Audrizzle

So, I'm writing this from the plane. I am 36,000 feet above the planet earth, and since I don't have internet access, I can't distract myself with anything.

Well, technically I could distract myself with plenty of things, but right now I'm choosing not to.

Anyway.
I haven't posted in a long time which is terrible.

Not really terrible for anyone who reads this website, if anyone reads this website. But terrible for me, just because I hate it when I go for long periods without writing.

Today I got very angry at a man on the bus to the plane… he asked me to move my backpack, and I just got so angry because there are certain times when you have to sacrifice your personal space so that the group as a whole may move forward.

The subway, for example. I could never understand how anyone who is very particular about having a "personal space bubble" could live in New York City. Whenever I was waiting for a train with a crowd of people and one came, a lot of people would get on, but then some other people would rather wait around until the next train than squeeze into the last spots available. So, being the efficient person that I am, I would always move past and squeeze in before the doors shut. If you want personal space, you don't live in NYC.

Somehow, in the rows in front of me, directly to my right, and behind me are infants.

The one right next to me just threw up all over his mom. I feel kind of bad for her, it must be really embarrassing. But at the same time it could be much worse. The kid in front of them was banging on the seat for a really long time earlier and the parents didn't do anything about it, and that also made me very angry.

I guess I always thought people found their own kids much more annoying than other people found them to be, which is why strangers ooh and aah over how cute babies are. I guess you get used to the cuteness, just like you get used to the annoyance. So even though it's completely rude and disrespectful to the dozens of people around you, you just don't care, you just let the kid scream or hit his toys against chairs or spit up on strangers. Because you certainly can't be expected to bother to take responsibility for yourself and what is essentially your creation.

I just feel sorry for the woman next to me. She's changing her baby's onesie now, because the green one with the dinosaur on it had vomit all over it.
Luckily I didn't smell any of it.

Now the baby is looking at me and saying Daddy and smiling laughing and reaching out his hand toward me. I guess that's the main reason I feel so sorry for his mom, because she's alone, no dad, no aunt, and my god - she's soaked in his vomit. I am amazed a baby could even hold that much liquid.

I don't mind this baby. The one in the row ahead of me is being quiet now, but both his parents are drinking alcohol. I wonder if you are allowed to bring a 3-oz container of booze onto the plane with you (provided that it is in a 1-quart plastic zip bag).

Captain says we're at 37,000 feet now.
It's kind of funny because his announcement keeps getting interrupted by other people radio-ing in. You'd think they'd plan ahead so that doesn't happen. Kind of looks unprofessional.

Also, I apologize right now for any and all grammatical errors in this document. I am being lazy, and it's very hard to move here. It is also impossible to google English rules.

So, what's going on in my life?

Oh. Well, I'm on a plane. I'm coming back from Key West, where I spent Christmas. Christmas was OK,
(the flight attendant - or maybe I should call her the flighty attendant - just gave the dad of the loud kid a free margarita. Not cool.)
for some reason my first instinct when I got there was to clean & organize my mom's entertainment center. I also made her up a nice little list of instructions for how to use it - which remote to use, which buttons to press, how to play Wii and listen to the stereo at the same time.

It's kind of funny that my mom can't figure this stuff out. I always figured that I got my "good at hooking up electronics" gene from her father, who owned a TV sale & repair business. I guess sometimes these things skip a generation.

I also think it's kind of funny how good I am at working with my hands and doing "labor" type things, I guess because everyone has always considered me so cerebral. If you grow up hearing over and over how smart you are it kind of gets ingrained in you and you end up believing (or at least I did) that intelligence is the only thing that matters and why should you need to know how to do anything physical, you're so smart you'll be a zillionaire and paying people to do things like clean out lint traps or rake leaves or carry boxes for you. Never work with your hands.

But I still have to admit, I do love manual labor. Mostly what I love is that I can get into it, I can focus on it and not think, or my mind can wander and do whatever. But it's straightforward, repetitive, and you can see a visible effect or outcome when it's complete. You can see the hole you dug, and think about how they can't teach how to dig a hole at college.

Maybe they can.

It's just that more and more, I think college is overrated. So much of college is learning things out of books, which is ridiculous. Why pay thousands of dollars to have the "privilege" to pay thousands more for books you could find at a library for free? I mean, I understand the desire to discuss literature with someone, but when I went to Webster, the majority of the students either didn't read the books assigned, didn't read them on time, or didn't want to talk about them.

It's amazing, but looking back, my experience in college classrooms was a very isolated one.

Oh. Here's something I wanted to bring up.

I finished reading The Magus at the airport.
It's one of those books I enjoyed so much while I was reading it that I stopped for a while to prolong the moment when it would have to come to an end.

The last time I did this was with The Idiot, which I finished about 5 years after I started it. I think that's because I was reading the David Magarshack translation, the new one by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is a lot easier to get through… yet I still think it loses some of the cute little oddities the language held before.

It's so interesting to think about translation. There are double meanings, alliteration, so much fun that just isn't translatable. And then you wonder whether you should translate to a sentence that is 100 % accurate in meaning, or one that sounds as artful in your language as it does in the original. Very difficult. I can spend hours trying to work one sentence, I imagine it would take ages to do a full book.

Anyway.
The Magus was great. Great isn't really even a good enough word to describe it. I want to say "magical" but that's not it. Intoxicating, in some ways, I suppose… but mere intoxication is such a bland, colorless state compared to the sensations this book arouses in the reader!

I almost don't want to talk this book up too much. Not many people have read it.
At first, I told everyone to read it. Everyone. But now I like it as my secret, as my treasure, it's not a sluttish piece of writing that everybody knows inside and out. It's special to me.

Of course I want to read it again, immediately.

I also want to give up the internet. Maybe I should only allow myself certain times of day to use it.

I guess I'd have to be careful with my phone then.

I think the concern is that we've become such a society of instant gratification gluttons. What was that movie with that guy? I have to know now.

It's really interesting to think about wanting to know something for more than an hour or two… how did people learn anything before the internet? How were they satisfied without being able to find out whatever they wanted whenever they wanted?

It's infuriating, really. When I was at Angelus House there was no internet. There was a large collection of reference books, however (many of which were mine) and trying to glean a specific piece of information from a book is very fun, in a way, especially if you are used to using the internet.

I think it would be a neat experiment for me to one day, instead of looking up words in the dictionary or googling this statistic or that, I want to just write down every single question that comes into my mind, then look them all up at the end of the day. I'll do that tomorrow.

I'll need to carry my big notebook around with me, probably.

I should start a chapter in it called "Internet Withdrawal".

There will be so many things I think I "can't do" without internet access. Can't contact my friends, can't write, can't do artwork, can't think about the bank, etc.

Who knows.

Anyway, it's 9:52 PM on Sunday, 12/27/2009.

The seatbelt sign is on and the babies are being quiet. I am exhausted and I hope the plane lands soon. This is going to be it for now.

Oh, one more thing….
on my personal/mental state.

Had been doing really quite well for a while except for occasional bouts of indorsiness, but the last couple weeks have brought on serious empathy attacks.
I have also been more loving and helpful, which is weird.

I think it's so funny that they make such a big deal about adults wearing seatbelts on the airplane but the kids just jump up and down on their laps. Incredible.

Plus. It seems like I see a lot more kids on planes these days than I used to.

I wonder when the captain is going to tell me to turn off my portable electronic device. I think it is very funny the way they are called "portable electronic devices"… like anyone could really bring a non-portable electronic device on an airplane. "Whaddaya mean I can't set up my surround sound? I bought all the seats in first class so I could! Do you know how much these speakers cost me?"


Sigh. We're descending, surely. I imagine what I see to my left is Chattanooga, that would make perfect sense. Planes go about 200 miles an hour, right? And we're about half an hour away, and the Chatty is about 100 miles away, right?

Oh boy, here it comes… I don't know why I don't just put away my damn laptop. It's not like I'm being extra creative or clever. This post is surely quantity over quality; please forgive me.

If we are flying over Chattanooga, though, has it always been this big, and where is Lookout Mountain?

I've got to say. Maybe it's just because it's the holiday season, but I think flying with Tennessee passengers is a lot less pleasant than flying with … well, I don't know. I just get the feeling the people on this plane don't travel a lot and so they want to make the most of it - get all the drinks, start all the conversations, ask all the questions, use all the lavatories, stand in all the ways they can.

It kind of sucks that I won't be flying over Knoxville. The airport here is about 10 miles south or so of the city, and since we're coming up from the south I won't be able to see the city lights at all. I bet Knoxville is bigger than Chattanooga, but if this is Chattanooga on my left, Chattanooga is a lot bigger than I thought it was.

Oh, suburban sprawl! I like the suburban sprawl in Knoxville because it seems like Farragut, Oak Ridge, Maryville, etc. are all spaced out enough that you're not expected to roam through all of east Tennessee. Boy, I was not fond of Connecticut, where all my friends lived a half hour away - in different directions.

I want to see the movie of The Magus but I can't imagine it could possibly be any good. So much of the book is internal monologue.

The drunk people's child is being really annoying. I didn't mean to, but I gave the dad a look and they tried to quiet their child a bit. Basically he is still making all the noises he was before, but now he is sitting down on his mother's lap instead of standing with his hands on the back of her chair.

What else is going on in my life…

I play Wii a lot. Dave has made me clean the apartment. I have good ideas occasionally but I don't always write them down. I haven't been going out or spending money as much.

The child in the row behind me has now started shrieking, the one in front of me is repeating "Ayyy yii yii yii yaaa…" over and over. The one that threw up earlier is somehow sleeping through all of this.

I think the weirdest experience ever on a plan was once when there was a screaming child in the row behind me, and I couldn't see it, but then after a while the screaming sounded really muffled, like they were smothering the baby or something. And then it stopped. I mean, I'm sure they didn't kill or drug their baby right there on the plane, but still… just one of those very eerie situations.

I cannot get over how rude the people in front of me are.

Money is still a major issue, of course. I'm knitting quite a bit since it is winter. I made a hat and I look like a mushroom head when I wear it. So i am going to make another hat, where I will look like an alien instead.

I need to stop at Walgreens on the way home. Also an ATM.

Also, here's something I don't know very much about: When you want to buy a gun there's some kind of waiting period, where they check up and make sure you're not a confirmed homicidal maniac or whatever, but if you buy a gun at a gun show they waive the waiting period.

How does that make any sense? I mean, do the gun sellers check up on the people they sold guns to once the gun show is over? Or do they just not take any identification at all?

Again, you'd think that by now the whole system would be digital, but this country is just too big for that.

"Ayy yiii yiii yaaa".

Now I can't see anything. Clouds, I guess. I wonder why they put the seatbelt sign on 20 minutes ago, don't they usually only do it right before they're about to land? I guess I don't know.

Well, NOW it's time to prepare for landing. 10:16. Going to put up my laptop and hope that I don't have to wait too long at the baggage claim.

SEEYAZ

Labels: books, children, emotions, hateful people, knoxville, language, rambling, reading, the internet, translation, travel, writing

OK, so I saw this posted on Tumblr and had to share it. Because it made me laugh like there's no tomorrow.

It will take you a while to read it but it will be worth it. Trust me.

This is just one page of the magic. Click it to see the full beauty.



I just cannot believe this person actually got a passing grade.
The teacher must be retarded. Plus, mixing up "to" with "too" ("Page is to big") ... yeah, that teacher is definitely retarded.

I wish I had tried to pull some shit like that while I was in school.

Sigh.

Labels: essay, funny, school, tumblr, writing