Fire | February 8, 2004
There was a fire in my building this morning, on the roof. We had a suspicion that something was up when we looked out the window and saw two people standing across the way, pointing and staring in our general direction. Suspicion increased further when we saw two firetrucks outside. Ten minutes later, the alarm went off.
(My guess is that it was a student who pulled the alarm, not the firemen. The fire department had probably already figured out it was minor and decided not to evacuate the building, and then some panicky resident saw the smoke. But who knows.)
In any case, the alarm went off and we all had to leave hastily. It was very cold and very windy. (Weather.com says: 21° F, Feels Like 5° F.) There was what seemed like a significant amount of smoke blowing around, and some people had soot on their faces. One girl had been in the shower and came out wearing nothing but a towel, dripping wet. I felt bad and would have offered her my jacket but she wasted no time dashing right past me and into an adjacent building.
A couple of us decided to make the most of the situation and go to Sunday brunch while we were waiting. After we were done eating we sat around at the table for a couple minutes, wondering if the firemen were done yet and whether we could re-enter our building. It was really cold, as you may remember, so we didn’t want to just walk back and check. I thought it would be nice if there were some way for the fire department to let us know when things were safe. Like if we all had walkie-talkies, or cell phones, and we got a broadcast when it was okay to return home.
And my next thought, which I realize is patently absurd, but which I really and truly did think, and write down so I wouldn’t forget it: Nah, what would really be cool is an RSS feed to let us know.
They could call it “Feeding the Fire.”
Posted 11:56 AM
Link ::
Call | January 10, 2004
You could so do it. A couple hours, an afternoon, a weekend. Nothing is stopping you.
So why haven’t you done it already?
Everyone you explain it to tells you to go for it, what are you waiting for. They believe they understand. You have gotten good at telling the story, after all. So many people have asked what it’s all about. (What is it all about?)
Time. So much time has passed. You’re not the same (though you are).
What will you say. (When you hear that voice, where will yours go?) “Hi, it’s me after all this time,” and then he’ll know? Not likely.
What if he doesn’t remember.
Impossible. But there is still something else, just at the edge of your vision, and as long as you put off calling, you don’t have to see it. He is still exactly who you remember him as, right now.
Go on. What are you waiting for.
Posted 12:12 PM
Link ::
Typo | December 23, 2003
A visitor commenting here signed her message with an e-mail address at “hottmail.com”. I immediately went to see if I could sign up for one myself. (“Yeah, aaron@hottmail.com. No, with two ‘t’s.”)
It saddens me greatly to report that it was just a typo. One cannot get a hottmail.com e-mail address.
Posted 4:57 PM
Link ::
Airon | November 21, 2003
This entry exists so that I have a place to point people when they ask about my screen name, IRC handle, or what-have-you.
It started when I was around eleven. I had discovered a text-based online Star Wars game called Star Wars Universe. It was a MUD, and true to the genre, the very first thing it asked you was to give a name for your character. (This was the golden age of MUDs—everyone and their mother was buying a shell account and cobbling together lousy zones. But I digress.) I had the dual problem of being both utterly unoriginal and prohibited (by my parents) from using my real name online. I tried all the Star Wars names I could think of—Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, I wasn’t picky—but of course in a popular game like that all the obvious names were taken. And Aaron wasn’t allowed.
And then, in desperation and a flash of nutty-eleven-year-old cleverness, I thought of a loophole. A perfect way around the rules. A true Jedi’s name, alright.
AirOn.
Needless to say, that didn’t go over too well in Star Wars Universe. In he schoolyard my peers would chant “Air-on, Air-off,” over and over as they took my lightsaber and tossed it back and forth over my head ruthlessly. (Their pummelling eventually drove me to a life of crime, where I stole credits from their pockets as they slept.) In a hunting party with my friends BaCKbReAKeR and Bonith, I probably didn’t have the worst name, but at least they weren’t named after a lousy chair.
So, the next incarnation of the game came around, and I knew I couldn’t be AirOn any longer, but I still wasn’t particularly good at coming up with character names. I noticed that if I just switched around the letters of my name, it sounded so much cooler. Aaorn was born, and it traveled to such realms as my AIM screen name, IRC handle, and previous website URL.
An improvement to be sure, but one which brought with it an unending stream of questions: “hey did u no u spelt ur name wrong?” “Like acorn???” and “R U AARON CARTER?” (seriously).
In later (non-Star Wars) games I acquired a last name and a title—Mushir Aaorn al-Dhulin—which was pretty damn cool if you ask me. By now I’ve totally disregarded my parents’ warnings about online predators and gotten in the habit of just using my real name, but I still get lots of Aaorn questions in IRC. So if I pointed you at this page: now you know.
Posted 1:23 AM
Link ::
Comments (8)
Serial | April 16, 2003
We sat shivering together by the last glowing embers. Across the river, we could see the ruins of the great city, burned out carcasses of skyscrapers and mass-transit arteries no longer pumping. “No,” she said, recalling something from times long past, “Not even if the world were ending.”
Posted 4:17 PM
Link ::
Surprise | April 2, 2003
For posterity, this is the story of a recent surprise long in the making, though most of you already know about it.
Rebecca’s birthday was today.
I first had the idea around the end of January (I don’t know when, exactly—it wasn’t until later that I started taking notes on my progress.) It seemed at the time like a great idea for surprise present: a letter (or a card) for Rebecca, from Orlando Bloom.
I dug around on the Internet, and discovered a pair of addresses alleged to belong to the erotic elf himself; one in Los Angeles, one in England. Then, on February 4th, I sent a letter to each. I told him someone I loved was turning 17 soon, and humbly implored him to spend a couple minutes for an extremely worthy cause.
I don’t know if he never recieved the letters, or if they just weren’t enough to convey how truly wonderful and deserving Rebecca was and is. Either way, he didn’t respond, but I withheld some hope that he would come through in time.
About a month before the birthday, I began to get nervous. Some further digging got me a phone number for his agent, one Chris Andrews of ICM. Mr. Andrews never seemed to be able to take my call, and I was afraid to leave a voicemail, lest I misspeak and have it recorded forever on the tape. Finally I gave in and just left a vague message, not saying what I was calling for except that I had been trying to reach him for a couple weeks and would really appreciate a call back.
Amazingly, he did call me back, the next Monday. He sounded very Los Angeles—harried, not really time to talk to me, didn’t care for my story about Rebecca. No, Mr. Bloom “doesn’t do letters”, but my secretary will give you a fax number and you can send your request for an autographed photo, bye.
Well, it wasn’t what I originally had in mind, but it was enough to rejuvinate my enthusiasm for the whole crazy scheme. I sent the fax right away, that evening.
That was two weeks ago, and a photo has not yet arrived. I don’t know if it is going to be sent at a later date (maybe there’s a high volume of requests and they take time), or if I’m just out of luck in the celebrity-stalking department, but either way the cat’s out of the bag now. I gave Rebecca a letter confessing all, and it went over well (if this humble one may opine on the matter).
For what it’s worth, it was a fun experience throughout. I managed to tell only three people during the months of planning, then one more two days beforehand because she was very persistent (You know who you are). I also learned a lot more about Orlando Bloom than I needed to know—the good man is a vegetarian, for example.
And hey, you never know, maybe a letter from Los Angeles will appear in my mailbox tommorow. There’s always hope, right? Happy 17th, Rebecca.
Posted 9:38 PM
Link ::
Comments (3)
Door | March 24, 2003
The second time I’ve had this dream, that I can remember.
It is a little collection of houses by a beach with white sand. I have just run away from something, where the rest of my family is still trapped. We made some kind of arrangement whereby they helped me to escape (they couldn’t), with the understanding that I’d go to this area by the beach but later come back and rescue them. The details of the escape are vague; the dream proper begins afterward.
(What constitutes background information in a dream? The way I imagine it, in a dream something like my-family-is-trapped-and-I-have-escaped-but-must-go- back-for-them-after-a-brief-sojourn-in-this-hamlet would be a single dream-emotion, something just felt intuitively and not experienced. Dreams are fascinating like that.)
The beach houses are constructed like old Japanese buildings—bamboo frame, thatched roof, paper walls and sliding paper doors. The residents of these houses are plotting against me secretly; in concert, I imagine, with my previous captors. Frequently I gain the upper hand by standing on one side of a paper door, watching their silhouettes converse, and listening to them scheme. Though I can see them clearly through the doors, they never spot me, or suspect that they have been compromised; this shortcoming of paper architecture has never occured to them in the dream world.
Posted 8:09 PM
Link ::
Comments (4)
Library | January 23, 2003
I’m sitting in the library now, writing on some scrap paper. Where I am, there is only one other person visible, a girl I have never seen before. She’s sitting across from me (facing me, that is) at the next table. She is reading a book now, holding it up high (as opposed to resting it on the table), so that I can see the cover of the book instead of her face. The book is called “Marijuana Facts and Myths”; not a title I would have expected in a public school library. I glance up (discretely) between sentences, and wonder: is she reading that particular book out of real curiousity, or because she knows all about it already and thinks the book’s answers will be amusing? To me she seems amused, which would indicate the latter, but really, how can I even guess “amused” when I can barely even see her face? And maybe the book really just said something funny, who knows.
I have more general wonders, too. Sometimes I look at people I don’t know (like this girl I’ve never seen before; she just went and got a different book) and I wonder: does this person enjoy their life, on the whole? Lying in bed at home, 1:30a.m. and they can’t sleep, just think and think and think about the day they just had, is this person smiling fondly, or frowning regretfully? Random day, say, I don’t know, last Tuesday — was it a blessing or a trial for this person? Or did it just drift by, indifferently?
The girl across from me just sniffled a little, eyes downcast, little tired crescents underneath. She had an argument with her father on Tuesday, and it’s still rankling a little.
I just made that up of course, the father part, but now that I have, the evidence is there every time I look up. People are like that: you don’t just get the hints the author is revealing (like I’m doing now), you get the whole infinitely complex, fractal-like picture, millions of subtleties, and you pick out the ones you want to see and make your characters from. Like how she just rubbed her eyes after that last sentence; sad eyes, opened extra wide when she dabbed at them.
And everywhere I look, more characters. In the far corner, now, a frumpy flock of librarians, socializing while the place is empty. One of them just read a joke from her e-mail aloud to the others. An old joke, one I’ve heard before; about “what people want”; or maybe it was “what excites people” — I missed the beginning. Here’s what I caught, though:
At 5 it’s not wetting the bed.
At 16 it’s driving.
At 20 it’s having sex.
At 30 it’s money.
At 40 it’s money.
At 50 it’s money.
At 60 it’s having sex.
At 70 it’s driving.
At 80 it’s not wetting the bed.
They all laughed (including the joke-teller, she laughed at her own joke), more raucously than is usually characteristic of librarians; and I wonder again — was it honestly that funny, or was there, as Tyler Durden said, a kind of sick desperation in that laugh? With them I imagine it’s honest, that they all have their little joys each day and sound sleep each night, a happy and content life.
I’m rambling now, and the time is drawing near when the library will fill with people and I’ll have to stop writing, so I’ll end with one last pondering. Sometimes I look at people and I wonder when they last stayed up to watch the sun rise. Even with strangers, you can tell the ones who’ve never done it, or who have forgotten its magic. The girl across from me, her last time was at the end of the summer, sitting with a sadly smiling and beautiful boy, looking out and skipping stones on a pond. No, not a pond; the ocean. I can see it in her eyes now. •
Posted 12:00 PM
Link ::
Comments (6)
Charred | December 2, 2002
Rebecca was roasting marshmallows over a candle tonight. Her technique was pointedly crude: hold the marshmellow low in the flame until it ingnites, then yank it out, rotate 90 degrees (so as not to blow out the candle), and give it a great big WHOOOOSH of moist spitty breath. Repeat until all sides are blackened, spit on it some more to cool it down, then pop entire ashy treat into mouth. Smile stickily.
I miss those days.
Posted 7:53 PM
Link ::
Comments (2)
Story | November 9, 2002
Silence is a recurring theme (1, 2) around here. This is not without significance.
I have never been adept at small talk. It all seems so pointless, doesn’t it?— Here is what happened today, during this unexceptional day in my unexceptional life. Here are my petty complaints and my petty joys (a segment on the radio, a new food, a passage in a story; things to share.) For a few minutes you are drawn in, my mundane details are somehow transmogrified by your presence into something actually worth sharing. You weave your own part in with mine; details build upwards like the rising action of some intricate story, some story that you and I are writing together, are living out together.
Here is the problem: The story has no climax. Or rather, the dénouement is inevitably silence, a sudden villain against whom I am powerless.
Here is what I want to say: You are amazing. You are the kind of girl for whom people like me - exactly like me - stay awake into the early morning, thinking and worrying and writing and wondering and, most of all, hoping. The kind for whom small-talk stories are extraneous, because there are a thousand novels to be written just for the way I feel with your hand in my hand and your head on my shoulder.
Like any reasonable tragedy, this story is foreshadowed. And of course, what I have been getting at all along is that I can bring myself to say nothing. What a copout of an ending that would be, to lash out at the silence by jumping from discussion of cookies to deepest affections. Better to keep my mouth shut, and silently take notes for my next chapter.
Posted 11:57 PM
Link ::
Comments (4)
Encounter | October 24, 2002
On my way out of the building, I ran into a girl in the hall - not literally, mind you, ran into her in the sense of saw her, only more than just saw her, encountered her, really - anyway, it was a girl who I haven’t spoken to or even seen since last June sometime, didn’t keep in touch with her over the summer or earlier this year. When I think about it, there are any number of girls for whom this is the case - I’ve been away a lot, no time to keep up with every little acquaintance - but this one, the one I ran into, was different. I had wanted to speak to her, on several occasions, I just never saw her around.
Anyway, I encountered her in the hall as I was leaving for the day. She and I were heading opposite directions. I smiled, or something - I don’t remember - and she and I slowed down somewhat, the way two people do to exchange greetings in a crowded hallway full of people. Which is what we were doing, really, only we were obviously more important than the hundred rushing other people in the hallway, and they characteristically failed to notice this essential fact.
Time is limited. Must say something so that it won’t be another four months before we speak again. “K! How are you?” Before it’s all the way out of my mouth, it feels inadequate. I say that to people I see three times a day.
She answers something - I don’t remember what, exactly, something ordinary, something that wouldn’t tell an eavesdropper that we were practically strangers, not having spoken for four months, something like “I’m good, how’s it going with you, Aaron?” - and I have failed to make the contact after all, ordinary words have failed yet again.
Posted 4:02 PM
Link ::
Comments (4)
Strings | October 21, 2002
I had a hemp necklace. It was made and fastened in such a way that I couldn’t take it off, ever, and as a result it got worn out fairly quickly (about 5 months). A couple days ago, it broke off.
I’m working on a new necklace now, and I’m about 40 stitches in. I am, however, at an impasse; I just noticed that I screwed up some of the first stitches I did. Fixing them would mean undoing everything subsequent and then redoing it afterwards; but if I go further, I may end up getting annoyed at the faults even later, and having to do still more work to fix them at that point.
This entry is a metaphor - I just don’t know what for.
Posted 4:11 PM
Link ::
Comments (1)
After the moment | October 20, 2002
After I asked her - much too late, I know - she asked (she was smiling beautifully) if that was so hard after all.
Yes - not because I was afraid of the answer (I’m of the opinion that one invariably knows beforehand the answer to these sort of questions), but because I was afraid of myself. Your smile erased any doubts.
(See also: Michael Barrish)
Posted 11:59 AM
Link ::
A Statistical Rarity | September 26, 2002
I’m somewhat abashed to admit that I actually had a whole lot of fun doing English work tonight. The assignment was to use a number of vocabulary words in a paragraph, with extra points given for humour. Right up my alley:
Vocabulary can be a difficult subject, often requiring intense study. Progress is arduous, and impeded by a variety of factors. Some words - such as inflammable - are abstruse, by virtue of having two meanings which contradict one another. For others, like chthonic and deipnosophist, the definition is not nearly as impenetrable as the pronunciation. But no matter how futile it may seem, remember that sedulous lucubration will eventually pay off, and someday you will be able to define every word in this paragraph.
(You can guess which are the vocab words)
Posted 8:44 PM
Link ::
Comments (1)
Rhode Island | June 21, 2002
Just returned from three and two-half days in Rhode Island. (Why not four? Because it wasn’t four days. It was three whole days and two half days, the half days being late Monday afternoon and Friday morning.) There were sixteen of us (aunts (2), uncles (2), grandparents (2), parents (2), siblings (2), & cousins (5)), all staying in the positively enormous house about 10 minutes’ walk from the beach.
The house was a sprawling affair, situated in the middle of the woods at the end of a rocky dirt road. It was complete with all the details of old New England - outdoor shower, dusty wooden floors, porcelain bathtubs on little carved feet, tiny crawlspaces everywhere, huge closets, dozens of full bookshelves, rickety old furniture, and those funny hooked latches on the doors. It also suffered from an acute lack of hallways - on the upper floor, getting from place to place usually meant walking through two or three bedrooms in the middle.
Arriving at the house triggered a certain set of old emotions in me. I think every kid dreams of being in an ancient mansion where you could actually get lost (at least, it was a dream of mine). I actually did get lost a few times the first day.
Posted 6:14 PM
Link ::
Comments (5)
Twisty Ties | June 16, 2002
I have amassed, over the years, a formidable collection of all sorts of wires. Speaker wires, telephone wires, hard drive cables, power cables, monitor cables, extension cords, &etc. These resided - until this morning - in a disorganized fashion in a bucket below my computer desk (where I now sit). This morning, being in a rather fastidious mood, I decided to disentangle the various wires and align them in a quasi-neat fashion in the bucket.
I had suspected for some time (months, in fact) that such a Day of Reckoning would come for the messy bucket, and so I had stored away a number of twisty ties (the type used for sealing bags of garbage or bread or frozen bagels) for the occaision. I put these twisty ties away in a special place so I could find them easily when I needed them for keeping the unruly wires coiled.
I couldn’t find them.
(This happens with some frequency, and not just to me, I am informed. I take things and put them in an especially logical place so they will be there when I need them, but then I go off and forget exactly where there is. )
I searched several likely places (top drawer of filing cabinet; in an unlabeled file folder; in my desk; in a baggie with the wires) for my carefully scavenged twisty ties, but they did not avail me. Eventually I came to the conclusion that they were Gone, and decided to seek another solution. Having already gotten it in my mind that I was going to straighten out the wire bucket today, I had no choice but to seek other twisty ties. Aside from taking them from unopened packages of bread, I had only one choice - take from the package of garbage bags below the sink. I understood that in the long run this would mean a bunch of garbage bags going either wasted or simply unsealed, but I was deperate and willing to face the consequences in a few months when the unstolen ties ran out.
Now, understand, there are two types of twisty ties. The proles may not notice the difference, but there are those of us in the world with discriminating taste who can’t help but pay attention to such things. A good twisty tie is a solid piece of plastic, usually grey or black, about an eighth of an inch thick. A crappy twisty tie is an exile piece of wire surrounded by some cheap green paper to make it look like a respectable twisty tie. (Upon vigorous twisting, the paper will fall off of a crappy twisty tie, and one will be left with only a bare wire.) My stolen garbage bag ties, as the thoughtful reader will have deduced from the preceding description, were of the latter, inferior type. They were also thoughtfully marked - on the cheap paper part - “WARNING: TO AVOID SUFFOCATION, KEEP PLASTIC BAGS AWAY FROM CHILDREN.” (It makes it sound like I’d be the one suffocating if a child got a hold of the garbage bag.)
So, having acquired the illicit twisty ties, and expressed dismay at their blatant lack of quality standards, I set about organizing my wire collection. At long last, it was done - each wire coiled and carefully bound about the middle with a wrinkly green paper twisty tie. I have set the well-organized wires away carefully in a logical place so I will be sure to have them findable when I next need them…
Posted 10:58 AM
Link ::
Comments (2)
Curls | May 30, 2002
As a young child - 5 or 6, as I recall - one time, I was accompanying my mother to the supermarket. It was terribly exciting being around all those brightly colored packages, and even more so being able to select some for purchase if I was well-behaved. I suppose I must have been taken to the supermarket in similiar fashion many times, but this is the only incident I can recall.
We were in the checkout aisle. My mother was conversing with someone I didn’t know - in retrospect, it could have been one of her patients - and, radiant little toddler as I was, I eventually became the focus of this stranger’s attention. She said something to the effect of, “My, any woman would love to have those delightful curls,” and she ruffled my hair.
I was horrified.
Did she think I was a little girl or something? What sort of compliment was that supposed to be? In my mind, I wanted to ask just what was she suggesting, but, being what I was, I think I did something like blushed and hid behind my mother’s thigh, scowling.
Posted 7:00 PM
Link ::