Enthusiastick Journal

Remember back when I used to blog every weekday? Yeah, me too. Heh. Good times. Maybe I will again after the new year.

Man, I have got the cold that just won't quit. Its been two weeks now, and while its not exactly still going strong, I'm still rocking a dry cough from deep in my chest every night when I go to bed and every morning when I wake up. This is one reason I have not yet recorded my vocals for sing_along_club (and, as a side note, if you haven't joined up yet, do it now!) I may not have any illusions about my ability to sing well, but I'm vain enough to at least want to be able to breath deeply without coughing while I do so.

The afternoon/evening snow storm has left Boston coated in a blanket of white that is, admittedly, quite pretty. I'm still woefully unprepared for it, though. Getting ready for Winter is one of those "being grown up" things I still haven't quite got the knack of yet. My boots fell apart this Spring and I haven't yet replaced them, so I'm currently wearing these black rubber galosh pull-over things over my sneakers. My Winter coat is still packed away with some nice sweaters, all of which I've been meaning to take to the dry cleaners for over a month. In short, its a good thing the temperature got up over freezing today, or I might be in real trouble.

(Don't get me started on the fact that my car is thoroughly snowed in and doesn't have snow tires on it, and won't until shortly before Christmas, when I go home to CT and retrieve them. I fail at planning.)

I have a problem with snow boots. On the one hand you have my LARP sensibilities: I want everything I own to be functional, durable, and designed along classic lines that either look like they might be period, or at the very least don't draw attention to themselves as ostentatiously modern. On the other hand I have the world's most superheated feet (I sleep with them sticking out from under the blankets and sheets in all but the coldest of weather) so most warm winter boots with lining leave me feeling like my toes are roasting. And I hate waterproofed hiking boots when used as a stand-in for snow boots. What the cock is that shit?

My father has a pair of truly awesome snowboots from back in the day, all stompy and rubber-soled and glorious. And because they're his, they're something like a full size too big for me, which means my feet don't get too warm in them -- I can cinch the laces tight around the ankles so they don't flop all over the place and they keep the moisture out, but still have plenty of wiggle room for my actual feet. I've been tempted to steal them for years but I doubt he would appreciate it.

Maybe I should just buy some big rubber rain boots, like the kind you would put on an eight-year-old. That's not weird, is it?

Clouds are kind of miraculous.

Not the most profound thought, I know, but there you have it. As I was sitting on the plane flying to Chicago on my recent trip I found myself staring out the window at the whispy, illusory shapes formed by the water vapor. They seemed so solid and tangible, and so close, like I could reach out and touch them.

As early as junior high I had science teachers who waxed eloquent about how lucky we are that the dihydrogen oxide is curved. Just a quirk of quantum physics, really -- it could easily be straight, like carbon dioxide. And then everything would be different. If it weren't bent, it wouldn't be polar. It wouldn't be liquid at room temperature, for one thing. And it wouldn't be less dense when frozen, so ice wouldn't float. And not nearly so many things would dissolve in it.

The universe as we know it would look very, very different. And we ourselves wouldn't be in that universe, at least not in anything like the form we're in now.

And one of those miracles of bent, polar water molecules is the formation of clouds. The idea that vaporized water should happen to accumulate with dust in the air into beautiful, visible gray and white shapes? Amazing.

I've had a lot of time to contemplate this notion recently. At my recently-concluded temp gig I've been working in the John Hancock tower, about fifty stories up. In the past few weeks I've watched some truly magnificent storms roll in along the river Charles, dumping rain and sometimes lightning onto the earth below. The building creaks when the wind blows fast enough, twisting in the wind.

A month or two ago I had a late night conversation in my kitchen with my friend Eric P about divinity. He and I have very, very different views of the world, especially religiously. He's something like a Buddhist, and a number of the things I take as implicit in my faith and spirituality seem to bother him deeply. Nevertheless I enjoy the dialogue a lot -- Eric's a great guy with whom to have a debate.

He'd probably laugh at me, though, if he knew how much wonder I took in staring at the clouds. I grasp the basic science behind them and have a sense of the deeper mathematics at work in their existence and their shape.

I'm twenty-five years old, and I still think clouds are magical.

The weather is completely ridiculous today. Bright shining sun and blue skies, bone-chilling cold and gusts of wind that feel as if they could pluck you off the ground and deposit you somewhere in the next county. I am dreading the walk from work to the train station.

So there's a lot of hooplah in my office lately about having to install patches to accomodate the new start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time, because if we don't peoples' calendars will fail to synch up and there will be chaos. Its really only because of said hooplah that I am aware that DST is changing at all. Yesterday it occurred to me to actually ask the question of why DST was changing (if it ain't broke, right?) This led to some interesting revelations.

Apparently in 2005 a federal law was passed (the Energy Policy Act of 2005, in fact) which, among other things, futzes with Daylight Savings Time as an energy-saving measure. Traditionally (or in America since 1986, anyway) DST begins on the first Sunday in April and ends on the last Sunday in October. Starting this year, however, it will begin on the second Sunday in March (which is to say this weekend, March 11th) and end on the first Sunday in November. So it starts earlier and ends later. This in spite of the fact that there is a great deal of controversy as to whether DST actually conserves energy at all, particularly because its based upon a model that proceeds such innovations as air-conditioning.

This irks me, and not simply because I have to remember to change my clock or because the coming weekend is abruptly one hour shorter than I thought it was. Nor does it particularly bother me that basically every computer system everywhere is going to have to be patched to accomodate this change. No, it irks me mostly because, among other things, the bill describes this change as provisional. Contingent upon demonstrable energy savings. Which is to say after all this fuss and change there is a possibility that, in a year or two, when we discover that energy consumption did not go down (or, as some people are predicting, went up) everything will have to be changed back, necessitating further busywork.

More information on all this nonsense can be found here and here. And remember to "Spring forward" this Sunday. Or go on a clock-smashing rampage of mass hysteria that precipitates nationwide anarchy. Whatever, I don't even care anymore.

Walking around outside in Boston the past couple of days its like watching the polar ice caps melting in miniature. Someone more clever than me is ultimately responsible for that notion. There have been a lot of discussions of the ridiculous storm, and how it layered various different kinds of moisture atop one another and then conveniently froze them all. And someone, I forget precisely who, quipped that they now understood how glaciers formed. And its true; there are these little hunks of ice everywhere that are remarkably resistant to melting. For the past couple of days we've had temperatures well above freezing and a healthy dose of sunshine, and so the little buggers are losing moisture without losing structural integrity, so everything that hasn't been salted or sanded is wet and icy and treacherous underfoot.

Twice in the last month I've made "friends only" posts, and its got me thinking. I don't like making friends-locked posts for the same reason I don't like using lj cuts. I didn't like them before theferrett laid down his guidelines (parts 1 and 2) for a succesful livejournal and forbade them. (And, whether consciously or not, I have used those posts and the ones related to it as a sort of style manual. I am aware of the ways in which I diverge from it.)

Ferrett more or less articulated what I was already thinking. I'm neurotic enough about friends-locked posts that I feel compelled to make public posts pointing to them, because I fear otherwise that they will go unread; people browse their journals without being logged in all the time. But that kind of defeats the point. Its like standing on the rooftops shouting "Look, look, I wrote something I don't want the whole world to read and its right over here!" As a general rule if I don't feel comfortable with the notion of an entry being public then it doesn't belong in my livejournal.

Except of course there are exceptions, because there are exceptions to every rule, and I just happened to run into two of them within the arbitrary period of the last thirty days. Sometimes there are things I want to say that I'd rather not everyone be able to read, for one reason or another. And I'm aware that friends-locked posts are far from secure, so its only things in that grey area that make the cut. It would be OK if other people read them, I'd simply rather they did not.

The whole thing is preposterous, really. There are scores of people in this world who's journals range from mostly to exclusively friends only. I count some of them as actual real-life friends of mine. I don't want my livejournal to be friends only, but if I'm going to make some sort of blog entry every weekday then every so often I'm going to come up with the sort of entry that makes me hesitate. I guess the trouble is that there's no easy litmus test, and that bothers me. Thus far I'm dealing with these things on a case-by-case basis, and I'd much rather be able to say "this post meets criteria XY and Z, and so it must sadly be friends-locked." And until I come up with one, I'm probably going to continue to be antsy about it, because sometimes there's no avoiding that grey area.

Winter has at last descended upon Boston, and its come swiftly and without remorse, angry at having been held back too long by bouts of unseasonable warmth and drizzling Autumnal rain in place of snow. The weather service would have me believe that the high today will be in the low twenties, with a wind chill dropping us down into the mid-teens. But weather.com tells me that its currently 11 degrees Fahrenheit, and that it "feels like" -3. That's more in synch with what I experienced walking to and from the train this morning; a bitter cold that bites viciously when the wind gusts, regardless of how warmly you're dressed, reminding you that no sensible person would be out in weather like this.

It won't last. Despite its outrage and ferocity Winter doesn't have staying power this year; current predictions hold that temperatures will be up above freezing tomorrow, and though there's precipitation expected on Friday no one can say whether it will come in the form of snow or rain. Which is good really, because I seem to have a minor cold, and its hard enough to drag myself from bed without the prospect of facing icy bone-chilling winds when I set foot outside. Also I continue to wrestle with my roommates for control of our thermostat. Both of their bedrooms have separate heating zones, so they can be heated up even when the heat in the house is turned down, provided it is not turned off entirely. Whereas my room doesn't even have storm windows, and is typically five to ten degrees colder than the rest of the house. On multiple occasions I've had the audacity to notch the main thermostat up as high as 66 or even 68 degrees only to have it turned down again as soon as my back was turned. There's nothing quite like waking up to discover that moving even a fraction of an inch in either direction will give you chills as it transports your body out of the pocket of body heat you've created for yourself, into territory where everything around you, even the blanket in which you're wrapped, is damnably cold.

Sorry if I seem downbeat. I have half a cold, and I'm stuck in the doldrums of no new television. Heroes won't return for another couple of weeks, and the Torchwood finale kind of, well, sucked. Things have gotten so dire that I've picked up Ugly Betty as a filler. I've watched all the back episodes and added it to the Tivo season passes. I didn't mean to pick up another entirely girly fixation, but, well, there you have it.