The Latest Post: The Wordy Half

Real classes started for real today. I am tired and have to get up very early in the morning again. Here is the first half of a post I wrote today. Second half, with pretty pictures, coming as soon as I get the time.

I really do not know how crazy things will get but I’m fairly confident my schedule will become at least slightly more rigorous now that I have given up my “permanent vacation” status.

Good morning everyone! I woke up at 7:30 this morning and went for a funky run. It’s currently about a quarter after 9, and seeing as I don’t have my first class—French 1-A For Total Beginners With Absolutely No Experience—until noon, I figure I will try to blog a bit before I shove off.

What? No coffee?! I seem to have killed my first 750 gram bag of ground Columbian beans just in time for the real intellectual heavy lifting. Oh well, looks like I’ll be drinking black tea with my Müsli, Jogurt, and Marmalade. (Müsli is a sort of granola-type cereal substance that I eat with pungent German yogurt and fine German jam every morning. I really do miss American breakfast—hash browns, pancakes, fried eggs n’ bacon—but my good friend Müsli helps to dull the pain.) I made a whole mess of pasta with meat+vegetable sauce yesterday, but after multiple events with leaky Tupperware, I don’t think I’ll pack any up for lunch. No, today will be a Mensa day—I hope they have rice with vegetables in it, and some sort of non-breaded, non-sausage meat product. Also beans. Beans would be a treat.

The clarinetist upstairs (Downstairs? Across the hall? In the kitchen? This is a nice apartment building but the walls are paper thin) has been practicing all morning. He seems to have a handle on Amazing Grace but The Battle Hymn of the Republic is giving him all kinds of trouble. Yes, I suppose it could be a woman, but I’m most amused by the image of an old man with no hair and a tin ear wailing away on his beloved clarinet. Heh heh—now he is squeaking his way through Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, & Thyme.

I left my glasses at a friend’s place on Saturday night—I got a little, uh, “forgetful”—and didn’t have time to pick ‘em up until Sunday evening. SO, I spent Sunday sort of hunched over my computer, squinting at the screen and finishing a little work. For those of you who I haven’t already bored with this information, I work as a freelance technical writer, mostly for a firm called Uvex that produces eye protection. I needed something to do with my extra week off, so I contacted my “manager”—an astoundingly energetic professor of Slavic literature with the awesome name of Séamas Stiofan O’Driscoll (yes, he can speak both Russian and Gaelic) who I once took a class with—and asked for a project. Séamas responded with his usual blinding speed and I spent the next couple days writing an online curriculum for industrial workers starting a new eye safety program. I know, I know, it sounds boring, but I find it very satisfying. I get to write at home instead of spending a bunch of time in transit, I don’t have to haul garbage or scrub pans or deal with annoying customers, and I get to use my brain when I work. Also I feel like I’m doing at least a little bit of good in the world—yes, Uvex is a big faceless corporation, but it’s not like I’m falsifying Environmental Impact Statements. I’ve spent enough time with gruesome eye injury statistics to know it’s a problem, and I’m happy to know my work might help save some steelworker eyeballs. And the money isn’t terrible, which is good when you’re a poor student bleeding cash in Metropolis.

So: I spent a good part of the past week writing about eye protection. What did I do that you squares won’t find (too) boring? Let’s go to the photographs!

(TO BE CONTINUED...?)