1. 25 April 2008

    Out the window.

    863 days ago

    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!

  2. 09 February 2008

    untitled 54

    939 days ago

    I love watching a white sky diffuse to blue. The moment it happens. Whether the wind is blowing the clouds off or the sun burning them up, there’s a point where you start to see the open sky peering down at you. Looking back up into it, it’s as if some wonderful understanding has just been reached. The feeling wears off awful fast. I could stand to spend more time watching the sky.

    —

    I’d taken a crummy mountain bike that’d been sitting unused on campus for as long as I could remember, unlocked. I rationalized that with no rider, someone must’ve just left it, and if anything I was doing everyone a favor getting the eyesore out of there. I bought a new chain for it, stripped off the derailleurs which had rusted unusable along with the chain variously fixed it up in different ways. I found a good chain length and set the thing up as a single speed, chain around the big cog in front and second smallest in back. It was a high gear ratio, and fun to ride. I didn’t need to mess around on snow or ice, the tires with thick with good tread, which is nice.

    I probably got two or so months of riding out of it when the front cog completely failed, bent in half. (What one hand gives, another may take away.) I don’t know if it was just crummy metal combined with cold or somehow the chain wasn’t running straight enough, but it was unfortunate. I liked the bare-bones, even if I had to stand up and pound at the pedals until I almost couldn’t anymore to get up the hill on the way back from town. So I went back to my Schwinn, which runs far smoother and takes half as much pedal cranking (because of wheel diameter and tire thickness maybe?), but with super-bald and thin hard tires it’s an exercise in balance and skids to ride in the winter.

    —

    The other night there was a spaghetti dinner benefit for a fellow in the athletic department who came down with cancer recently. Held at the Legion, it was a demonstration of small town cohesiveness. Huge amounts of people showed up. All the teams had to come and help out, I was debating whether or not to go. Both my roommates were, so why shouldn’t I. I really was impressed at how many people were there. Hundreds of people had to have showed up, the line bent back and forth all through the bar from 5:30-7:00, and the spaghetti got dished out faster then we could heat up the 6 or so pots to cook it. It was fun to help out.

    I burned two of my fingers pretty bad. I was doing odd jobs, cooking the spaghetti was one of them. I wasn’t exactly cautious around the stove (which was huge and burned gas, as I wish mine did) reaching back and forth above 7-inch blue flames to move pots around and throw spaghetti in. But I got burned thanks to a bad pot-holder. On my right pointer and middle fingers, while carrying some cooked noodles over to the strainer. So now I have a blister that’s inflated to about the size of half a marble sticking out of pointer, and I popped the blister on my middle finger before someone told me that was a bad thing to do. But it was probably three times the size.

    —

    Epiphanies last night:

    A guy I know through a few friends somehow knows me by a photo he saw while in Florida, before he came up to Morris, on the school website. Something to do with cookies. I never heard about this picture, I thought they had to make me sign something before they get to use my ugly mug on their website. But I kind of want to find it.

    Another guy who now goes to morris, unbeknownst to me, remembered me from our soccer team in 5th/6th grade. (The Arroz!) Which is awesome. I wouldn’t have ever placed him there, but once he did it for me it brought back good memories. That makes 3 of us who ended up going to morris, though only the two of us were there to talk about it. I really have no idea how he could have marked me other than by my name, but it’s amazing to think that I look close enough now to myself as a 13 year-old.

    Whether or not you like the song: it’s darn cool when an entire room full of people sing along to Journey. Don’t stop believing indeed.

  3. 23 April 2006

    Cougar Classic

    1597 days ago

    We had a soccer tournament yesterday, four 7 man games. I was beat. Man, soccer is fun. As a team we didn’t do great, but coming in without the highest expectations, I wasn’t too disappointed. We tied 2 (and should have won both) and lost 2. We played three teams who will be in our conference next year, and we didn’t lag far behind.

    I scored one of our paltry three goals, on a nice assist from the center back. I got it in the open, one on with the goalie a few yards out, as he slid at me I flicked it up at the same time I jumped over him. It rolled real nice right into the back of the net. The only goal we scored in our worst loss, 3-1.

    I think with good training there’s hope for next year.

  4. 14 March 2006

    Mumblings

    1637 days ago

    I got picked to fill out a survey for my school, 15 minutes of button clicking. The quick reflection on college it provided wasn’t a bad one, and here’s what I put in the comments box after it was all said and done:

    I’m no big fan of “school,” and really only came to college for lack of anything better to do. I consider myself an ardent self learner and value skills learned independently and on my own time tremendously (probably because they so outweigh those I’ve experienced within school). School just hasn’t ever been able to keep me interested.

    Considering that, UMM has been better then I expected, and although I’m not yet sure whether or not I’ll be continuing with institutionalized education or not, I have enjoyed my time here.

    When people at home ask me how things are going, my response varies between “not bad” and “I haven’t dropped out yet.” As unenthusiastic is I sound, that’s really quite a testament.

  5. 01 March 2006

    1649 days ago

    Cougar Soccer

    My school is adding a varsity mens team next year, I’ll be there. I regret going to a school without a soccer program a little, but hated the idea of a private school, and also the idea of going all to far away. I heard rumors that Morris was starting a team, and hedged my bets. We start practices after spring break, in just a few weeks.

    Kjell Olsen1649 days ago

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