I haven't had to stop working because my forearms were burning in, oh, 17 years? The last time was throwing 15-foot 6X10s up to a guy on the third floor of a house we were building--dozens of them, and then pushing huge trusses up to him, and finally plywood sheets, and then we hauled shingle bundles up a ladder. Oh, Christ, was that a good burn. My arms feel that way again, but from moving the goddam Bound Periodicals around. Another three weeks of this and I'll look like Ludacris in his new video; I mean I'll look even more like Ludacris in his new video.
I don't feel guilty, despite only getting one twelfth of the section done. Nobody else is doing any work here today. So far I've had lengthy chats with everybody who's working upstairs--they've all come to visit me as I throw 80-year old volumes around the 2nd floor.
My arms hurt so bad I can't type! Argh.
Ok, I've always said I love the change of seasons and I like cold weather and I'm more a fall-winter guy than I am a summer guy--well, fuck that bullshit today. It's cold as Condaleeza's steely 9-11 testimony out there. My beard froze between 2 York and Cook Library this morning. Uncle Area 51, whenever he's up from Florida, always gives me a hard time. "Fuck that weather! Couldn't wait to get out of Pennsylvania and MD ain't much better. Why do you choose to stay?" (rote "change of season loving" bullshit). "Well, you'll outgrow that," he always told me.
He was right. After the last three or four winters I'm starting to say fuck it. Get me OUT of here.
We saw Imelda on Sunday--in case you haven't heard, it's a biodocumentary by a MD filmmaker about the wife of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Cha was powerfully moved by the film because riot of footage shot before Marcos declared martial law and clamped down brutally--Cha's mother just barely made it out and escaped to America (pregnant with my wife, BTW!), and had a close call with Marcos' thugs at the airport (she had all her cash stuffed in her bra). Cha wept for her cousins who got stuck there and lived through those dark times. Imelda is a nut-job extraordinaire. Such amoral people fascinate me. What drives them? How can they live in such denial? The film features footage of an attempted assassination--some guy with a small machete attacks Imelda and hits her 12 times. Her thoughts? "Why would he try to kill me with something so ugly? Why couldn't he find a nice sword, or at least tie a bit of yellow ribbon around it?" Precious!
1 comment:
For me it was my hands that hurt--but I wasn't doing uniformly huge journals--various sized books...still got a good workout on the third floor this summer, yet still look like crap. That's the way it goes!
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