Trouble
(26 February - 7 March 2003)

7 March 2003
-So, it was looking like a pretty good day... going to hang out & judge at the Stanford tournament, a day with fewer than 9 hours of work for me, all sorts of good times.  But Em & I were both starving when we got home from work, so we wanted to get food before trekking out to Palo Alto.  We first tried to call Pollo's, but they don't seem to be listed in the phone book.  Okay, no burritos... how about Thai?  We drove up to the place (Bangkok, not Your Place) a little up the road.  But they close from 3-5 in the afternoon & we always forget that & it was 4:15 pm.  So not there.  How about Your Place?  So we parked near Your Place, on the corner of University & Chestnut, the street up from Curtis.  While we were dining on Thai food & discussing how our week was about to get a lot better, someone hit the Probe (Em's car), tore the front of it off of the rest of the car, and drove away.  We have no idea who, & the people at the Taco Bell (near Your Place, right behind where the Probe was parked) saw nothing (at least that's what they say).  Anyway, it was a shocking image.  But apparently not shocking enough for the four (4) Berkeley police cars that passed by the scene & moved along.  The last two I actually tried to wave down to no avail.  There may have been more before I saw these.  Heck, maybe a cop even saw the accident & drove on.  So this is why we're not at Stanford right now, we're waiting for the police (since they're clearly so short of them today) to show up & complete the police report.  They actually told us to drive the car home, which I'm pretty sure isn't what you're supposed to do in an accident.  Ah well.  Hopefully we can get to Stanford at some point tomorrow, but right now, just a day to lose some faith in humanity.

6 March 2003
-You know those electronic signs that they have on some roadsides (or over roads) these days?  Usually in amber lights on a black field, warning you that traffic is backed up for the next 55 miles & you should seek an alternate route (possibly the one the cows are using on the hillside neighboring the highway)?  Anyway, there's one of those on my new route between jobs & it was lit-up today.  I expected traffic warnings, or maybe construction references, but the sign instead informed me that someone with Indiana plates in a white Suburban had abducted a child today & they were looking for said person on the freeway.  Wow.  That's not what one expects to see.  I started wondering some about the nature of "abducted" children, since about half of them (roughly, it seems) are actually abducted & the other half are simply with their other parent who got sick of having 0-5% custody.  In the former case, it's imperative to try to find the kid for all sorts of reasons; the latter case seems to have less urgency for me.  But both show up on the same milk cartons.  Nonetheless, this shook up my day a little, just seeing the word ABDUCTION on the roadside sign.
-I started thinking about CTY late today & it hit me that I feel more & more like a Humean every day.  No, not a member of Sep's fantasy basketball team, but a follower of Hume.  Now we all know that Hume was a crackfiend, though his general premises shed some sound light on the fact that all "proof" is an illusion.  But I'm getting distracted.  The point is that it's so hard for me to digest that I am the same person who was born in Carson City in 1980, or even lived through half the experiences that have intervened since then.  It's not that I feel those people necessarily did stupid or bad things (certain notable exceptions aside, also discounting the regret/guilt that I periodically feel for everything), it's just that they (here "they" complexly refers to "past me's", like "snapshot of Storey, circa summer 1995", for example) feel much more like friends than, well, me.  I think I've posted about this before, but it's always amazing to remember that I actually did certain things.  Sometimes they'll be things that have become oft-told stories, so I feel the events more as the story than the original memory.  But usually they are just things that somehow feel more like lore about other people than they feel like my past.  I guess the basics here are that life is long, & along that road, the past feels distant.  No surprises to people older than I am, probably.  But it still blows me away.  I think this has a lot to do with being a very verbal person... all my memories are textual with some side graphics, like one of the journal articles I copy these days.  I think of things as verbal descriptions, verbal manifestations.  & I guess that's a vaguely more detached way of looking at things than, say, sensual perceptions.  If my memory were dominated not by words but by how everything felt (physically here, not emotionally), it might seem a lot more contiguous to me than it does now.  But the more I think about the verbal theory, the less it's appealing to me as part of why I feel this personhood gap.  Blarg.  The point is, I'm feeling strangely schizophrenic, like I'm more someone I've heard about (from myself, presumably) than actually been.  Yes, I think it took me that long to say what I meant.  I feel more like I've heard about me than been me, in the past.  There.  I'm sure I'm only making sense to me, which means that in five years, I will remember a story of someone making sense, but they wouldn't make sense any more.  Get it?  Maybe I just miss philosophy classes.  But actually, I just think way too much about silly things like this.

5 March 2003
-Ahhh, that's better.  Today the energy has finally come, turning what have been very long & trying days where I question this new schedule into a pretty enjoyable run of activity.  The good mood comes from a myriad of very small sources, mostly parts of the new JMMC job going very well.  But it's also getting accustomed to having a full schedule again, something I haven't really had in a couple years, & arguably since 1998 sometime.
-Today I opened a plastic bag containing a periodical... I stretched it further & further & then it snapped apart.  The sudden motion of release did a number on my chest, & for a bit I felt like I was having a heart attack.  Now I know that it's nothing, that it's just the muscle, but I felt really unsound.  I guess this is all just a product of the weird realization that muscles are everywhere in one's body.  I know that sounds funny to you science people out there, but I do everything I can to be as unaware of my various physical internal realities as possible.  They freak me out.  The point is, if I had made a muscle in my leg spasm like that, I would barely have noticed, for I know that nothing vital is in my leg.  It's just the muscle the protects the heart that makes me flutter.
-I have all these rants that spring to mind at certain times (usually when driving; most of them are about driving) & I think "Hey, that's something that I need to put on Introspection!"  But I so often see the anger fade away to nothing when I'm out of traffic, or when some other outrage catches my eye, or when I'm in a good mood.  Today, I'm just feeling too high-energy to even worry about it.  But don't worry, bad drivers, I will call out your idiocy for specific driving tactics soon!
-Condolences to Amy Phillips & her family on their loss.  The glib mood of the above posts may seem out of touch with this one, but I just found out.

4 March 2003
-I drove 99 miles round-trip (the whole loop) yesterday, though up to 15 of those miles were superfluous as I drove around looking for a restaurant for lunch.  I suspect the full commute will be a lot more like 80 miles/day over the three trips.
-Apparently the plan is for me to work 49 hours/week instead of 44.  John Muir Med 25, Chapman 24.  Insanity.  I figure it's good for me to get back to an era of far less sleep, far more activity, & even some money.  It'll take a period of adjustment, I'm sure, & I'm feeling it this week.  I'm pretty sure next week will be much smoother.
-The JMMC (this will be what I'll be calling my 2nd job location, so get used to it) Library is a crazy place to work.  The Library is beautiful, the collection is shiny-new, & the rolling stacks are fun.  But then there are the full color illustrations of diseased humans on the walls, most of them with multi-colored rashes, tumors, & the like.  The loudspeaker calls for doctors of all kinds at all times to go to all places &/or phone lines.  Every time a baby is born in the 'spital, a baby lullaby tune plays out over the loudspeaker.  There are other code sounds for more urgent situations.  My boss is constantly full of energy, something rarely found in a woman of her age... & profession, for that matter.  I think I'm going to like it, on the whole, but there are things to get used to, things to learn from.
-I think it JUST hit me that I'll be driving or working for 12 consecutive hours a day on Monday through Thursday.

3 March 2003
Happy Birthday to Alisha Creel
-Many projects, many projects.
-Not only is Jake no longer selling numbered T-shirts, but the whole CYI site is down & out.  So long, Numbers are Countagious.
-This 8-hour day is not kidding around.  Especially when it's (door-to-door) more like an 11-hour day.  I still don't think I'm working as hard as Emily, but tomorrow I will get 9 paid hours (about 12 door-to-door).
-Last year it was 2 February.  The year before, New Year's Day.  We'll have one of these days a year till 12 December 2012.  Pretty fun stuff.
-There were some pretty amazing searches last week, many of which I think were planted by friends since so many of them involved looking for the emu mating dance.  Regardless, the quotes-search winner revealed to me that I am the ONLY (!!) Google hit for that search in quotes.  My main theory for this is that the book in question is not deep enough to be analyzed, & only my joke of a paper about it shows up in the whole world of that book's literary criticism on the web.  Meanwhile, the Quiz set a new low since the first week, but the total number of quizzes taken is up to 8,406.  This week was probably the most evenly distributed set of results amongst the 64 countries ever.

2 March 2003
-Em's home!
-Am I ready for 44 hours a week?  I guess we'll find out...

1 March 2003
-Work was insanely boring today.  Part of the problem was that I was really tired & also drained from having woken up naseous & thus unable to eat anything before heading to work.  Nevertheless, the day drags when you're too tired to read, so you can only do online stuff for 8 solid hours, perforated by interruptions from people, some of whom apparently teach but never learn.  At least one person today convinced me that she had no memory function whatsoever.  If students of these teachers behaved like a lot of these teachers do when trying to learn, they'd send them home.

28 February 2003
-Em went down to Santa Barbara for the big PIRG shindig that many seem to be gathering at.  This leaves me alone by the Bay for the weekend, with the cat, chest pain that doesn't change but has an explanation, & work on Saturday.  So it goes.
-March is a-comin.  But you knew that.
-With a half-hour left in February, I have redesigned the front page.  Hopefully this will both give fewer headaches to our 800x600 viewers & show you an idea of what this Blue Pyramid really is all about.

27 February 2003
-So I spent a fair amount of today in the ol' Emergency Room.  Basically everywhere else had appointments for millennia into the future (do people PLAN when they're going to be sick in their busy life schedules or something?), so we just bit the bullet & went in.  Probably a mistake, all told, since they ended up concluding it was a major muscle strain.  They also drew blood, which usually makes me faint & dizzy for 48 hours (no exception so far) & gave me vicatin, which gave me the experience most like I'd imagine being drunk is in this lifetime so far.  Basically I just started laughing & giggling for no reason whatsoever.  In between breaths after laughing out loud for long durations, I would observe to Emily that absolutely nothing was funny & I had no reason to be laughing, then I'd laugh some more.  Then I started feeling utterly abysmal, which is pretty much how I've been for the last 3 or 4 hours.  So.  I bought some peace of mind (how horrendously expensive it was won't be known for up to 2 months, the billing people said, but with no insurance at all in America, I'm sure things will be wonderful) & I wasted the hospital's time.  Bleh.  At least all the people telling me to go to the doctor can stop bugging me now.  I'm, in future, likely to be even more reticent to head to a medical professional.  & with them telling me my heart's fine, blood pressure perfect, & everything else checking out, I guess there won't be a need to for a long time.
-In other news, apparently Mr. Rogers died today.  This makes me sad.

26 February 2003
-I guess the old adage goes something like "you need a job to get a job".  Actually I know of no such adage, but I think that would be a good one, right up there with needing money to make money & (in general) needing a girlfriend to get a girlfriend.  Conventional wisdom aside, I now have a second job, one that should last a little longer than the fly-by-night session with the Marin people.  This one is also through AIM, but I'm not being hired as part of a 4-person team that really needs 3 people, a nice improvement.  Instead I'm being hired all by myself to help out the Library at the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek.  At 20 hours a week, this puts me at 44 hours/week total & gives me a one-day weekend on Sunday, though I'll only be working 4 hours/day on Fridays.  The point is, I'm going to be busy with this work.
-Finally bothered to look up the lyrics to the year's most utterly incomprehensible song, Tori Amos' "A Sorta Fairy Tale".  Though I didn't hear "shook-up ramen" anywhere in that song, I was very wrong about the chorus, which I was pretty sure went like this:  "And I'm too sick, like a good book lacking proof, this deep end, this sorta fairy tale with you".  Apparently it's more along the lines of "And I'm so sad, like a good book I can't put this day back, this sorta fairy tale with you".  Hey, I got some words right!
-Also, I know what you're thinking... "Storey's going to be working in a HOSPITAL?"  That's right, folks.  It's good for me to challenge myself, methinks.  Also, the Library itself feels much more like a regular Library than even the Chapman locations.  It's just the walking through the hospital to get there that will be a new challenge.
-In other news, I think that Cop-in-a-Box is proving itself to have been a visionary case.  Sure, there are some good Opps, but compare those to the Opps to all the proposals on the Congressional table right now.  Armed pilots?  Guns in lockboxes that have to be opened from the outside?  What's going on?  Sounds like Drew & I had the best of many bad ideas.
-I once said (this is clarification for Kate) that it was a mortal sin to put a potato & sour cream within 50 miles of each other.  This demonstrated my general feelings about the supreme goodness of the potato & the supreme power of sour cream to muck up anything it got near.  Of course, I don't really believe the moral implications of this statement; I just really hate sour cream.

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