My mental circus, inside and out.

eek! a mouse

So Emma is teaching her class and rambling on about the use of direct quotations when suddenly the silent majority at the back of the class stirs.  It is a gray mouse, about the size of a quarter, scrambling around the backpacks and desks, attempting to climb the pull for the window blinds.  This mouse was much more interesting than Emma, as she herself would be the first to admit.   This mouse could give a crap about direct quotations.

There are also cockroaches larger than this mouse living in Emma's building, which is in a state of decline, rather like all of higher education. These cockroaches inhabit the bathroom and the commons room, so far, and seem to have been disturbed into daytime appearances by all the office moving as people retire and shuffle around.   God knows what is living in some of the offices which have been inhabited by some of the more ancient faculty.   Emma would include herself in this list except that she has moved around some.

In fact, Emma is moving again.  And so she is going through file after file.  She found a rejection letter from fourteen years ago, and was shocked to find that she felt somewhat stung again by this rejection letter, even though it was for an article she could  not even remember anymore.  Oh EGO!  So into the trash it went.  Everything is going into the trash, Emma has decided.  She heard once that the Cherokee used to burn everything once a year.  What a fantastic idea.

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 20, 2007 04:23 | link | comments (3)

The Village Sims

Emma has been neglectful of blogging as of late, partly because. . . she is embarrassed to admit it. . . she has become addicted to a palm pilot game called the Village Sims.  The Village Sims is the narrative of a tiny group of cyberpeople who are stranded on an island and must learn to survive.  Through careful nurturing, the gamer encourages these tiny persons to engage in scientific research, plant crops, breed, and tend the sick.  Because they look like hippies, Emma is strongly reminded of an old  ABC television show called The New People, which aired in 1969.  This show traced the attempts of a group of young people, stranded on an island, to build a utopian society.  So Emma has been tending her little village of sims, who are in their third generation now.  Five sims have turned into sixty-five.  The women, after retreating to a hut for sex, instantly give birth to a purring baby, and are able to do nothing else but squat in the field until the baby transforms into a tiny child that spends a lot of time peeing in the "magical" flower field, dancing, and pondering a monolith.  At this stage of the game, the adult sims are able to think, relax, tell jokes, and exercise--late developments since the first generation could only perform survival tasks.  So Emma has been guiding her little utopia though she is nothing like a god really.  The god is the game program.  But Emmas little people have a weird reality to them, and she feels  happy at their accomplishments, sad when they die and oddly fond of them, perhaps because, though they sometimes resist her efforts to move them, they never argue with her.

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 19, 2007 08:58 | link | comments (2)

Bye bye Sopranos

The Sopranos ended brilliantly last night.  We were expecting blood, gore, some kind of massacre, but Chase gave it to us quietly,  evoking life's comic dread.  The last two scenes were fabulous.  Tony encountering his future in the person of Junior, now senile, remembering nothing, recognizing no one, the potential of all of our fates, all of life's drama adding up to nothing in the end.  Then the incredibly stressful restaurant scene with the family, the building expectation that something terrible must happen, a threat in every new face, every gesture. the ordinary world full of dread, the culture of paranoia.  This was a contemplation of death in life.  And that is what we were left with.  Brilliant. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 11, 2007 20:07 | link | comments

fixin' stuff

Feeling mighty proud of herself, Emma has once again fixed a washing machine, her Kenmore HE4.  The thing started to hum, had trouble draining, and so she took off the front and cleaned the pump, which had about two dollars worth of change, a dryer sheet, a purple bow hair clip, and a big clot of lint. (This is actually a very easy operation which will cost you $100 if you have some repair guy come out and do it.)  Emma is actually remarkably competent at this sort of thing, for a girl raised in the 60s, probably because her dad was always tinkering with stuff, and often had a sports car disassembled in the garage.  He also built a computer from a Heath kit.   So Emma is unafraid to take appliances apart and dink around with them, even though she once almost electrocuted herself on a dryer.  This taught her that the safety rules are absolutely correct: turn the damn thing off before you work on it, or you might find yourself with singed hair or worse.  Emma figures this was a jumpstart.

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 10, 2007 06:41 | link | comments (3)

Look for Emma Pele on GTalk!

Posted by: EmmaPele at June 09, 2007 19:08 | link | comments