Wednesday, 1/12/05 - 22:05
Lately I've been sitting on the couch next to the Christmas tree listening to the rain and watching myself construct the cozy nuclear household. As you can imagine, it's getting its snugginess in contrast with the cold damp outside. But I remember all the walking I did in the rain in Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin, when the rain wasn't so much something that I avoided, and so my reaction right now feels contrived to me. This disposition toward coziness undergirds those suburban values that drive me nuts. Nevertheless, sitting inside feels pleasant in such a visceral way that I'm enjoying it anyway. Only some stupid liberal intellectual would conceive of a way to feel guilty about feeling cozy, right? If I want to feel guilty about enjoying the rain, maybe I should just look at the poor people who died in the mudslide down the coast in La Conchita. I'm guessing they felt cozy, too, in their little nuclear houses built to be islands that the rest of the world couldn't touch.
I think I still like to walk in the rain with my head up, but everywhere I want to walk I know there are patches of up-to-your-ankles mud, so I mostly stay in. On the way back and forth from the car, I've taught Ted a mish-mosh of rain songs from Sesame Street -- "Ducks like rain!" and "Every living thing needs Water!" -- since these are the only happy rain songs I know, besides the song from Bambi. Ted didn't remember them because apparently he had no call to sing them regularly in LA growing up.
Where we live is mostly flat and we have new tires on both our vehicles, so the roads are fine. But it's disconcerting to watch our little city get cut off from the cities up and down the coast. Mudslides mean it takes over 5 hours to get to Ventura, which I'd normally tell you is 45 minutes away. Classmates who were caught in LA had to fly back. Some of the long distance phone lines were out earlier today (Monday), and Ted couldn't call out. Hadn't realized how much our bit of the Californian Riviera is shaped like an island. Unlike our apartment, that seems very un-cozy, because even if I'm starting to think of myself as Californian, I'm still not convinced that SB is anywhere you'd want to be.
I felt my first quake last May. It happened at 1:57 AM, so Ted and I were both asleep, but Ted woke up right away. Then he shook me awake to tell me that there was an earthquake, and sure enough the bed shook for a couple moments. But a bed is something that shakes regularly in the natural course of things, so it wasn't too dramatic. Just felt like there was someone else on the bed jumping in the dark, except that would've been creepier than the actual quake. It didn't even knock anything over -- it just rattled the glasses. That's because we live on the first floor. Some of our friends who live on the third floor said some of their papers and postcards were knocked over. The only frightening thing was that we didn't know where the epicenter was right away, so we didn't know if we were feeling part of a much bigger quake home in LA. But as it turned out, my uncle Butch and my mom found out about the earthquake the same day, and Ted's family in Los Angeles didn't know anything about it until we told them.
Long live Diaryland!
The five most recent entries:
More Naval Gazing - Saturday, 8/13/05
Anniversary Diving - Friday, 8/12/05
Academic Tip of the Week - Tuesday, May. 17, 2005
How to tell a Midwesterner - Sunday, 4/24/05
Academic Feelings - Thursday, 4/21/05
Ted's most recent entry:
Monday, May 12