9:03 AM 4/29/2007

Well, this week has been relaxing. Returning to the office is always an odd experience. I feel the pinch of time once more. It looks like everything has been calm while I was away, and that means I can settle in a get things done in a predictable fashion, instead of run around putting out fires like a normal day.

Yesterday I slept really late. I woke up at 11am. Tucker's line: "It's been a long time since I considered 11am late." Well, today is a fairly normal day for me, and I got up at 5:45. But, never mind all that: I was missing out on some seriously nice weather. I know it rained overnight, but when I left the house it was a beautiful day. I went in search of a new electric razor. Best Buy, Tenleytown was calling my name. I waited for an H bus. People were waiting for it by the church. I wasn't going to wait there, just look at the schedule, which would no doubt tell me that I had twenty minutes or more until the next bus. A different bus pulled up - it was going some weird place that wouldn't help move me toward my destination. I looked at the schedule, and only saw weekdays. There was a blank panel on the box - was that where the Saturday schedule should have been? As the doubt propagated through my conscious mind, a young lady walked up to have a look herself. "I don't see any Saturday times - maybe this one doesn't come today." -- "No, it's right here on the bottom half. But, it's all compressed... I can barely read it." Oh. Yeah. She was right. The next H4 was in 10 or 15 more minutes. Instinct told me that I should walk 'upstream' toward 14th, or 'downstream' to Mt. Pleasant (now I think there are more frequent H8s), but everyone seemed content to wait, and I wasn't in any big hurry, and I thought this girl was striking up a conversation. Then she started calling people on her cell phone.

I pulled out my copy of "New Art City" and started re-reading some bits. I must've deliberately moved the bookmark back, because it wasn't where I left off. This helped me cope with the bus being late. I learned from overhearing cell phone girl that her name was Elizabeth. When she wasn't talking on the phone, she had her iPod in her pocket. At some point when the bus was inexplicably late, I decided to bolt. I took four or five steps when I saw the bus emerge around the corner where the road bends from the one grid system to the other older one that matches Columbia and Mt. Pleasant. I turned around and went back to where I had been standing. I remarked to 'Elizabeth': "I guess I had to threaten to leave!" She took out an ear-bud and said "Huh?"

A young couple were sitting on the bench in the bus shelter. Quite spontaneously during the wait, before our bus appeared, the woman got up and walked away. They were most definitely together. Not that I was watching them closely, but I noticed that they functioned at a mostly nonverbal level. I never heard them speak to each other, they merely shared an understanding. Probably they muttered coordinating signals to each other. They certainly sat closer than two strangers. And yet - there she went! Just up and left. In kind of a hurry, too. I wanted to read my book, but I was now involuntarily obsessed with analyzing this new development. Had I misunderstood what I had seen? Were they really together in that sense? I hypothesized that they delegated her the task of retrieving something left behind. They didn't seem to require much discussion over it. Somehow she was just triggered. It could've been a bathroom break for all I knew. She moved quickly, but didn't run. Did they have better knowledge of the bus schedule than me? Enough to budget their time better? You can never really know when those buses are going to show. And guess what? She returned in five minutes to rejoin her companion. We were all still there.

Even though no bus had shown up, more passengers continued to arrive. I got anxious enough to alter my whole agenda. Even worse, I started to sneeze repeatedly. I was people watching; starting to loose interest in the painters or 50's Manhattan. One other young woman arrived to examine the schedule. She was dressed a little like a painter. Except the sandals... you wouldn't really want to paint in sandals, but no worries. She was cute, but not happy. I am always much more fascinated by the inscrutable - in both people and ideas. Anyone a little shy - or even hostile really makes me think about existence, self-presentation, misdirection, style. This woman wasn't about to smile. Her cap covered her eyes in shadow (not such a bad idea in the brilliance of that sunlight). She had on a clean white t-shirt and khaki cargo pants - a glossy sort of treated fabric like parachute with darker stitching. I wondered whether she thought she looked ready to go paint the walls inside some house. And then, I wondered more abstract thoughts about the efficacy of imitation. Mimesis, costume and role. But that stretched out to cover much of the day. This is how I decided to walk somewhere else, and as I've already mentioned. That came to nothing. Once the bus was actually visible, my patience was renewed.

The park was a luscious green again. One advantage of the H bus is that they are practically all those newer style buses. The front it low to the ground and the seats in the back ride much higher. It might just be my imagination, but the windows seem bigger too. And with the jog through the park, along with the overall sylvan look of northwest DC, it makes for a generally more pleasant ride.

I made short work of Best Buy. It makes me wince just to go in there. I got a good deal on an external hard drive there once, and I like to pay some attention to the mobile phones, mp3 players, and cameras so I have a vague idea of what's available and at what price. I can supply you with my entire history of shaving in a handful of words: Sometime late in high school, my parents got me an electric shaver. A Norelco. It did a good job. An even shave, if not a particularly close one. I remember picking it up at the BEST catalog store in Lakeforest Mall. Could it really have lasted more than ten years, or did I get a second one? Because it did last a while, and when I went to India in 2000, I definitely had an old one that my parents bought me. India was not kind to the Norelco. Recharging it on different voltages was built into the design, but electricity has some voodoo to it, despite all those differential equations required to analyze it. My guess it that the charger/battery age in a particular way based on the 110 US voltage, then are suddenly stressed by the UK and India voltages, which tended to be 220. Soon after I got back the thing would no longer hold a charge. I could either get a new battery, or... Well, you know, they're made as cheaply as possible: It was time for a new one. When my travel companion Amanda heard me grousing about the shaver, she bought me a new one as a gift. I appreciated it, but as I've said, they're made as cheaply as possible. In fall 2004 (four year run - not bad at all), I packed it for a trip to Ohio. That was the first time I ever flew to Columbus. I've driven it so many times that flying that distance seems weird. Flying is for places like London or Seattle (done both!), but not Columbus. Of course, I don't have a car, I was taking Christina along, and she doesn't drive, so renting one was not going to help. Furthermore, I would get to drive my parent's car everywhere. So we flew. Now, while I know basically what happens to checked luggage, I wasn't expecting a bunch of guys to kick my duffel bag with steel-toed boots. I wasn't thinking about that when I packed: The bag was not full - I expected to shop for clothes at discount stores in Ohio, which I did. Well, dear reader, despite the boot attacks - my electric shaver still functioned properly. It just needed a loving touch. And to this day, after one more trip to Ohio of that sort, it still works, but only if you're willing to squeeze it while shaving to prevent parts from flying off. I had a premonition about it - I picked up a cheap shaver a few months back - didn't want to spend too much - experimented with a flat 'Remington foil' model. It buzzed, irritated my face, and cut some of the hairs. But I wasn't angry per se - the trimmer is narrower that what I had before, and works great. In light of all that, I got another Norelco. It spent yesterday charging, and today I open a new chapter on shaving my face. Oh yeah, maybe you're wondering: I have shaving cream and razor blades. Don't feel tempted to use them much. Maybe I should give them a go once in a while for practice.

Container Store caught my attention. I have those boxes of old letters that I've been meaning to organize better. There is also a big bag full of photos from my 21st century photog renaissance. I've been looking halfheartedly for a storage idea that will work for me in practice. I see things in the store that look great, then when I get them home I can't get excited about them anymore. Small solutions are going to be ineffectual, and large solutions are such a big gamble that I usually put them off forever. So since I was right next door, I thought it might be worth taking another stab at a partial 'small' solution. I got a clear box with dividers and a snap on lid. It describes itself as 'media storage' because it is the same width a DVD box is tall. I'm trying not to own many DVDs, and I already found a nice metal mesh container that I like. I've been toying with magazine storage boxes, but they create a new problem: without a flat top, I can't stack more stuff on top. Magazines on the shelf allow me to cram lots of extras in the space left over. One of my favorite things to do upon leaving Container Store is to figure out what items will go inside what other items. I put the Norelco and the chip bag clips into the clear box. Snappy.

I saw a lot of old photos when I was in Ohio last weekend. As I unpacked the box of letters at my place, I found (surprise, surprise) a bunch of old photographs. I forgot about those. They are mostly from high school. It's becoming ever more difficult to deny that I am a photographer. Even if I've never sold a photograph. There are pictures of my friends, both from school and summer camp (Johns Hopkins, CTY). If you ignore the fact that I dressed in a ridiculous fashion - the hair and clothes were enough to make my parents warn me: "You'll be embarrassed to see old photos of yourself in the future!" - we all look very awkward. I got the same feeling looking at photos of me and my cousins at an even earlier time. The fashion is almost tragic, but more than that, we are total goofballs.

In addition, I shot entire rolls of the railroad near my house in Gaithersburg. Track maintenance equipment, locomotives, freight trains, bridge reconstruction over I-270. Whatever I thought looked interesting. I rode my bike to get there, but later on I drove places to take photos. Even still, there aren't that many photos from the period, so I know that it was the rare occasion that I got shutter happy. All I can say is that I was fascinated by trains. And not because they were on their way somewhere: I wasn't really interested in going to those places, but possibility must have contributed some subtle extra dimension to it. I would probably have explained it more as an amazement that something could be so big, that network of narrow rails, criss-crossing the continent. It's a nice counterpoint to how I think about computer networks, and how they've managed to take over a big part of my consciousness.

At home I found Tucker just waking up around 2pm. That's when she made her pronouncement about waking up late. John had been calling my phone looking for Tucker. I didn't know why. He had her cell phone. Huh? Why have a cell phone if you're not in total control of it at all times? That doesn't fit the profile.

After moving all that correspondence from one box to another, I went out for a coffee. I thought I'd sit at Tryst and read a while. The weather was turning cloudy, but it was still a reasonably nice day, so sitting in that half-in, half-out space of Tryst was an inviting idea. When I arrived to find no seats available, I was disappointed, I stepped back outside to scheme on another al-fresco place to sip coffee, then I looked up at the roofline across the 18th, where I saw that people were on the roof at The Reef. I don't know why I never think of the Reef in daylight hours. They have light snacks, but I don't know if they make espresso. They probably do - but once I see the 16 beer taps and find out there's a fancy new one "Bell's Oberon" that I've never tried, I forget about coffee. Believe it or not, I went the entire Saturday without having coffee - although I did have a can of energy drink at noon. "Monster" or something like that. So I continued reading "New Art City" and ordered a chicken caesar salad. Catherine was bartending, and she is always good for a laugh - if usually a perverted and sarcastic one. Some guy asked me about my book, and we started talking about various things. He moved up from South Carolina with his girlfriend who got a job at NOAA. They had a place in Capitol Hill, but he really liked Adams Morgan. "NOAA... downtown somewhere, or in Silver Spring?" -- "Yeah, you should totally move here.. I ride the bus to Silver Spring every day, and it's faster than the subway." He said he just recently started looking into Douglass Hofstadter, and finally read "Godel, Escher, Bach". He found an article about the difficulties of translating GEB into other languages. I tipped him off to "Le Ton Beau du Marot", which is all about that, with experiments he did getting people to translate poems. It might have been someone else I talked to, but this guy also made some disparaging remark about Hegelian Dialectic, and I was stunned: "The passage in this book is going on and on about dialectics in art" - it was interesting enough, but my resolve was starting to flag. I had an Irish whiskey, and I recalled how my sister used to make cake icing by stirring powdered sugar into Irish whiskey. The flavor will forever remind me of dessert.

Back home I started working on my computer, but I didn't get much done. The sky clouded over, and everything had a gloomy light. I discovered an odd problem with my Firefox browser. It has lost the ability to save an image. Investigating further, I found that it won't save the page either. Thursday I was reformatting a book jacket to post it on the Event Calendar at work. I had to copy the image, then paste it into Photoshop. A bit tedious for the times when I have to grab a lot of stuff. So maybe I just have to reinstall Firefox, but then the problem will forever be a mystery. I really think it should have a simple explanation. I went searching through the "about:config" page, and I still haven't found anything relevant, but that's a long list. All the parameters with 'download' looked clean, but that's just a start. Maybe it's a Windows DLL or something else. I started to to worry about a virus, but the scans come up clean. So far it hasn't caused me too much trouble - I can always work around it, but I get really annoyed with a program command being available, happily running like usual, then having no effect whatsoever. The program normally knows when it is broken, and an error comes back. But with this, it ignores me and keeps going, as if the command actually worked. Maybe the files are being saved to some weird place, but three things argue against that: I saved the same image a second time, and that should have generated an overwrite error "Are You Sure You Want to Replace?"; There are default directory settings that check out; and the Download manager lists every file downloaded, but remains empty. Furthermore, the download manager had a dropdown menu with commonly used destination folders, and it is now an empty list - that's different since I noticed the problem. I have messed with the settings that seem relevant to the download manager, with no success. Am I even on the right track. As I said: I could just give up and reinstall. I started to write something, and then the laptop overheated. I wrote more in my notebook while I was out shopping, and I didn't lose much, but momentum was definitely lost.

The night ended with "All The President's Men" on PBS. I enjoyed looking at old footage of DC.

last updated 1 year ago #