2011.01.11
140 Days Remaining

01. So, this will be brief, but there are a few interesting things that took place today, and I wanted to jot them down before going to bed.

02. I haven't been sleeping well the past week or so; I'm unable to fall asleep until very, very late, and then have a proportionately later waking time. This is very likely at least in part due to being somewhat depressed, but it also is simply part of a vicious cycle. Last night I moved to break the cycle by going to bed at 1030pm. I was awake until about midnight, but I woke up at 8am feeling rested and ready to go. So of course I stayed in bed a bit longer, enjoying the feeling of being up, and that's when I heard the explosion.

03. A transformer blew out, cutting electric power to a significant portion of New Aldwych, and effectively derailing my day, as I couldn't do much of anything (including get a shower with hot water). I spent the day reading some photocopied essays, I began reading a book given to me by Romulus and Iuno for Christmas, and slowly began to freeze. Around 145pm this afternoon I decided to take a walk to remind my body what cold actually felt like, and thereby maybe make the potentially unheated indoor night less traumatic. So I walked all the way out and to a park on the other side of the inlet that borders the ocean beach park I walk to in the morning sometimes. It felt like a significantly longer walk than to the ocean beach park, and eventually I got to the shore (again, on the other side of the inlet). Two swans were swimming near the beach, and the ocean was full of color (blues, greens, and purples as the waves rushed in), which surprised me given how cloudy the day was.

04. While walking back through the park, I ran into a woman with a very shy but friendly dog named Buddy. I held out my hand for him to sniff, and she said he's very shy, but after smelling me a bit I moved to pet him and he shied away (to my dismay, I think it was an outstretched hand coming down at him, which makes me think he'd been beaten - his current owner found him abandoned and took him in, but he'd been damaged before). She advised that I let him sniff my knees, and he did, after which he let me pet him. He seemed very sweet, and it breaks my heart that he was hurt before, and I'm very glad that someone found him who takes good care of him.

05. One of the essays I read today was by an anthropologist at Columbia University named Michael Taussig, who is brilliant and maybe a little crazy (he's Australian by upbringing, and that may explain some of it - I've heard him described as a gonzo anthropologist). The essay, as is typical for him, was extremely good, it's about the fact that in North and South American Native societies, the ritual experts (shamans, curers, priests, etc.) would often (and in many cases still) engage in a very interesting sort of cat-and-mouse game with each other and their clientele over whether or not their rituals (and the demonstrated effects) were "tricks" or "real." I'm not doing any of this justice, but the essay is brilliant, both for showing how skepticism and belief are not either/or states of mind but are always sort of tugging at each other, and for leaving open the problem of how or whether these rituals work (something that I think is vexed and not nearly as settled as many people would like it to be).

06. The power came back on around 545pm, and there was much rejoicing. After logging on to my computer and reading my email, I checked the weather and discovered that the forecast was simply, "Blizzard" for tonight and all day tomorrow. They're calling for up to 16 inches of snow to fall, Baskerville College closed preemptively, and the city began sending trucks around warning everyone not to park on the street so that the plows can clear things off. No snow just yet, but it seems to be coming.

07. And that's about it.