation nine minutes later when the alarm goes off again and i'm a shade closer to awake.

This morning -- yesterday morning, by now -- my morning commute was enlivened by a posse of fourteen-year-old girls in from out of town. There were about ten of them, with three adults; really not bad, as school-group types go. And the kids weren't that noisy and rowdy (possibly, I'm sorry to say, because there were no boys among them, although I predict that a boys-only group would also be better-behaved than a co-ed one). What did make them annoying only made them slightly so, and isn't the point of the story anyway -- the point is that, one stop before mine, the two people in the seats in front of mine got off the train, as did the guy in the seat next to mine. I was on the outside, so I had to get up to let him out, and he followed the couple through the path cleared by the girls and off the train. I waited a moment to see if anyone -- any of the girls, or any of the other standing passengers -- wanted to take the inside seat, but when nobody did, I shrugged and sat down in the outside one. (My stop was, as I said, the next one, so sitting on the inside wouldn't have made a ton of sense.)

Two of the kids then took the two seats in front of mine, and a third sat herself down in the middle. The original two whined good-naturedly that it was too hot to sit three across, and they didn't quite fit besides, and sort of shrugged their friend out from in between them. She protested ("I've been standing the whole way!"), and the girl on the left nodded over her shoulder at me and said -- and I quote -- "Sit next to the lady. I'm sure she'd let you."

[blink.]

[blink.]

(Fox's Auto-Respond goes on at this point: "I'm getting off at the next stop, but if you'd like to sit on the inside, let me get out of your way ..." This is involuntary. Voluntary speech is temporarily disabled.)

[blink.]

The first time I can remember being called "the lady" by a stranger (and this is, obviously, not waiterspeak 'the lady' i.e. 'not the gentleman'), I was about seventeen and working at Baskin-Robbins, and the stranger was a young father with a very small child who was shy about ordering his own ice cream. The guy said "Go ahead. Tell the lady what you want." At the time, it was a little startling, but of course it sort of made sense -- at the age of seventeen, I was okay with a four-year-old considering me a "grown-up."

(I once babysat for a child who wanted to guess my age, and when she said "ten" and I said "no, higher" she said "thirty" and it was vaguely amusing that as far as she was concerned there was nothing in between. She was about five; "babies" were littler than she was, like her eighteen-month-old sister, and "big kids" were about ten, and "grown-ups" were about thirty -- probably about her parents' age -- and what else was there? [g])

But of course I've never really stopped labeling myself "kid." I was a high school kid and then a college kid and then a kid right out of college. It's been years, but I still have to remind myself that I'm no longer right out of school -- my brother is right out of school. And the new hires at work, the infants who haven't learned the ropes enough to take their own initiative and instead wait, like baby birds, for me (me!) to give them assignments -- they're right out of school.

This is the first time I've been so conscious of my seniority at work; there's a layer of management above me in my department, and my self-direction is pretty limited, which is okay and doesn't bother me. I've had temps all along, but temps come in because you have something you need them to do, so finding something for them to do is never a problem, and if it is, you thank them for helping out and send them back to their agency. But these new kids, who are only a few years younger than I am --

The thing is that my boss, the manager, is about ten years older than I am. About half a generation. And she's in this gig as a career, more or less, and is generally in a different place in her life than I am. We're all friendly (probably even friends -- we all went to her wedding), but she and the teammate who's about her age are distinctly one subset of our team, and the three of us in our early- to mid-twenties are distinctly another subset.

And it strikes me that the new kids probably perceive more of that sort of gap between themselves and me than I do. (Which leads to the idea that I probably perceive more of that sort of gap between myself and my boss than she does, but that's neither here nor there. At the moment. [g]) They might, god help me, even think of me as their boss. Holy shit. You know?

And to these fourteen-year-olds on the train, I am deferentially equivalent to any other adult. The train is full of commuters, some youngish, mainly middle-aged (it was late enough in rush hour that it was mainly folks with the clout to go in late if they damn well please -- I am not such a person, but my schedule's an hour later than the bulk of my department's and we have some whose schedules are an hour earlier), with the grey[ing] hair and the wedding rings and the briefcases and all that. I'm certainly not a high-schooler, thanks be to whatever god you name, but until this child called me "the lady" it hadn't hit me (in a while) that as far as a high-schooler is concerned, considering me an adult is not cause for even the slightest qualifying comment.

(I think I've mentioned this before. When I was in junior high and high school, I had teachers who were the age I am now. When I was in love with the camp counselor, he was younger than I am now, and he taught fourth grade for a living. Nobody in my peer group ought to be entrusted with the molding of nine-year-old minds. Good lord. [g])