Andare, Partire, Tornare ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- fish that swim, birds that fly I've wanted to write, but honestly, nothing's been particularly going on, so I've been at a loss as to material to write on. I don't think I feel like dissecting any of the books I'm reading, since they are primarily history books that don't really lend themselves to dissection in that manner. I will note that an earlier read of mine, _The Basic Eight_, has been eaten up by Boop, who is currently passing it around to those of her friends who both find it interesting and can be trusted not to drop the book in a pot of boiling soup or to dogear the pages. (This coming from a person who has been known to read in the shower: ah, well. I never said I was consistent.) I have the Ligabue live double cd to play today (more Italian pop) plus the Stevie Ray Vaughn double album from the two shows he did at Montreux. Oh, today I have to go to the one hour condensed version of the all-day seminar the department heads had to attend. It's on harassment. Presumably they warn us against it, and not instruct us on how to harass better and more effeciently. The little twist is that we're a women's organization, which means that the odds are greater for the men getting harassed. A few of the guys have been called "boy" by some of the elder women around here, and once or twice there have been comments made that there shouldn't even be any men working for us, and that they're just here "to do the heavy lifting." However, all the examples I've cited happened ages in the past - a good twenty years, really - and I think things have been relatively quiet. I'm not sure what triggered this round of sensitivity training, but it might even be a preventative measure. Me, I like dirty jokes and innuendo, as long as I can give back as good as I get, and it's not somehow mysteriously tied into raises (hah - where I work, fat chance of getting a raise or bonus!). But then I like that sort of thing, and I am vastly in the minority. Actually, my desk is sort of covered with repros of famous works of art, which means my area is the Cubicle of Nudity. Maybe I should charge admission. Swwoop scoffs at my going to Boston to escape the humidity - that's all well and good, but fuck...D.C. used to merit hazzard pay back in the days before air conditioning. We're built on a swamp, after all. When it gets humid, it gets humid in the "I want to dissolve into a puddle and just get it *over* with already" levels. Can Boston match that? Can you pull up lobsters already parboiled, right out of the water? I swear to god, I once saw a seagull pull up a fish out of the Tidal Basin that was already cooked and had a nice garnish of parsley on it... Ok, I lied. There are no fish in the Tidal Basin. They're all dead from pollution. Or at least they were when I was a kid, they might have started to come back now. One of my most vivid memories as a young child was walking to see the Jefferson Memorial and seeing all these dead fish floating on the water...very dreamscape-like. But I haven't seen anything like that since, and rumor has it they've been trying to clean things up. So maybe things do occasionally change for the better. 8:20 a.m. - 2002-05-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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