Monthly Archives: January 2005

this weekend, i went to a new/used bookstore in sunnyvale with anderson and jason. where i bought the book about the curious garden tine forked dog in the nighttime. which i then read over the weekend. it’s very good. the author is all about the inner-workings of asperger’s syndrome and i’m willing to believe he’s portraying it correctly because he’s worked with autistic kids. the bits about maths are good, and the bits about toby the rat, also the colors and the cars and Siobhan. which i find to be a simply wonderful name. and the voice and the descriptions and the pictures. also the idea of the book being about writing a book about doing detecting about the dead dog on the neighbor’s lawn.

at one point though, christopher, the main character, approaches a woman with a kid in a stroller with his swiss army knife open to the saw blade position prepared to slice and dice if she touches him. and so begins the odyssey of the boy-with-knife-can-travel-can-stab story wherein he goes to london and ALMOST stabs, or horribly mutilates, 8 people. this is not ok. i was with him up to the point when he almost killed a baby. sure he doesn’t do it, but he gives you the impression that if someone touched him, his stabbing them would merely be self-defense. scary.

‘where can i buy a map?’

‘sorry?’

‘where can i buy a map?’

‘where are you trying to go?’

‘the train station.’

‘you can see the train station from here.’

‘where is the train station?’

‘you can see it.’

‘no.’

‘here,’ you reach out to point and turn him around and he goes for the knife. stab! stab! mortal wound! gushing blood! he falls down doing the groaning. the baby starts screaming. you keep leaking. he likes the color red though, which is excellent. if your blood was brown (or yellow) you would be so screwed. not that you’re not already screwed. what with the geyser of blood spurting out of the hole in your body.

When I go into the bathroom to shower, I shut the door. Not all the way mind, because that would require force and also a caring about nudity when I live by myself. So, the door is always just the tiniest bit not stuck in the frame. And I’ll get in the shower, you know, with the soap, and all of a sudden the door will spring open.

For a while this was terrifying. Ghosts, I thought. Or psychotic serial killers desensitiving me to terror so that when the end actually came I wouldn’t even be expecting it. But now I just look out the shower’s glass door at ground level and I can see a fuzzy little white and black body wandering around, wondering what I’m doing.

Moo Cow thinks there should be no doors between us. This apartment follows a ‘Her Castle, Her Rules’, system of management.

Though maybe, it sometimes still is a ghost taking advantage of me thinking it’s a cat and then chuckling wildly up in the eaves while he rattles his chains. Or the serial killer idea, I feel, still has some merit. Because maybe Moosers is in cahoots with him and is the Desensitizer. Or it could be Christine, I suppose, who still has a key to my apartment. Though what her motive would be, I hesitate to speculate.

this morning i woke and went to work for the first time in 2 weeks. it was hard. doubly hard because i kept having to shove cats off my hip all night long and they just kept sleep walking right back up there and flopping down. little bastards. why do they feel the need to perch on the highest level in the bed? is it some sort of odd superiority complex? i just don’t know.

anyway, the office today was a freezer box full of penguins. seriously, the heat on the entire campus was broken. my boss came in to the gold room and told us that it’s a good thing it’s all one system since this means the president’s heater isn’t working either and thus it might actually be fixed soon.

i spent the day typing with frostbitten fingers, wearing 3 layers of clothing, (including my wool overcoat and a scarf), trying to convince myself that moving beyond hypothermia was an adventure. this all came to an abrupt halt when the boss man came in again and told us that we should all leave because it was too cold to do anything. with promises to bring fuzzy slippers and gloves tomorrow, i took my leave of the polar bear cave.

home again, home again, lickity split. already i am in fuzzy slippers and pajamas set to contemplate the composition of little weenies in their buns. the song is both heartwarming and toe tapping while the treat itself is scrumptious.