As a new owner of a kindle, I eagerly biked into Spencer* yesterday and downloaded my first four books:
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Tess of the D’urbervilles (Hardy);
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White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Easterly);
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The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy; and
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Dead in the Family – A Sookie Stackhouse Novel (Harris).
Oops. One guess as to which book I’ve already finished.
*Because one of the things my parents’ house has in common with where I’ll be working is lack of a 3G network.
These are the concerns that have appeared in my addled brain since finding out I’m spending next year in Burundi. I should add that the primary emotions are firstly gratitude and secondly excitement but it’s really more fun to explore the multitude of ways in which my mind has freaked out, in roughly chronological order:
1) That it was all a mistake, and would shortly be revoked.
2) Death, dismemberment, disease.
3) That elections would go badly and I wouldn’t be able to go for security reasons.
4) Being so bad at my job that they send me home.
5) Tearing my ACL playing frisbee and not being able to go.
It’s comforting to see that most of these actually have to do with NOT actually going to Burundi, although maybe I’m cheating with the consolidation on number 2.
In descending order, here is how much I like the various parts of sushi:
1. Pickled Ginger
2. Wasabi
3. Seaweed
4. Vegetables, fruit and/or avacado
5. Rice
6. Soy sauce
7. Fish
Reading Science magazine on the commuter rail, I discover that the sun was probably not born an only child, as once believed, but rather one of a cluster of stars that has since dispersed. I pause to consider the universe and am caught by a sudden and overwhelming sadness, sitting helpless as I am while planets and galaxies fly from me at incomprehensible speeds. Because I have also read about climate change on this trip, and the DR Congo, I understand why the universe flees us. Still, I feel its departure is premature, like fans who leave the arena when a comeback is still possible.
Filed under: wtf brain?
So, this weekend has been a doozy for dreaming. Between Friday and Saturday night, these are the things my brain has churned up:
- My nephew ran away – the nephew who to my knowledge still cannot roll over or hold up his own head.
- While standing in the aisle on a moving plane, three of my teeth suddenly broke and fell out.
- I was swimming in a race while my family watched, when the water formed a sticky sheet that covered my nose and mouth, which I could not remove and no one else could see. The last part of this sequence I remember is the feeling of choking and everything going black.
- Two of my roommates got into a nasty fight with each other in front of me.
- I was informed that one of my dear friends in another city had been hit by a bus. He wasn’t killed, but was in an unspecified critical condition.
- I decided, while drunk, to steal a car from Boston’s South End and drive home to JP. However, I got lost, and ended up at the I-90 on ramp, and decided that pulling over next to a cop car, while still drunk, in a stolen vehicle, was preferable to getting on 90 and having to drive all four miles to Brighton before I could get off (plus, the $1.25 toll!). Needless to say, the cop in my dream gave me a breathalizer immediately, with no small amount of joy.
So, yeah. Saturday wasn’t so bad, since I awoke from the last bit to discover that, not only were my roommates not fighting, they were enjoying coffee and fresh scones in the kitchen. Sunday morning, though, I woke up at 3AM, still on edge from the dream, and suddenly aware of creepy sounds that were either someone in the leaves outside my window, or my gurgling stomach. Considerably less fun.
