the hypothetical wren

I have been in such a bad mood all day. I’m tired of the wind around here — all other weather I can handle, but high winds are the worst. Wind makes my ears hurt and my teeth grit, and I feel like I’ve been involuntarily exfoliated via a mere walk to the mailbox and back. It’s not just the wind and the cool temperatures and the sky that doesn’t know if it wants to be blue or gray, though — there are lots of other reasons to be pissed off out there:

• The hosting service that hosts this domain and others I have has been having a major email meltdown, so I haven’t been able to get email for a while. Although this problem has been reported by many people on their customer discussion forum, it isn’t showing up on their emergency status page, nor on their list of reported issues. This service, which shall remain nameless, used to be pretty good when I became a customer six years ago, but they’ve been having serious speed and email issues over the last few months, which even I find irritating.
• I began grading papers this afternoon, and the first paper on the pile was very obviously plagiarized. Thank you, Google and JSTOR for making it easier to catch people doing this.
• I found a photocopied article in one of the UNM library’s vertical files (collections of newspaper and magazine clippings on various topics) that would be really useful for the paper I am currently writing, but it did not include either the publication name or the date it was published. This is going to make it especially hard to cite.
• I had a huge barometric-pressure headache this afternoon, and one of my officemates kept talking to me, even after I told him my head hurt and I was trying to be quiet.
• I found, when I checked my mail, that I somehow, mysteriously, began receiving The Mother Earth News. I don’t know why, but there it was, and I’m set for issues until next spring. [1] Reading through it was very irritating. I’m all for saving energy and recycling materials and making your own things, but the prevalence of the rural, back-to-the-land ideal in its pages set my teeth on edge. It’s like you can’t be an environmentalist if you live in a city and rent an apartment; to really love Mother Nature, you need to go buy a big pristine chunk of it upon which to build a house. All of the solar-heating systems and composting toilets can’t hide the fact that there’s something fairly contradictory about that (admittedly simplified) idea. I was also irritated by one writer, who kept going on about the pleasures of the country life, since her byline indicated that she lived in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, which is so not the country. It is, as many of you know, I guess, a huge suburb south of Denver which is full of giant houses and gated communities — country, my ass.
• I am tense about the paper I am writing. I will never get all of this research done, even though I don’t really need that much to complete the paper. I’m just being a bit Type A this semester.

I left the neighborhood for once last Friday, so I could go to Trader Joe’s to buy more coffee, cheap frozen enchiladas, and the three-layer hummus that always defeats me. I also went to Borders, but so little happened there that I can’t even make any sort of observation about the time spend within its walls. While I was driving up Wyoming, though, I saw this sign. I like how none of the four little signs below the large sign seem to match. The top two are the same colors, but it doesn’t seem like the same person did the lettering. The “Wines” sign is completely off, and the “Ice” is a different color scheme entirely. This is an unusual shot for me, since it was taken in my car, and not while I was on foot.

[1] I suspect I know why I got this — some years ago, I signed up for this service that sent free periodicals to editing and writing professionals (which I was at the time) because I wanted a subscription to Saveur they were offering. Then they also began sending me copies of the randomest magazines: Prevention, Motor Trend, Essence, things like that. Since I have a bad tendency to read everything that comes into my house (except for the piles of library books laying about), I actually read most of these, before taking them to the GJ library’s magazine exchange. Now, I have no magazine exchange, so I’m trying to think of who I can pawn off this new arrival to.

A landscape of cake pieces, left after a function in the SUB one evening last week. UNM food services had made a real effort to put the evening’s food out attractively — dip on one level, tiny beef burritos on another. It worked the best with the cake, though. There was cake up here, and cake down there, which is why it seemed more like a cake landscape than a simple display.

My review of this cake: sugary but tasty frosting, and the vanilla and coffee-swirl cake itself was pretty good. The piece I kept in my office fridge until this afternoon didn’t taste that great, though. Few cakes are meant to last — you should enjoy it as soon as you possibly can.

Sometimes a Photo of the Day is just that: that only photo I took that day, for various reasons. There have been examples of this throughout this entire project, and here, I submit another entry in this category. After this, I started having problems getting the lens to retract back into my camera — something that is sort of a problem. Nevertheless, here you see an empty package, once full of Tropical Passion-flavored mini cigars. That’s an idea that really stimulates the palate. This wasn’t here the day before, so someone had a fun Tuesday evening, exhaling some coconut-and-mango-scented smoke and perhaps thinking about the woman on the package.

Last week, I met the Scrap Metal Guy who rummages through the dumpster behind my apartment. If you have an alley behind your apartment, house, or other domicile, I’m sure you, too, have a Scrap Metal Guy or other regular trash scavenger who makes the rounds. I went to take my trash out the other day, and there he was, with his bucket and his long pole, poking through the trash looking for hidden treasure. I’ve seen this guy tons of times before, but had never actually encountered him in action.

He greeted me, and asked me if there was any metal, broken jewelry, broken electronics or other “unknown valuables” in my tiny bag of trash. There was not. (Coffee grounds and banana peels, yes.) He showed me a gold or gold-tone chain he had fished out of someone’s garbage, wedged between the junk mail and the discarded packaging. “That’s real valuable, right there,” he said. “Someone just didn’t want to fix the thing, so they threw it away. Gonna be worth a lot at the scrap metal place.” Then he went on about some of the other things he’s found in the trash: dollar bills, rings, photos, and lots and lots of aluminum. “Copper, though, that’s the real gold mine. Don’t ever throw away copper, because you can get a lot for it.” I said I wouldn’t.

The encounter reminded me of this book I read last year, titled Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging, written by a criminology professor who quit his tenure-track job (I can just feel all the grad students and other academics out there wincing at this statement) and lived off of what he could find in the trash for a while. I recommend it, quite a bit, if only so you can marvel at the kinds of things people just throw away — unopened packages, books, brand-new electronics, etc. — as well as the resourcefulness of those who manage to turn other people’s trash into money or some other form of living. This books surprised me because I hate to throw things away. I don’t mind getting rid of things, of course, so it’s not driven by sentimental reasons or other attachments. I just don’t like to throw things away if I think someone else could use them. I’d rather put useful things beside the dumpster so someone could take it, which usually happens (often within a matter of minutes). Magazines are the worst, actually. I don’t want to throw them away, since that seems wasteful, and since there’s not a magazine exchange nearby (a place where you can take old, unwanted magazines, and then pick up ones others have left behind — in GJ, there’s one at the public library), I usually end up foisting them on M. or leaving a pile of them in the department office. Anyone know of a good place to take magazines in ABQ?

Scrap Metal Guy wasn’t there the morning I took this, though. It’s not every day that you see a Smith’s cart in a dumpster on your way to work. This is about the way I feel about Smith’s, too, but I don’t think you could get much for this cart.

I mentioned the art at Ortega Hall in an earlier entry. Here is the newest addition: stencil graffiti near the stairs. I’m glad I won’t be catching salmonella from this grey concrete wall…