2003-08-29 - 10:04 a.m.
This town has been smelling like shit lately. Yes: like feces. For the first few days of it I kept obsessively checking the bottoms of my shoes, sure I'd wandered through some dog poop. I had not, and besides, the poop smell is neither definitely dog nor definitely something else. The air has just carried a warm poopy smell at all times for the past few weeks. I think it may have something to do with the late summer rot...all the vines and huge leaves and the uber-fecundity has begun to consume itself, greenery rotting away under other greenery, choked by growth. Temperatures above 90 and crushing humidity only help to carry the smell of rot. But it's poopier than that. I close my eyes and feel like I'm living in seventeeth-century London, dodging emptied chamberpots and hailing shit-encrusted carriages.
Bettina writes that it's cool enough back in CO to drink hot chocolate, and I nearly wilt with envy. Or maybe I wilt with heat. Even if it didn't smell like shit here, it would still be gross gross gross. It is evil sticky. It gives me big eighties hair and stinky armpits, neither of which I particularly mind, but it also makes it impossible to sleep without closing the windows and cranking the AC. Fine for me, if not my energy bill, but this is like instant cat methamphetamine; if she can't sit on the windowsill staring out at the night, Ronnie prefers to run from room to room yowling. All night.
L closes on his first house today. I want a house. I've become so obsessed with the idea over the past year. I want to buy a little house and do yardwork and home repairs all the time. I want to renovate something. I want to put the cat box on a porch rather than in my bathroom.
I'm still on the listserv for my old department, which means I occasioanlly get emails like the following, now rendered hilarious by my distance from the program:
"Students: A question that will help us planning the spring course offerings: Would you possibly be interested in taking BOTH Technology in Second Language Acquisition Education AND Seminar in Historical Linguistics: Comparative Germanic Linguistics?"