it’s bedlam!!

It’s just insanely noisy here in the Land O’Aggravations today. I hear what sounds like a party next door, with five or six people talking at once. Although several of the grad students who work here have such loud speaking voices that I wonder if their iPods have damaged their hearing, so I think it’s mostly them talking all at once. I also hear the copier going in the room beside me, which doesn’t usually bother me but today it is very bothersome as whoever is copying keeps stopping and starting and banging things around. Couldn’t possibly be a case of jamming copies. No way. And the phone won’t quit ringing and K is off all week and there are just hordes of noisy people out in the hallway as well. I can even hear my student shredding paper three rooms down. (He, incidentally, has worked out WONDERFULLY, after all my worries. He may be the best one I’ve ever had. Dependable, mature, very good natured, smart… and he failed one of his two summer classes, after arriving with a less than stellar GPA to begin with. He better not flunk out, that’s all I’ve got to say.)

It also appears that all hell is about to break loose outside – the skies are black and scary. I sure do wish I could send some of this rain to you poor rain-deprived souls in other parts of the country. I’m sick of our daily downpours. It’s also been hot – it’s 81 right now according to my Desktop Weather, which for here is blazing – so our house is a great big festival of mold. Heat, mold, and water in the basement.

SO since I have nothing of general interest to say, I’m doing a survey. One of those meandery pointless ones I like to do so as to avoid any actual semblance of work.

OH, and Baker B wimped out on the Beefheart Tribute Band. The first band wasn’t starting till 10:30 and the Beefheart one was due on about 12:30. That’s past his bedtime. We are officially OLD OLD OLD.

what did you fear was going to get you at night as a child?
Oh, just ….EVERYTHING. Seriously, I was quite the scaredycat as a child. I couldn’t sleep if any body parts were outside the covers, because whatever was under the bed would get me. I don’t recall any specifics about whatever was under the bed, which in reality was packed full of my junk (just like now) but whatever it was, it was quite threatening.

Mostly, though, I was terrified of the dark house – not the dark outside, mind you, but the dark inside the house. I still remember that feeling of complete and total horror at having to go from my bedroom on one end of the house to the kitchen at the OTHER end of the house, at night. Since my parents were thrifty we did not leave on lights, so all the rooms between the bedroom and the kitchen would be pitch dark. And I had to turn off MY light before leaving my room. So I’d run through the dark house like a crazed rabbit.

I’ve considered asking my mother if she knows of something that happened to me when I was a child to make me like that, since I still become very anxious about dark rooms
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what’s in your pockets right now?
Just a tube of lipstick that hasn’t been used since I left the house this morning. It’s now 3:30. I don’t know why I bother.

favorite bathroom?
What?? I don’t think I really have a favorite bathroom. Unless you count the one at Jekyll Island, in one of the Millionaire’s mansions, that had solid gold fixtures. I toured it as a child and it made quite the impression on me.

what kind of phone do you own?
The kinds that don’t work. Our roof leaked on one, so it is dead. The other one has some problem with dialing out, so no matter how you punch the buttons, you never get what you were expecting. It does ring in, just can’t dial out. And I have a cellphone that is generally run down. So, we’re kind of hard to get in touch with!

is your music kept in a particular order?
Only in the sense that the rest of my life is kept in some particular order. So, no. None at all.

where did you go to pre-school?
I didn’t. I started with first grade, back in the prehistoric era when not everyone had kindergarten. My cousins in the same county did go to kindergarten, so I’m not sure why we didn’t. I was quite peeved at the time, but got over it when I finally started school and discovered that I hated it.

last movie you rented?
Baker B decided last night to go out and rent this movie called “In the Realm of the Unreal – The Mystery of Henry Darger.” I said I wasn’t going to watch it – it was about an Outsider artist I’d never heard of, it was late to start watching movies, and I just wasn’t the slightest bit interested. Then he sticks it in the DVD player and I hear Tom Waits singing “Innocent When You Dream”. So I was lured in with that, decided I’d watch a few minutes, and ended up watching nearly all of it. It got so late we have to finish it tonight.

I’m STILL determined to start writing my own movie reviews, so don’t want to go into the whole thing here, but Henry Darger was this guy who lived most of his life in Chicago, with the exception of a number of years spent in a home for mentally ill children, had no friends, worked as a janitor for fifty-some years, and when he died in the 1970s his landlords found this 15,000 page manuscript and a gazillion illustrations of this fantasyland where seven little girls called the Vivian Girls fought evil, called “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.”

It was… bizarre. And kind of disturbing. I’ll go into greater detail if I ever get around to the movie thing again.

last movie you went to see?
Umm…. Ummmm… uhhh… I think it may have been Harry Potter, and not even the most recent Harry Potter – the one before that. I went with my nephew and sister-in-law at Thanksgiving. Like… three years ago. We don’t go to a lot of movies. We RENT a ton of them, just don’t go to the theatre.

I must say I was very very tempted to go to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory this weekend, though. I’m dying to see that. I loved the original movie, I REALLY loved the book (way better than the first movie), I love Tim Burton, and have never seen a Johnny Depp movie I didn’t like. So, I’m eager to see this one.

were you a thumb sucker?
I was. I still remember trying to hide my habit from my mother since she tried hard to get me to quit. Oddly, I apparently announced that I would quit sucking my thumb when I turned four, and my mother is still under the impression that I really did. I didn’t.

Well, that was sudden. Back to work.