the hypothetical wren

It seems appropriate for Halloween that I have become Google’s number one hit for “creepy music”. I didn’t really do much to earn this honor, but I guess I will accept it.

I didn’t really do much for Halloween this year. I never really do, since I think that if one were going to dress up in costume, it would have a lot more impact if you did it sometime in March. Coming to work (or in my case, school) dressed as a rodent or as a enormous butternut squash would be more memorable in the spring than on the day on which everyone expects you to dress oddly. I’m not saying that I’m planning on doing this come next year, or that I would be dressing up as a squash, but it’s an idea I have every once in a while. I was invited to a party last night, but didn’t go, since it was held at a house way over in Rio Rancho, a good 20-30 minute drive from me, and because I was extrememly tired, having had a pretty full day up to that point.

My dad was in town, and we spent Saturday kind of driving around. He wanted to go to Santa Fe, since he’d never been before, and, believe me, this is not the sort of request he’d usually make. SF is the last place I ever imagined my dad wanting to go. But we did go, and walked around the plaza for a while. It didn’t take long for us to get tired of being there — there were a lot of people down there, despite the fact that it was cold, because Bill Clinton was in town for a rally. Rather than waiting around and getting smooshed in the crowd, we decided to leave. My dad remarked after we’d walked around for a while that all the stores down there look alike: there was a lot of redundancy built into the Santa Fe retail sector. He was pretty excited about the mineral and fossil gallery, even though it stank of incense.

We then drove up to Los Alamos, visited Bandolier National Monument, and then drove home through the Jemez Mountains. I hadn’t been up there before, since I really haven’t had the opportunity to see non-ABQ and non-Roswell parts of New Mexico since I moved here. The leaves were still changing, and there was a bit of snow on the ground. The most interesting thing at Bandolier (to me) were the Civilian Conservation Corps-built buildings, signate and other infrastructure, rather than the ruins, which ties into my longtime interest New Deal recovery programs. They had a little CCC exhibit in the visitors center, which had some interesting items (a CCC uniform, the diary of someone who worked at Bandolier, etc.). I learned that in order to join the CCC, a young man had to have at least three natural, functioning teeth. The fact that this was an explicit criterion implies that there was probably a real problem with keeping teeth in 1933, probably due to malnourishment, poor hygiene, and a lack of advances in dentistry. I love the bookstores at parks and museums: they always have odd books you don’t often see in other places. I bought one book, Tree Army: A Pictorial History of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which has many interesting photos and reproductions of CCC newsletters and other paraphernalia. My dad spent most of his time taking pictures of rocks.

Today has been pretty mellow. Dad and I had breakfast at the Flying Star before he headed back to Colorado, and then I went thrift shopping, where I found a great 1960s green-and-brown-paisley coat. I had to fix the hem and trim the lining (it had stretched out, making it longer than the hem of the coat), but other than that, it was in good shape. It has a green velvet collar, and is by far the best vintage coat I’ve seen in a long time. I was really surprised it fit me, since vintage clothing in my size is rare. I also bought some shoes (not at the thrift store, though). The rest of my day, and probably the rest of the week, has been devoted to reading a big, imposing book: Nature’s Metropolis, which I have to write a review of for my environmental history class. I’m only seven pages into it, which is sort of depressing. I’ve owned it for a while, and it’s been sitting there on my shelf, glaring at me for not reading it, so I figured that it was time, since I had to pick a book to review. It is considered a very important, original book, which is undoubtedly is, but right now, the one thing I have to say about it is that it weighs more than my computer. This seems wrong.

It is much too dark outside for 6 p.m. I hate standard time.

Why am I getting so much spam as of late about watches? Every day, there’s several messages, offering me the chance to own or win or steal some super-swell timepiece. Watches are neither rare or hard to obtain, so I don’t understand why this is such a big spammer concern

Of course, maybe they know somehow that I don’t actually own a watch. I tell time with my cell phone, or with the clock function on my iPod, or I free-ride off clocks in offices and stores. Perhaps there is somewhere, unknown to most, there is a registry of the watch-less, and my name got on it somehow.

Speaking of, someone asked me today what time it was, and I whipped out the ‘Pod to show her. “You keep the clock on yours updated?” she asked me. (Note: they have a tendency to get out of sync with what the real time is, meaning that my reliance on it to tell me whether I’m late to class or not in the morning may not be the best idea.) I pointed out that I had to, due to my watchlessness.

Just because it’s October doesn’t mean that frozen desserts are out of season. I’ve been enjoying quite a bit of gelato and sorbetto this week. I bought the chocolate hazelnut gelato at La Montañita earlier this week, and finished that off pretty quickly, and I’m here to report that the blackberry-cabernet sorbetto (available at Whole Foods) is equally as good. I was afraid that it would taste more like cabernet than blackberry, but it doesn’t: the two flavors seem pretty balanced. I wish that I could find the blood-orange flavor. I had a scoop of it at the Ciao Bella stand at the Ferry Building in San Francisco earlier this year, and it was very tasty.

I tried to to vote today. The line was very long at the location I went to (on Wyoming, near Central). I went too late, unfortunately, and would probably have not been able to get in before the polls close. I’ll try again this morning.

I hate to say it, but I’m having a hard time getting worked up about most of the people and/or things I’m going to be voting on here in New Mexico. I’ve read up on what I’m being asked to vote on, and have (or will) made decisions that I think are the best, but, since I’ve only lived here a short time, I still feel a bit detached from the issues and candidates. I can easily get worked up into fits of disgust over Colorado politics, since I’ve lived there for nearly forever (with a few interludes in other states), and feel like I have a personal stake in how things go there, even when I don’t live there. I’m moving back someday, hopefully, so I just hope that people don’t fuck things up while I’m gone.

I am a doofus. The book that the library sent me an email about is not one that I already have, but, rather, one that I recalled from someone else. I only figured this out, of course, after extensively searching both my apartment and my office for it, and then looking it up on the library web site to find out that it wasn’t actually checked out to anyone: it was waiting on the hold shelf for me.

I am eating a nutritious lunch of veggie corn dogs and Greek yogurt with honey and granola. I have three bags of clothes to take to the laundromat to wash, the consequence of not being able to get into my laundry room for three weeks. I have a lot of do today, but I just want to waste time on the Internet and nap.

Someone recalled a book that I am supposed to have, and I can’t find it anywhere. The title doesn’t seem familiar, so if it weren’t for this recall notice, I would have no idea that this book had been checked out to me. It’s on travel, so I suppose it is mine, but I have so many of them that they all seem to run in to each other.

I gave my presentation, and it went well. I managed to babble, rather incoherently at times (at least in my mind, where I had pictured myself saying things in a much more suave manner) for 15 minutes and answer questions, which, luckily, weren’t too difficult. Now I just have to write the dang thing, and continue to harvest all of the primary sources I can find. I checked out a bunch of Senate and House committee proceedings today, many of which look like they haven’t left the library since they first showed up. None of these were in the library’s online catalog, so each had to be given a barcode and entered into the system at the checkout counter, which made the people behind me in line really happy, I can tell you. It’s interesting, because these are the sorts of things that I’ve been looking for in the library from the start of this project. I thought the library didn’t have them, but then I actually got down in the government-documents section and looked, and there they were. They had never been entered into the system.

However, these documents are just about the most boring reading I’ve ever encountered.