Today I was pushed to my limits in terms of my threshold for boredom.
I woke up at six quite by accident and couldn't sleep. It might have been the thousands of roosters and church bells across the street. I noticed that my fan wasn't spinning. "Didn't I turn it on last night?" I though. Well, this is usually how I discover that we're in the midst of a brownout, black out, walay kuriente. The winds were blowing so hard and the rain was coming down in sheets and the combination must have knocked out the power lines. If we lose power, it's almost a sure thing that we've lost running water too. Heavy rains usually knocks out my town's cistern. Indeed, we had no running water or electricity for most of the day.
This in and of itself is no problem; the catch is that it has been pooring rain all day. I was trapped inside the house with little to do. But you know, come to think of it, there would be little for me to do even if I could leave the house. Most certainly I would be out in the hammock instead of pacing in the kitchen like a madman reading, listening to my iPod...yeah, I had the good fortune to have charged my iPod yesterday! So know what I did? I laid in bed for five hours, finishing up Dreams from my Father (1995), the first book of Barack Obama in audiobook format.
I now know so much about him, 7 hours worth anyway. He has a great voice for audiobooks, he read it himself.
Otherwise, I wasted my life on the internet and listened to The Who ad nauseum. Two years of this will certainly kill me. This rain is driving me mad. Cultural isolation is driving me mad. Even The Who has started to drive me mad.
It will be fine as soon as the weather improves (which it has yet to do since December).
Fortunately I have over 2 hours of political podcasts to listen to to. It's the only thing I've been looking forward to all day.
Hey hey, I thought I would comment on your blog because I remember getting a few comments on my travel blog and I loved it. Sorry to hear about your boredom and I hope you don't mind if I'm a little jealous (just of the idea not the reality boredom is a bitch). I started work this week and it was actually really good. The two main algae guys are leaving next week so another staffer (not a research scientist) and I are taking over, so there has been a lot to absorb.
ReplyDeleteI also liked your post on post-racism. I agree that assumption of the term is that once whites are no longer a majority or in power there will not be any racism. I wonder if racism will simply shift to the new majority directed towards a new minority. Another random thought I had and could be interpreted as not PC but is more a scientific question. It was Darwin's birthday this week and I was thinking of species distinction. One common distinction of two different species is that the two groups cannot produce offspring either because of genetic, behavioral, or geographic separation. Prior to globalization and mass migration of the last 1,000 years could different races be considered different species by geographical and behavior separation? I had this thought in China when in a sea of Asians I saw another American I had never met. Seeing him amongst the others and realizing that is what I looked like definitely made me feel like a different species. I say species instead of race to eliminate the political nature in the observation and try to convey the animal feeling I had. We are all humans and we are all animals sometimes it is disturbing to realize that.