coldhearted scientist وداد

This weekend I have begun shopping for Hurricane Ike. I considered putting off roofing until the end of hurricane season, so as not to have to repeat the job. The roofers got here before I could make this wild decision. But if Ike or any other storm comes here, I am not repairing the roof again, I am getting a FEMA tarp. It will be fashionable, and it will harmonize with my paint colors.

I have been working, uninspired, on boring, bureaucratic things: letters of recommendation, a vita reduced to three pages that someone needs, things for intermediate level classes that need to be squared away and can be done in a workmanlike manner, things for senior/graduate courses that are interesting enough in themselves, but are not closely connected to my own current interests, so that I wonder, when do I do “my work?” But I have to get all of these things moving.

The summer was messy with more Peruvian events than I have described here, the culture shock was great upon arrival here, and the beginning of the semester was messy with the hurricane. I need to start working  in a normal manner, so I am trying to get very objective and infuse all things with only positive energy. Academia is too negative, and one thing I notice about my intermediate students is that they have not caught this disease yet – they have transferred no traumas onto academic work yet. I aim to emulate them.

There are additional, exotic Peruvian posts programmed to come up on this weblog, but the storm has brought me back to the local earth. I must empower this reality and make it interesting. And, it being the weekend, we will sing.

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The problem with most choral music performances is that they are so slow. Even funny songs are interpreted as dirges. For La Tricotea, it was a relief to find this conservative performance because in it, the song is at least not dead. But more interesting is the arrangement of the next version. Commentators do not like it since it incorporates the cacophony of actual tavern drinkers, but I think this is one of the more creative choir directors I have ever seen.

Written soon after my return from Peru: Like the tavern patrons, I would like a glass of wine, but I am not willing to go to the market to get it. I am having a severe case of standard of living shift and shock. Only recently I was amazed to be in a house with incandescent light bulbs and a seemingly endless supply of hot water. Now I am dissatisfied because the sun is not shining, because since I have frozen my gym membership, I cannot simply jump into a luxurious sauna, and because I have to go shopping myself and cook for myself unless I expect to eat permanently in restaurants. I am shocked to find myself so rich that I have a motor vehicle of my own, and yet I do not expect to have to do my own shopping. I wonder how picky I am going to get in the coming week. And I wonder whether the reason thermal baths are so beloved in Latin America is that people do not have bathtubs and hot water in their houses.

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Written post Gustav: Now, clearly, I am able to shop and cook, and I have gone through the rediscovery of the beauty of incandescent light twice. I would like to say that my AT&T DSL service has never been good. The signal was always intermittent, and the company swore up and down that there was no problem with my wiring (although my calculations were that there had to be a problem with the telephone wire going from the street to my house). It was more reliable to enter the unsecured network of a neighbor, which usually worked.

I then upgraded to faster DSL and wireless, for another $5 per month, on the theory that AT&T policy must be to push me to this by giving a weak signal to people paying at my level, and that the line of least resistance was to just go along. Matters did not improve, although there was a placebo benefit to knowing I had a secured wireless network of my very own – in theory, at least.

Then during Gustav my telephone line got pulled off my house. It is still connected, but most of it is draped in a nearby tree. The telephone still works, but the Internet barely does. A benefit to this is that AT&T at last does see that there is a problem with this line, and they will be here, or so they say, by September 10 to fix it. This may fix everything, but I am not counting on it.

A friend has a cable modem from Cox and it works very well. Is my neighbor’s wireless network a creature of Cox as well? I am wondering whether I, too, need a cable modem. I am also considering getting a second phone line and just using dialup. I am very familiar with dialup, and I do not want to mainline it, but it would be an improvement over my DSL service so far. What is your experience with DSL and/or cable?

Axé.