Alight, Abright

Attention passengers, due to work on the tracks, we will not be stopping at the Morse or Jarvis stops. If you wish to get off at either of those stops, alight the train at Howard, and take the southbound Red Line train.

I heard this announcement for the second time today. They're doing a bunch of track work on the northbound side of the line of the el that I take to get, well, pretty much anywhere other than Evanston, and to get to two stops, you have to get off at a third stop, then take the train going in the opposite direction to get off at your stop.

The weird thing I see here is the term alight. I was unaware that anyone actually had actually used this term anytime since 1946, at least in the United States, and not outside of a book.

There is no reason I can find for the use of "alight the train" instead of "get off the train," "exit the train," or even "dismount the train," though the latter is clearly most acceptable if you plan to backflip off the train.

There is really no use for this word in the context of the Chicago Transit Authority. Even the definition linked to above states that alight means:

"2. To set down, as from a vehicle; dismount: The queen alighted from the carriage."

The queen may still alight (albeit from a Rolls Royce), but the drunks on the el trying to get back to the liquor store at Jarvis get off the train.

Not much

It's that time: When my day was so hideously boring that there's really not much I can say.

I feel some sort of obligation to continue to update this weblog, since I've managed to do it every day for the last couple of months. But today was just sort of a non-day.

I got up really late because my one class (2pm Gender and Society) was cancelled, took a shower, ate lunch, screwed around for a while, went to lab and spent three hours learning about the joy of AVID editing, then came home, ate dinner, watched the Simpsons and then read for about three hours.

Then I had a beer and tried to figure out what to write.

It's an odd feeling, having your existence seem reduced to the bizarre shit that happens on a daily basis. It's even odder to feel that your day is incomplete when nothing weird happens.

Well, okay, weird things did happen today, but as Obscure Store shows, they happen in great volume pretty much every day. It's just that none of them happened to me personally, and this, certinaly, is an unusual occurence. Maybe that's the weird thing that happened today: Nothing weird happened.

Though there's a distinct possibility that it's the beer talking.

O'Hair

I went and got a haircut today for the first time in about five months, and I have run into my usual problem: In order to get my hair short enough so that I will not immediately need another haircut, they have to cut it just a wee bit too short for me to get it in a ponytail.

This drives me batshit.

I really hate wearing my hair out because my hair seems to have one eternal goal, which is to fall into my face and piss me off. I always end up inhaling a big strand sooner or later, so I just wear a ponytail.

The problem is that you can't go with the half-assed ponytail. It just doesn't work. The hair falls out the sides, and because you were trying to hold it back, it rebels by shooting way out the side of your head and making you (or me, in this case) look like a complete idiot.

I tried the hat method, but my good hat has gone missing, and my other hat (yes, I'm down to only two, believe it or not for those of you who knew me in my previous life when you couldn't pry any of my hats off with a crowbar) makes me look like a moron, and does nothing to combat the outward sprout of my hair, further confirming my idiotic look.

I'm going to try the sunglasses-as-hairband thing tomorrow, which has proven fairly successful in the past. The only snag: It's supposed to rain. Oh well, the rain will plaster my hair in place.

Hopefully.

Oh, inverted world

I really need to stop taking naps during the day, because they always end up far longer than I intend them to be.

Example: I intended to lie down for a bit after I returned a bunch of film equipment this morning. By "a bit", i mean about two hours. I ended up sleeping for six hours, and woke up somewhat disoriented because the position of the sun had shifted so drastically.

So of course, this leaves me awake now (3am), working on a project I could easily have gotten done this afternoon, and my world is totally inverted from what it should be. Although, theoretically, I could have been working on the project instead of screwing around with my music site earlier this evening.

But I want to be a musician, so I guess I might as well get used to being awake when it's dark and asleep when it's light. Yay for that.

Service with a...time machine?

I went to Cozy's, the local Bland Thai place that I like because they have really good pad thai, to reward myself for getting through a project without killing one of my partners.

This was not an easy task. I can take monumental stupidity if at least the person can admit it. I can take irritation if at least the person knows what s/he's doing. I cannot take the combination of the two, especially if the person has no idea what s/he's doing and refuses to admit it.

And this was one of my partners, who my other partner and I had to repeatedly restrain ourselves from beating over the head with a gobo arm. This was an extraordinarily difficult task, as this guy is perma-stoned and is convinced this gives him insight into the way things ought to work.

It doesn't.

So anyway, getting back to my actual point, since I managed to avoid killing him despite my intense desire to, I decided to reward myself with Thai food. I get to Cozy's and order my usual, and I sit down to start reading, as I figure it's probably going to be a while before my food is ready.

I reach the second page of the reading I have to do and I hear, "You had the chicken pad thai with rice, right?" My food was already there.

I guess, logically, I can see how it would work: Soft rice noodles don't take long to cook and the chicken was obviously pre-cooked. But it was still really bizzare to have the food arrive so quickly, especially since I had been settling in for a long wait.

It felt like I was in this strange, futuristic universe, where you could just order food and it would appear. Like in old Marvin the Martian cartoons when someone would put food in a rehydrator or something and it would just go *boing*! and be done.

Either that, or in the Batman movie. You know, the old one they made from the '60s TV show, where they have to fight the forces of evil that dehydrate the U.N.? I don't know why I thought that, maybe the association with de- and re-hydration.

I shall now return you to your tangent-free (or at least less tangential) universe.