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Name: Natalie
Country: United States
State: Texas
Metro: Houston
Birthday: 7/11/1984
Gender: Female
Expertise: (astro)physics, discrete math, classics, linguistics, and a little bit of dutchness
Occupation: Student
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
1/27/2003
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| Moving out
Remember a couple months ago when I said I was moving to my own site? Turns out I wasn't kidding. Prepoceros
is up and running, and you're all warmly invited to come visit me in my
new home. It's not much to look at right now, but it's got all
the same bloggy goodness you've come to expect here at demeter.
(I would be more self-effacing, but if you don't like what I write,
chances are you've stopped reading long ago.)
Xanga's been good to me in the two-and-a-half years I've been here, but
I've outgrown it. I will of course continue to read all my
subscriptions, so nothing will change on that end. The only
difference will be, for those of you who are subscribed to me, that my
new posts will (obviously) no longer show up on your subscriptions
page. I hope y'all will still make the extra click over to visit
me, though. That's the one thing I'll miss about xanga--the
built-in community. I've connected with some really great folks
here.
Oh well, no need to draw it out; I'm not going far. I hope you like the new site. Over and out.
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| Hello, September
Call this a cop-out post if you like. Zero Fluegers, two
Beebests, whatever. I really don't give a flip. I had a grumpy
day today, and the sooner I get this up, the sooner I can go back to
covering my head with a pillow and pretending the world doesn't exist.
My convenient excuse will be that either yesterday or the day
before was some sort of informal "share the love" day in the
blogosphere. Thus, I present you with the following selection of blogs/pages/photojournals you
probably have never read/seen but might want to check out if you're in the
mood to add to your reading list:
Good night. Morning. What-the-fuck-ever.
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| Southern hospitality
I'm fortunate enough to have been spared Katrina's wrath. Not
only did the weather miss Texas completely, but also--thanks to my
still-unplugged TV--I've dodged the mind-numbing barrage of
reporters in slickers on the beach or in wading boots amidst floating
debris and "breaking news" updates in which tired anchors relentlessly
inject verve and freshness into the same depressing statistics and
video montages over and over and over again until at 4:30 AM they lose their shit on live television and begin bickering like whiny schoolchildren.
Millions of other people, however, have not been nearly as fortunate,
and many of them have ended up here in Houston. I'm proud to say
that my hometown has welcomed them with open arms. Anyone with a
Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama ID has the run of the city.
They get free admission to all of the museums, tonight's Comets (WNBA)
game, the zoo, the symphony, and a bunch of other attractions around
town. Six Flags Astroworld, not too far from my apartment, is
also offering half-price tickets, so I expect I'll be seeing plenty of
out-of-state license plates around here in the next few days.
I think a bunch of local bars are also waiving their cover charges,
restaurants have half-price deals, and some of the apartment companies
are setting up supercheap short-term leases for people who need a place
to stay. If it were me, I know I'd have a hard time having fun
not knowing whether I still had a house. Still, a day at the
museum sure beats sitting in the hotel lobby watching looped footage of
your neighborhood under ten feet of floodwater.
I doubt I have any readers from the affected states, but hey, if you've
stumbled across this page and are looking for ways to spend your time in
Houston, click here
for a list of things to do while you're waiting for the power to come
back on in your hometown. And y'all stay as long as you'd like; we've
got plenty of room. This is Texas, after all.
[Edit: It looks like they'll be
evacuating the Superdome and bussing thousands of people over to the
Astrodome (also down the street from me), to be housed there for an
indefinite length of time. The refugees will mostly be
Louisiana's poorest, as everyone else would have evacuated before the
storm hit, and I'm guessing many of Houston's homeless will make their
way to the Astrodome as well to join the crowd, which I suppose is a
good thing.
Things are about to get a lot crazier, a lot more crowded, and a lot sadder around here.]
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| For once, I know I made the right decision.
Friday was a marginally good day--starting sluggishly, peaking around
mid-afternoon (in terms of both mood and productivity), and crashing in
the evening. Yesterday was a bad day, as was today.
Last night I went to bed at 11, woke up at 8:30, read fifty pages in my
book, then dozed off again and slept until TWO IN THE
AFTERNOON. Wtf? I haven't done anything like that
since I was at school, and the past few weeks have seen me consistently
waking up at 7:30 or 8 every morning.
I spent most of the rest of the day (what little there was left) on the
floor, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, as is the norm on these
sorts of days. Around 8 I wandered over to Barnes & Noble, as
I'd run out of things to read. I flipped through two magazines
and, just as the store was closing, bought three new books (which I most certainly don't have the money for) because having books makes me happy.
Fifteen hundred miles away at Harvey Mudd College, the dorms opened
this morning, and classes start Tuesday. Earlier this afternoon I
imagined myself there, feeling as crummy as I do now, but with a whole
semester of hard work, an inflexible schedule, and a steady stream of
deadlines looming. From a start like this, things could only go
downhill. I would be miserable.
Despite all the angst I've put myself through over not being able to be back at Mudd this semester, I am so glad
I made the decision to stay here. For once in my life, I've made
a prescient, mature decision and staved off what would surely have been
a disastrous waste of time and money, not to mention a heavy blow to my
self-esteem and joie de vivre.
Now I have only to get down to the business of actually solving the
problems that would have made my return to school miserable.
After all, I can't hide from college forever. And I don't plan
to--yesterday I got my letter of admission to HBU,
and I'll be registering for classes on Friday. I also started
teaching a new SAT class in Kingwood yesterday, and I'll soon be
picking up another--here comes that busy schedule again.
(But busy schedule = more money, so I don't mind at all. Also,
I'm much more likely to feel sluggish and depressed when I have nothing
to do (e.g., today).)
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| In which footnotes feature prominently
The night before last I had a funny dream, and yesterday I told people
about it. Then last night I had another funny dream. I woke
up, spent an hour telling maybe ten different people about all the
parts they had played in my dream...and then I woke up for real.
So I had a dream within a dream, which has never happened to me before.
It was trippy, to say the least. It's a recursive dream*, or something like a frame story--the Canterbury Tales
of dreams. It was about six in the morning when I woke up for
real, and I spent the next fifteen minutes hurriedly scribbling down
all the details so I wouldn't forget them. I keep a notebook and
pen next to my bed for this exact purpose.
I love dreams, and I consider myself lucky that I remember mine almost
every morning; most of them are spectacular. When it comes to
remembering them over weeks or months or years, I seem to store
memories of dreams in a particular part of my brain, separate from my
"real" long-term memory. Either that, or my dream memories all
have a special "tag" on them that links them together incredibly
strongly.
I know this because although I can't often recall dreams from more than
a day ago, when I do remember one, several other, semi-related old dreams
come streaming back in rapid succession. I find that if I
concentrate on remembering one dream, all of a sudden I'll be
"transported" into a completely different dream, and then another, and
then another, often through thirty or forty or fifty different
dreams. Sometimes I'll hit on one that I *know* I haven't been
able to recall since the morning after I dreamed it, even though that
may have been years ago.
The links are usually between dreams that occur in the same (fictional)
location**, or in similar-looking places (on a plane***, in a forest,
in a village on a hill). Oddly enough, when the action occurs in
a place that exists in the real world (my high school, my backyard), it
never triggers a *real* memory of something that happened there--it
only works for dreams.
Needless to say, bedtime is usually my favorite time of day. I
feel sorry for people who don't remember their dreams--I know my life
would be much duller without mine. By the way, does anyone know
what I'm talking about? Do you remember dreams this way, too?
* Does this mean that tonight
I'll have a dream in which I have a dream, wake up and tell people
about it, then wake up again and blog about it? I hope so.
** There are several elaborate "dreamscapes" where several of my dreams
have taken place. I usually recognize them while I'm actually in
the dream, though when I'm asleep they register as real places that
I've visited before.
*** Probably a quarter to a third of my dreams take place on
airplanes. Every now and then I'll be on a spaceship, but it's
usually planes, planes, planes. I don't know why.
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