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25 April 2008
Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:14:12 GMTOut the window.
I like to set my desk up right in front of a window. That way when I need to look away from the computer it’s a piece of cake—just stare out the window for a few seconds until I’m ready to dive back onto the desktop. My room in morris is on the second floor of a smallish white house. There’s an amply sized window facing north–east right in the middle across from the door. My desk sits there, my bed to the left and a lamp and chair to the right. The desk supports my laptop and whatever crap, plus an old, corked wine bottle with a few leaves of Epipremnum aureum (Devil’s Ivy) growing in it, terrarium–style.
When I was in fifth grade for some reason I was big on plants. I worked out in the garden during the summer, read all kinds of books on all kinds of *–culture, and I eventually built up a nice little greenhouse where else but right in my room. I was particularly taken with orchids and bonsai trees, (which I couldn’t much afford but did with whatever money I earned working odd jobs and through gifts from my parents). I also liked messing around with my mom’s houseplants, making cuttings and that sort of thing and putting them in odd places. That’s where this this wine bottle comes from, it’s a few inches of pebbles that I spiked with fertilizer and water then stuck an ivy cutting into, which has thrived ever since. I’ve probably only uncorked the thing twice in the intervening years (10 or so? I think 9), new leaves have grown to replace those that die, making a nice cycle. It’s an efficient little atmospheric system. The coolest part is that I just made it, just thought that I should see if it’d work, could I just copy the idea of a terrarium? And I did.
But back to that view. Out the window at my normal vantage there’s about 1/3 roof, the roof over the living room below that pops out from what I would assume was once an even smaller plain white house. Green shingles, with a very relaxed slope. Once or twice I’ve popped off the screen and hopped out there just to sit—but it really isn’t that nice a place to sit and read. The best part of the roof is the animals that run across it, birds and a squirrel every once in a while, going about their business with no idea I’m just on the other side of a pane of glass watching them. Until they notice me and scamper off. The house next door takes up a similar amount of space, it’s a big, boxy, light blue, vinyl–clad thing, well–proportioned but ugly. The front of of ends in a porch, which I liked until I walked onto it one day and realized it was not just faux–wood for the floor, but the railing was plastic made to look like it had been lathed and for gods sake, why?
I like the roof being in my view, it’s very rule–of–thirds; I could stand the house getting out of there. If it was just a little smaller and older, to fit in with all the other houses on the block, I might not be so mad about it. But the real view is off to the left of big blue and above the green roof. It’s a mass of trees in the cumulative front yards of the houses next door. It lifts my view when I do look out the window so that my head tilts up and to the right, a good thinking pose. The first two trees clustered in the first yard (damn blue house) are thick pine trees of some sort, trunks worn orange in places, needles green even when snow blows (out here snow never just falls, it’s always horizontal). Behind it are a few big deciduous ones that fill out the treed portion of my window. At the far left is the street, just inside the street the sidewalk, where I can see bikes/people/cars going by (ordered by interestingness). Overall it’s a good view.
The only reason I’m writing about it is that because today it’s been profoundly debased and contaminated. It’s snowing like a bitch. For a point of reference, it’s the 25th of april, 2008. This weekend I played in a soccer tournament on saturday, it was perfect weather—65º and sunny—I got a nice sunburn, and up until yesterday it’s hovered between 60 and 70 degrees. Very much springlike. For a couple of weeks now whenever the weather was looking up people have been joking about how a renegade snowstorm would blow through and fuck everything up. It isn’t funny anymore. The snow layer had already melted twice then reclaimed itself at the foot of everything when collectively we all knew it was finally gone for good. The thermometers hit 70º (and when I say thermometers, I expect you to understand that I mean a 100×250 pixel animation that slides on and off my computer screen when I hit a certain button with my right fourth finger, sends a few packets to the internet to ask another computer that receives dispatches from a network–connected thermometer someplace in or near the city of Morris, and can combine that temperature with a hopelessly abbreviated 7 day forecast), snow is gone for good. Nope. Yesterday I left for school at 10am, markedly enjoying the hot humid feeling I got: haven’t felt this for an awful long time, this is nice. All this week we’ve played soccer on our field, the big spacious grass one as opposed to the cramped plastic football field we’d been using while the field reconstituted itself after being swamped with the melting white stuff. But yesterday, the last day of practice, it was cold as a bitch with 30mph gusts of wind (this is after I’d remarked how nice it was at 10am). And this morning I biked to school at 10:30, just as I left it started to tinkle little crystals. Not snow, not rain, not slush, not hail. I couldn’t feel them falling, but I heard them hitting the ground. I was fine with that actually. But come time to leave the science building it had turned into snow, and by the next time I needed to go out of doors it was really blowing, at some point between snow and slush, coalescing on the ground into a half–ice–half–snow, thick and wet like I’d imagine a frozen cheesecake undergoing the process of thaw.
Here I must digress, having just hit 1000 words in this stupid little rant. It’s been more than I week since a certain french paper was due, and I haven’t written a word of it (I did write a paragraph at one point, but deleted it). There’s something about springtime that keeps me from doing schoolwork, I noticed it last year and it’s hitting me equally hard this year, even though I’m sitting here looking up every 30 seconds as snow blows completely on the horizontal right outside the window. No good.
The amazing thing about a real blizzard is that the snow blows omnidirectionally. You can walk however you want, but that shit is still going to smack you in the face. It might hit one side more than the other, but never does it just hit you in the back. It’s always going to get you in the mouth, nose, and eyes. It might be that snow is so much lighter than rain, then, just like in the vortexes you see in a wind tunnel, after the wind blows past an obstruction it whips around propelling snow into the only place I particularly mind the stuff.
I biked back from the RFC—the farthest point on campus from my house—in the storm, through this pudding buildup of snow–slush and on my schwinn with 1.25” tires nonetheless. That was no good. I walked to class after that because I don’t have any glasses to shield my eyes while biking—the way there wasn’t so bad, but the trip back I couldn’t take it and after I was 1/4 the way home I just decided to sprint the last few blocks to get my poor self out of the cold. This isn’t how april is supposed to work. If april showers bring may flowers, I’m damn glad that I’m not one of the poor daffodils who dared to stick my sensitive green nub of a head out of the soil before this storm came along and frost–bit me to death. I, again, don’t think this is how april is supposed to work. But I don’t have anything to back me up except for the bitching of each and every person hit by this storm, so who knows. Maybe global warming should have been called global major–fuck–with–weather–patterns–the–world–over, that way people would never have sat back and thought: great, I’ll be able to grow oranges in the garden 10 years from now!
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09 April 2005
Sat, 09 Apr 2005 13:10:00 GMTVacation
Spring break is just winding down for me, and having skipped out on a week of tennis and U classes I might as well procrastinate getting back into my real life by writing about it.
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Also somewhat recently
