Eggbert and The Styrostinkers!

A week ago the unthinkable happened: I turned on my computer to find that the screen was black as pitch. Then a little, blue square appeared and in it were the words “no signal detected!” With an exclamation mark, as if this failure to detect a signal was very especially panic-inducing. I tried turning the machine off and then on again. And off and on. And off and on. Off. On.

“No signal detected!”

Something was very wrong, so I made a decision. I would call customer service. Even though that meant making a long-distance phone call with my cell phone, something which most students on a budget tighter than Boy George’s pants in the 80s, would be reluctant to do.

Two minutes later, there I was, sitting on the kitchen chair, staring at my blackened monitor and listening to Shakira sing how fortunate it is that her boobs are tiny so that they’re not mistaken for mountains, occasionally interrupted by a man’s voice saying: “thank you for holding. You will be serviced soon.”

I had a friend once who claimed to have dumped her boyfriend for saying that.

While we waited, Bergerac (my brain) and I started to conjure up images of me pushing setting Shakira’s hair on fire, and just as we were getting really good at creating scenarios, we were interrupted by Bob.

“Hello, this is Bob. How may I help you?”

I explained my problem to Bob and pictured him sitting in his office chair behind a desk with his headset, while nodding solemnly as he listened to me speak.

“I see,” he said after I was done. “Is the computer plugged in?”

The idea that the computer would, in fact, not be plugged in, was so far from my mind, that Bergerac needed some time to mull the question over before I could say yes.

“Are you sure?” asked Bob. I noticed that the tone of his voice never changed. Again I pictured him sitting there, behind his desk, but this time he was Data from Star Trek. And I was standing behind him, arms raised above my head, ready to beat him to death with a mallet.

“No, I’m a dribbling idiot. Of course it’s plugged in,” I said.

“Very well. Please turn the computer off and on and blah, blah, blah.” Said Bob in his ever-unchanging tone of voice.

He didn’t actually say that last bit, but that was what I heard. After much back and forth and blah, blah, blah, it was agreed upon that the computer would go to the computer hospital in Big City.


This immediately brought about another problem: Eggbert (my computer) needed something to travel in. Since I’d thrown out the packaging that the computer originally came in, I needed new stuff. I hadn’t thought that would be too much of a problem, but I completely forgot that everything is a bit complicated when you’re living in Big Hellhole, Hickville. After three hours of wandering the streets, hitting one store after another, I had to admit that it was a lost cause. I would have had an easier time striking gold.

Bob, of course, had secretly scurried down here and abducted all the cardboard boxes and Styrofoam, at the same time erasing people’s memories of them ever being there to begin with. He was being a very naughty little android.

What’s that? Ridiculous? It most certainly is not. However, the idea of living in a town where there is no cardboard or Styrofoam truly is. Now what? Paranoid? How dare you?!?

Moving right along…

Just as I was about to give up, I did manage to get a hold a sack of little marbles-like balls made of Styrofoam, each about the size of 1/2 ping-pong ball. They were crunchy with old age and smelled funny, kinda like Pooch smells when she’s tired. Pooch has smells for everything. But I digress.

I wrapped the ailing Eggbert up in generous amounts of bubble wrap and put him in a cardboard box that I found in the back of my closet. Then I filled it up with ping-pong stink-balls. Finally I closed the lid.

It didn’t fit. Eggbert was too tall, causing an odd looking bump on top of the package. But I didn’t have another box and waiting for Eggbert to shrink or the box to grow seemed like a futile idea. I also noticed that the box itself wasn’t in the very best of shape. It was time for lots and lots of tape. Soon I was whizzing around the box, Styrofoam stinkies flying everywhere and the tape making swooshing noises. When I was somewhat satisfied that the computer would stay put and the box wouldn’t fall apart, the package consisted mostly of tape. I used the whole roll.

Only then did it occur to me that there was no way in hell anyone would be able to get it open again without using some sort of saw. After which they’d be attacked by stinkies loaded full of statical electricity and a merciless taste for technical engineers. But it was too late to turn back now, so I got on my cellphone again and called a cab to take me down to the post office.

There I put Eggbert on the rattling conveyor belt and as he slowly floated down past the black plastic curtains, I hoped that he would be okay and that he’d be home soon to distract me from school work and household chores. Until then I’ll be working on my thesis and picking styrostinkers out of my hair.

To go deaf or not to go deaf

Since I am going down the coast for a couple of weeks, this will be the last fascinating and terribly intelligent thing I'm going to share with you until I get back. Enjoy!

That's an order.

People can be divided into many categories. Two such categories are mumblers and non-mumblers. For some inexplicable reason, a great deal of the people that I hang out with here in Bigger Hellhole, are members of the first category. Over the past three weeks, this fact had me seriously wondering whether or not my hearing might be going.

I had started to become a bit worried, actually, always asking people to repeat what they’d just said. I thought I might need to get myself a hearing aid. I would cringe when I thought of the ones the old folks at the home, where I worked last summer, would wear. The kind that would slither around the back of their ears like some waxy leech. Half the time, the apparatus would make a high-pitched noise that everyone but the owner would hear. I pictured myself wearing one of those, and I didn’t like the idea. Besides, they’re all either grey or beige, both of which are colours that make my complexion look like death warmed over. Which is so not the look I usually go for.

Then luck intervened, and threw a couple of non-mumbler in my path last week. Rarely have I felt so relieved. In the future I am going to have to become friends with more typical non-mumblers, so that I can seek them out if I ever start to doubt my abilities to hear properly again.

How does a mumbler become a mumbler, though? Hasn’t anyone ever told these people to speak up? And shouldn’t it be a hint to maybe turn up the volume just a little, when the most common reply you get whenever you speak to someone is “huh?” I have noticed something interesting, though – A mumbler never seems to have any trouble deciphering what another of his/her kind is saying. This leads me to think that these creatures have hearing like bats, and might not be entirely human.

This time of the year, people also start wearing gigantic scarves, which aggravate an already difficult situation. Trendy, fun and colourful as a scarf may be, the already miniscule voice of a mumbler finds it very hard to fight its way through such a large, woolly barrier. This leaves perfectly normal people, such as myself, to wonder if they’re going deaf.

There should be a law against these things. And violators should be forced to take a course in how to speak so that non-batpeople can hear stuff that comes out of your mouth. All in favour, say AI!

Bigger hellholes

Wohoo, I’ve found a new flat in town. This means that next month I’m moving to a much bigger hellhole. Yay and hurrah and yippee all rolled into one.

So now I’m puttering around, thinking about moving. I’ll pack all my stuff into boxes, which I will forget to label, even though I bought a special marker for the occasion. This will lead to chaos. My kitchen stuff will be confused with bathroom stuff, what I think will be livingroom stuff will, in fact, turn out to be bedroom stuff and the knickknacks will be MIA. Still, it’s kinda fun figuring out where all your crap should go.
Also, since it will probably be raining, everyone’ll drag mud into my apartment and then I’ll need to hose it down, or something. But what the hell.

And you know what? I just made a smoothie. It turned out really weird and I made lots of it, for some reason. Now I feel obligated to drink it. Or eat it. It’s pretty thick.

A lovely day for the wiggling of the toes

I’m starting to get that vacation-feeling deep inside my tummy, right underneath the ice cream, watermelons and fizzy drinks. In a couple of days it’ll probably have spread to my brain, from which it will have to be surgically removed once classes start up again, like some malignant tumour.

I’m going to grad school in the fall, you see. To Hellhole U, to be specific. The thing is that I didn’t really want to go there. I wanted to move back to the city, to where you can have food brought to you and where there is a big enough population to form a good-sized cult. But the universe had different ideas. It always does. First, I started thinking about all the stuff I’d have to haul halfway across the country, which put me off a little bit. This goes back to the lazy-thing I’ve mentioned earlier. I’m lazy. I’m also lethargic, sluggish and slothful, and I don’t like moving furniture over large distances.

Then I received my letter from Hellhole U, offering me a spot which I would have to accept by the 16th. Which is two whole days before the other schools I’ve applied to send out their letters. The thing is that I’m a sissy. The universe knows this, and tends to use it against me. The universe is very well aware that if I were to turn down Hellhole U, then not get accepted anywhere else, and have to postpone my masters for another year, I’d be forced to have a mental meltdown. I’ve seen meltdowns on movies and have always thought that they look like a lot of work. Which brings us back to me being lazy. I mentioned that, yes? So I’m going to Hellhole U.

But until then, I’m sitting outside in my garden chair with my laptop, wiggling my little toes in the air. I left the TV on inside and the sound is a bit annoying, but I’m too lazy to get off my ass to turn it off.

Some guy sounds waaay too happy as he says: “Before, we had to go to the doctor in order to remove my warts. Now we can do it at home with just one treatment.”

Idjit.

Neverending Friday

Last Friday was a very long day, of the seemingly neverending variety. Despite not having any classes that day, I went to the college. Being the lethargic creature that I am, this goes against everything I stand for. I did, however, have to hand in a paper.

I had the idea in my head that this would be a piece of cake. All I had to do, was find the professors office, knock-knock on the door, and hand it over, right? I should have known better. There’s no such thing as a piece of cake in Hellhole.

The finding-the-office-bit was easy enough. Knocking on the door went just as I had planned. But that was where Friday stopped following the script. There was no answer. I knocked again. Nothing. I waited. And then I waited some more. And a bit longer. Then I got fed up with waiting, and concluded that if the professor wouldn’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed would come to the professor. So I went searching the halls for a tall, gangly man in his fifties (the professor, duh). The only problem was that the guy kept moving around. When they insist on having things handed to them, the least they can do is bloody hold still, don’t you think? All lecturers should have some sort of tracking device injected into their necks, so that their students could find them. Then they could just hang a few of those electronic gizmos that show their locations as a small, red dot on the wall. Like the ones they used in Alien.

I looked at my wristwatch. The bus would leave in less than an hour, and after that I’d have to wait two hours for the next one. I needed a plan.

Fifteen minutes later, I was standing in the checkout line at the store, clutching the key ingredient to my master plan: a roll of tape. Ten minutes after that, I was in the process of thoroughly sticking my paper to the professor’s office door with great enthusiasm.

And what did I see coming towards me at that very moment? A tall, gangly man in his fifties, that’s what.

Bloody typical.

Tape pic by deziner02 for www.sxc.hu

Grocery shopping and the seagull-head

I believe in the unconscious, but I have to say that I prefer the conscious. They pay more attention, if you know what I mean. The cashier at the grocery store on Saturday, for example? She was unconscious.

A friend and I decided to put together a taco pizza, so off we went to the grocery store, happily picturing our soon to be meal in our heads. When you have friends over to cook, eating while you’re cooking is part of the fun, so we picked up a bunch of snacks, as well. Pretty soon, our shiny wagon was filled to the point of almost bursting with all sorts of figure-ruining things.

We balanced the overstuffed wagon between the isles and towards the checkout line, still eager to sink our teeth into its content. Operating the cash machine, a bit like a seagull picking on a dead fish, was a teenaged girl with black mascara smeared underneath her eyes which in turn were almost hidden under dishwater blonde hair.

Every pin-code she fed into the registry was acknowledged by a short *beep*, as it should be, with a few exceptions. The first was my see-through bag of rolls.

“How many?” asked racoon-girl and held it up in the air.
“I forget,” I said. “Count them, dumbass,” my inner voice added.
It turned out to be five, and I can understand that she needed to ask. Five is, after all, a difficult number.

A couple more beeps later, she picks up yet another bag. Paper, this time.
“What’s in here?” she asked. The word "Figs" were written on it in capital letters just above a picture of… Guess what! Figs. Also, it was partly transparent, so that you could clearly see the content, which matched the picture perfectly. At this point, I felt like saying something rude. However, my friend cut in, answering the girls question. My inner voice did have some things to say, of course, but I won’t repeat them here.

Then came the small can of corn which I found sitting by itself on a shelf with all the other canned goods. The registry refused to beep at it. Simply refused. As the girl fixed her gaze at me once more, I could feel my patience packing up its stuff and making a run for it. I wondered how she’d react if I were to reach across the counter and slap her.

“Was this part of a pack of three?” she asked. I answered (surprised at how patient and polite I sounded) that I really didn’t know. It had been sitting on the shelf by itself. The seagull reached under the counter to ring a buzzer. Then we waited (and waited, and waited) until the store manager turned up. Mascara-face asked her about the can of corn, and she went off to check. When she returned, she smiled and explained to me that “this particular can came from a pack of three such cans which cost so-and-so, blablabla, so that a single can would cost me this much”. As if I gave a damn. I smiled politely, and said thank you. My inner voice used much more colourful phrasings.

After what seemed like a small eternity, our groceries were finally paid for and we were given one – one – bag to pack them into. You know that trick that they do in circuses where they see how many clowns they can stuff into a mini? It was a bit like that. And there was no way that we could fit all of our clowns into that tiny, little bag. We tried asking seagull-head for another bag, but she overheard us. So we were forced to get creative, stuffing groceries into our handbags and pockets.

I hate doing my grocery shopping in Hellhole…


Pic by Wallula Junction for www.Flickr.com

The evil in its eyes...

Ever seen that Hitchock (or however you spell that) movie "the birds"? It had lots of different types of birds, but I can't remember seeing any swans there. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it is that the swans are the ones you need to look out for.

I first started to suspect this when I was walking the dog one cold winter night. There's this lovely path along the river that we use sometimes. During the whole walk, I kept hearing little sounds behind me, but everytime I turned around they were gone, and there was nothing there. But after a while, I saw something moving out in the water. Right there, in the middle of the river, with it's eyes fixed directly on me, was a huge, white swan. It looked evil.

After that, it kept happening every time we walked along the river path. The swan would turn up and follow us, all the while it was staring at us, but it never once came out of the water.

Then, it was just before christmas (during that mild period we always have a few days before christmas eve, when everyone worries that we're not going to get any snow this year), we met a man. He was out walking all alone. He smiled and nodded at us. Said something along the lines of "what a pjutty woggie" (to the dog, not me) as he walked by. Then there was a mighty splash and an even mightier scream. I turned around to see the woggie-man run for his life with the swan coming after him, hissing like a snake. Never before have I seen a swan move like that.

I still walk on the river path every now and then. It's pretty. But the swan is always there. And I always bring my dog.

Picture by Chris Sainsbury

Good morning, Hellhole!

Whenever I have morning classes, I have to get up at six am if I'm going to have enough time for all the crap that people do in the mornings (this includes standing in the middle of the bathroom whilst staring straight ahead and trying to remember what you’re doing there, a process that takes about ten minutes) and make the morning bus.

Morning crap includes bathroom activities, such as my zombie moment, getting the dog to go out and do her business, having breakfast and packing my handbag. The first problem is the dog. She’s definitely not a morning… uhm… person. As soon as she sees me getting out of bed, she clenches her eyes shut and doesn’t want to get up at all. I read somewhere that dogs don’t know how to pretend. The hell they don’t. They just don’t have the intelligence to do it well. I, of course, see right through her clever sleeping-disguise, and make her come downstairs with me. At this point, she’s actually quite eager, rushing down the stairs like a white, furry bullet. There’s a large chest in the hallway, and between it and the stairs there’s a rug. The dog lands with all four paws on the rug, causing it to slide across the floor. She manages to turn sideways while sailing on the rug, and slams her side into the chest, which then always makes a small jump towards the right, in order to stop. Then she does the bullet-impression again, heading straight for the couch (her second favourite sleeping spot in the house). This is where I intersect her and force her to go outside. Once she’s actually outside, she’s probably got the slowest bladder of any dog in existence. I swear that she sniffs every single damn grass in order to find the perfect one to pee on. And before she gets that far, she has a zombie moment of her very own, which is almost as long as mine.

Breakfast is also a bit tricky. I usually get around to that at about 7:45. The thing is that my stomach doesn’t actually wake up until around ten. It’s very hard to get an unconscious stomach to digest food, but I can usually force down a sandwich. Being a mature adult, I always watch the cartoons and drink a large glass of milk while I'm eating.

And today I have to do all of that, despite of the fact that it’s my day off. All because there was a problem with the computers at the college on Friday, so I couldn't get my term paper printed. Again.

*Insert sigh here*

risking my life in the photobooth

As I might have mentioned, I take the bus into town every morning in order to get to my math lecture. The drive is about ten minutes or so. There aren’t that many morning buses, so I have to leave the house at seven, even though my class doesn’t start until nine. I also think that there’s a rule around here that says the busses have to be at least ten minutes late. This rule applies with one exception: if you’re not on time, it’ll turn up five minutes early and leave before it’s supposed to, so that you miss it. When that happens, you stand there forever, confused, because unless you actually see the damn thing, there’s no telling whether it’s gone already or if it’s just late again.

It’s not as light out in the morning as it used to be, only a few weeks ago (although I’m still denying the existence of fall until I see snow), so the bus had the inside lights on. None of which worked properly. They all blinked in unison every five seconds. I counted. It was a bit like riding a photobooth.

Another thing about the morning bus, is that it always drives in the middle of the road. This has nothing to do with who is actually driving, because all the drivers do the very same thing. I guess that’s just another one of those weird rules.. It will (and does) stop absolutely anywhere. There aren’t all that many actual busstops, so you just pull it over where it’s most convenient to you. Even if that happens to be in the middle of an intersection, where you can’t see a damn thing in either direction. Not that there’s any traffic to speak of. This is Hellhole, after all. Of course, the moment someone decides to take a morning drive, we might all be screwed.

Sometimes, riding the bus into town is the most exciting point of my day.

Run, Forrest! Run!

Last Monday I took up running. That's right - running. As in "Choochoo goes huff and puff up and down the hills".

I wasn't planning to run, I really wasn't. Just like every other night, I put on a top and a pair of jeans and took the pooch for a walk. The dog and I both suffer from the same condition: we have a bunch of energy that we just don't know what to do with. The dog is taken for a couple of walks, and she seems happy. As for myself... Well... I pace back and forth a lot.

So there we were, walking down the street towards the woods, and I just couldn't seem to get rid of that over-energetic feeling that I get. So I walked a bit faster. It didn't help. And that's when it happened. All of a sudden, my legs were running. Both of'em. I don't mind telling you, that I was a bit surprised. They just kept right on running for an hour or so. If I'd known they were going to do that, I wouldn't have worn jeans.

I always thought that this form of exercise looked absolutely horrible. Everytime I see someone running, they usually sound as if they have some sort of painful lungdisease, eating them up from within, and they're quite often a bit purple-looking. Surprisingly, it wasn't that horrible. No terrible diseases grabbed a hold of my respirational system, and even if I had turned purple, nobody would have seen it because

a) it was dark out, and
b) I'm the only person in Hellhole, it would seem, nuts enough to go running in the woods after dark.

(Picture "Moon over rust farm" by Ctd 2005 for www.Flickr.com)