Forays into civilization and the pursuit of shiny objects

Well, it's been over a month since my last post. For half of that time I was on vacation back on the East Coast. It was unnerving to discover, on my first trip into Manhattan after an absence of six months, twenty-six days, and sixteen hours (not that I obsessively monitor these things), I had totally forgotten proper street-crossing technique. So, in an effort to avoid an untimely death by speeding taxi I had to resort to waiting for the light to change color. *sigh.* On my second day of walking around, however it came back to me: Step into street, look in direction opposite oncoming traffic for bike messengers, step farther into street, look in direction of oncoming traffic, proceed across street in between cars, arrive at destination on time. Now I'm back in Madison, but I haven't readjusted my street-crossing mentality yet, so I've caused several people to flinch by walking into the street well in advance of the walk signal turning on, after verifying that I was not going to be hit by anything. Ha! This weekend, however, I am going to Chicago to visit a friend who's starting grad school there. I will have to be careful. Chicagoans will definitely try to run me over.

Anyway, I went to the Met when I was in New York, and found the current roof garden exhibit (sculptures by Jeff Koons) to be highly amusing. Specifically, there's a sculpture of a 10'-15' tall balloon dog made out of yellow high-chromium steel. It's very shiny and reflects the skyline and Central Park and fills my inner child with glee. There's another, smaller (I think), orange version of this sculpture (and another one of a rabbit) currently on exhibit at the Meuseum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. This, after visiting my aforementioned friend and generally enjoying a final weekend of urban life before classes start is my main reason for going.

Roommate hunting, some true observations

A few months ago, I realized I was going to need new housemates to replace my current ones and that these new roommates were not going to materialize out of the blue. So, I, the intrepid protagonist, put an ad on the university's off-campus housing listing site. This, I assumed, was likely to attract a random sampling of graduate students, who may be irresponsible in their own absent-minded ways, but whose situation I can relate to and who I would, therefore, trust to pay the rent. The alternative was craigslist, which, in the stories of one of my current roommates, attracted several normal people, one recently paroled, extremely jittery, homeless person with $500 who was hoping to move in immediately, and one other guy who seemed ok and was permitted to move in, but had to be kicked out again when it became apparent that he was a verbally abusive, asocial, kleptomaniac. Right. So. University listing for me.

The responses to my ad came from mostly grad students, which I consider a success. However, for future roommate-hunting purposes, I have learned that ads aimed at reasonable grad students will not produce potential roommates who are all a) grad students, b) observant, or c) obviously capable of taking care of themselves.

For example, I received phone calls from the fathers (and it was always the fathers) of several undergrads who were looking for housing for their incoming freshman children. The questions I asked myself before failing to return their phone calls included: What parent, who has raised children I want to deal with, calls potential roommates themselves instead of making their 18 year old kid do it? As a >21 year-old, what <21 year-old would I want to assume the legal liability of living with (assuming I will neither hide, nor constantly monitor my inventory of judgment-impairing beverages)?

There were also a few incoming grad students (all of them for non-PhD programs, though) who came to visit with their parents. This did not inspire my confidence. When I moved to a new city, I managed to find accommodations for myself. I realize I'm unusually independent, but my grad student friends also found housing for themselves. If you want me to believe that you're old enough to feed and dress yourself and be a grad student and live without a babysitter, you probably should too.

Finally, there are my favorites - the women with cats. Necessary background information: the listings allow you to specify pet policies as "No pets", "Cats only", or "Pets negotiable" and then has a text box to explain the negotiability. My listing has "Pets negotiable" and the explanation says, "No cats. Dogs negotiable." So I've gotten a number of emails from people (always women) looking for someplace they can live with their cat(s). The first one said, "I know your listing says 'No cats' and I have a cat. However she's a very cute and well-behaved cat, does that make a difference?" I replied, "Unfortunately, that won't work. The prohibition on cats is not only because I dislike them, but because I'm allergic." The second one came today and said, "I know your listing says 'No cats' but I'm looking for a place to live in Madison with my two cats, is the room still available?" I haven't replied, because I have been unable to convince myself that the correct reply is "No, sorry the room has been taken." What I want to write would have the same effect, but would require lying: "Yes! The room is still available, and how fortunate! You have two cats. I hadn't previously noticed the typo in my listing, which I intended to read 'No cat' - singular. I would be allergic to one cat, but of course, everyone knows that if you have a pair of cats the dander from cat 1 will counteract the dander from cat 2, leaving me and my respiratory system happy and functional. Hooray!"

So anyway, I did successfully find new roommates. I don't think any of them will require extensive looking-after. They don't seem to have overbearing parents. They're all of legal drinking age. And when everyone is moved in, we will be able to bond over our shared hatred of cats.

I've caved

In search of new and exciting ways to procrastinate, I caved in and set up a twitter account for myself. I don't know yet how much I'll use it, but it's here: http://twitter.com/lazyphysics/ if you care.

Note that this doesn't mean I'm abandoning the blog, it just means that I will no longer feel obligated to wait until I can think of a complete sentence to write something. There will probably be a post here at some point in the next week or so.

-Mgmt

The Paul Simon-mobile lives!

I am the proud owner of a car that is no longer sitting in my driveway unable to start. Woohoo! Now I can go purchase $50 of gas and drive around the upper Midwest to my heart's content. This should also have the result of making evening/weekend social outings less of a pain- on several recent occasions there have been one or two cars, seating between 2 and 4 passengers legally, to take between 5 and 7 people from point A to point B and back(the upshot has been that we're all much closer friends now).

In other news, if anyone cared about my camping trip - my dry socks hypothesis was disproved. I had exactly the needed number of socks. I could have done with an extra pair of sneakers though, as mine got completely soaked through with mud on the first morning and I had to wear boots for the rest of the trip.

Camping!

I am celebrating the solstice by going camping in Southern WI with some friends for the weekend. Happily the campsite where we're staying in has not been flooded recently - but the forecast calls for scattered thunderstorms today and tomorrow - so I will have an opportunity to test my dry socks hypothesis (I'm bringing twice as many pairs of socks as I *should* need... we'll see if that works). The park in question also has a large bat population, which presumably means no mosquitoes. Sweet. Anyway, I need to go finish getting my stuff together to leave.

Happy Friday the 13th!

I noticed it was both the 13th and Friday today. Then I thought for a while and realized that exactly 5.5 years ago was also a Friday the 13th... memorable as the day I got into Columbia. Today has not been quite so good a day - its major selling point so far is that the torrential rain and tornadoes finally stopped and the sun came out. :-)

In which the protagonist's uncharacteristically brilliant planning is thwarted

So, when you're going to do something outside, you know how it usually turns out that if you forget to consider bringing extra socks or you think before leaving the house, "nah... I probably won't get that wet," you end up really wishing you had something dry to put on your feet? I have a theory - it says that if you bring N pairs of dry socks with you, in hindsight you'll always realize that the correct number to bring would have been N+1.

On Sundays, as long as it is not snowing and people don't have homework to worry about, a bunch of friends and I spend the afternoon playing soccer. Usually, after soccer, I am sweaty and covered with dust (or mud, depending on the condition of the field), however I only occasionally remember to bring a change of clothes/shoes so I can stay at work in clean and dry clothes for a while before I go home. Today was one of those rare days... anticipating a rainy afternoon, I figured I should bring a complete change of clothes so as to have something comfortable to wear for dinner and the return journey to my house. We played for two hours, and while the sky looked mildly threatening for a while it didn't actually rain. When I got back to my office I put on all my clean clothes to avoid being sweaty and smelling as bad as I otherwise would have. Then, I went out to dinner with some fellow soccer players.

Now, in some incredibly cruel twist of fate, it began pouring while we were at dinner (roughly half a mile from the building we work in and where I'd left my stuff) so my previously dry clothes got soaked on the way back to the office to retrieve my laptop and my soccer stuff. What's even worse is that the shoes in question were the my last pair of dry sneakers. My other pair were taken sailing on Friday and ended up completely water-logged... they're still damp. And ironically, the jeans in question had just been washed as they had also gone sailing (they smelled suspiciously like lake water when they got home). So, despite my best efforts, I had to come home and immediately change clothes anyway... and because it's been thundering like crazy for the last hour I will need to change again after I can finally take a shower. Gah.