War of The Worlds

3/20/14

Some time between fourth grade (when I started listening to the hometown's AM station during a snowstorm that canceled school for a week and let me clean my room thoroughly for the first time and read Robin Hood) and sixth or seventh grade, the local FM station played Orson Welles' "The War of the Worlds" radio play on Halloween.

Like, it was long enough ago that I taped it with a blank cassette tape in my clock radio that also had a cassette player. (I was so excited that I could set it to start playing when my alarm went off; I used the first track on my Lion King soundtrack cassette tape. It and my Space Jam tape were my first tapes.)

Anyway, I turned off the lights and wrapped myself in a blanket and listened to the radio play. After the intermission, the play starts out with the narrator asking if anyone's there. There's no background noise, no music, nothing that seems like the flurry of activity from the news reports prior to the intermission (during the active invasion). In fact, the narrator is utterly alone. I remembered wondering how being alone like that would feel, whether or not the narrator was actually alone (he wasn't; he meets some other man, who gets all suspicious and runs away).

I know how that feels now.

Getting Caught Up

9/26/13

Wow, it's almost October. Which, here in Michigan, is going to end up being Octobrrrr. The leaves are already changing and I think that's thrown me off a bit because I'm still mentally in Tennessee, when it comes to seasons at least.

My favorite class so far is my programming class. I am learning how to code in Python.

Today for a class project (for a different class), I got to see the Papyrology Collection, which includes wooden mummy tags, various ostraka--and the oldest manuscript of a good portion of Paul's letters. I saw part of the book of Romans--11:36 to about 12:something--written in Greek on papyrus. It was ridiculously awesome. (We were actually ostensibly doing an environmental check because that's our assignment, but the place has such filtered air that the reading room actually smelled weird.)

I've been learning the bus system (since I want to know how it works before it's freezing and snowy outside), but when I walk the twenty minutes to campus, I try to take different paths so I can learn the city better. (I think I already know it better than I do Michigan City or Chattanooga, but that's partially because I haven't really lived in Michigan City for years and Southern wasn't a twenty-minute walk from downtown Chattanooga.) Today I was walking a new route to my job at the stacks office when someone behind me spotted my SI bag and decided to give me her contact information because she's an SI grad and knows that we're supposed to network. So that was cool.

Biggest problem so far is that I've been a bit lonely, despite making friends. I miss my jeesh, my fellowship. (You guys know who you are.) Yeah, I'm learning how to keep track of my finances, use coupons and read the grocery ads (though I haven't bought a Sunday paper yet), got Netflix (to watch Doctor Who), navigate the bus system and what not. Yeah, I'm driving to Detroit for a class project and will have to fill out a reimbursement form for the gas money. Yeah, the guy in the apartment next door sometimes walks around without a shirt on (of course I noticed). And there's a guy I only talk with on Wednesday mornings because we share the bus stop for five minutes before the bus arrives. And, yeah, I go to church, but I see them once a week. But overall, no real deep connections anywhere.

So sometimes I wish I had my friends here to discover it all with me. I wish I had Castle nights (I'm still about four episodes behind) and chances to play the character Gwen. Time to go to sleep.

Rain

9-2-11

Rain. I love how it sounds when it patters against the roof and windows, how the thunder rolls and the lightning flashes, how the dry, cracked earth soaks up what it has badly needed.

I went out to my truck to make sure that the duct-tape window was keeping the rain off my back seat. (So far, so good.)

I went barefoot, with the wet new smooth sidewalk underfoot. The wind pushed the rain around a bit, but nothing too bad. I laughed, though I'm not entirely sure why. I walked slowly, though I'm not entirely sure why.

I thought about getting caught in rainstorms at camp or on Ebeye, about looking forward to rain. I wondered how Elijah felt when that very first drop hit the ground after three years of drought. What would it be like if we looked for blessings the same way we look for rain?

More later.

--Ashlee