I mean, I haven't been abandoned by anyone, as far as I know. (Oh, sure, a have a couple of friends who are pretty slack about answering their e-mail, but I'm not always the world's greatest correspondant myself, and anyway I chat with them on a semi-regular basis, so I know they haven't abandoned me. They just haven't written.) I haven't lost anything. I don't think I'm abandoning anyone else.
My dad was telling me yesterday about a dream he'd had in which he was lost in a large, confusing city with a blank map. He interpreted it to be his confusion over the letter he'd gotten recently explaining that he owed more in taxes than he thought. But I couldn't figure out what these abandonment dreams were trying to tell me. Any ideas?
I'm working on a new project for this page, sortof. Because the journal is called Reflections in the Dragon's Eye, I thought I'd re-do the page on which I describe people. Here is the current page, and here is what I have in mind for the new page. Obviously, I'll need to take some more pictures if I go that route, but before I make it official, I'd really like to know what you think - or if you even care.
Matt got his Hammacher Schlemmer catalog yesterday! For those of you poor souls who haven't seen this before, Hammacher Schlemmer offers only the very finest in gadgets and toys for people with more money than sense. Last year's featured item was an honest-to-god submarine, sized to fit one or two people.
This year's feature is, in essense, a remote-control boat so you can go waterskiing without needing to bother with the hassle of taking turns with other people. "It is nearly 8 feet in length and is operated solely by the skier, using a push-button panel built into the towline handle (included)." This amazing little device can be yours for only $9,999.95! (Plus $550 S&H. May not be legal for use in some states.) Also on the first page are featured a calorie-counting hula hoop ($70) and a motorized skateboard ($900). On the second page are an authentic British telephone box converted into both a shower and a telephone stand ($9,000); a CD recorder and player ($600), and my personal favorite: The World's Smallest PDA Computer Watch ($300). (It looks like a techie's wet dream - it's even really programmable - but I don't see a way to type!)
Other items of interest: A battery-powered chainsaw; a remote-controlled air conditioner; a light for your sock drawer (so you can get dressed without waking up your partner); a drag chute for runners; the insect vacuum (a leftover from last year, but I can't get over it); electric body-hair tweezers (with gold-plated tweezer disks!); and a robotic lawnmower (pictured here). Oh, and for those of you who've been craving them ever since I went through this catalog last year, they do still carry the bulletproof tableware. Word of the Day: polyglot - speaking, writing, or containing several languages; widely diverse in ethnic/cultural origins
I always wanted to be polyglot. When I was a kid, I'd babble nonsense and pretend it was a foreign language. (I'm not talking about anything as elaborate as actually making up a language. I'd just let a random stream of syllables flow from my mouth and think whatever I wanted to say. Since I was playing by myself, the invisible people I was talking to always understood me, or didn't, depending on what I wanted them to do.)
Then I got to school and discovered that learning new languages was actually work. Much harder than, say, math, or science. I chickened out and took Latin for my high school requirement. Latin, you see, didn't require that I learn how to speak it. I did pretty well the first year, not badly the second, only mediocre the third year, and then I decided to quit while I was ahead.
I do wish I'd hung on for that fourth year, though, because then I got to William and Mary and found out that a fourth year of Latin would have absolved me of their foreign language requirement. Well, I didn't want to take any more Latin, and I was dating a German at the time, so I took German. I discovered then that it's actually easier to learn a language if you're speaking it on something like a regular basis. Björn and I broke up before the end of my first semester, but I enjoyed German. Unlike the French I'd been briefly exposed to in elementary school, the rules for spelling and pronunciation made sense.
Of course, I've pretty well forgotten it all, now. I can barely remember enough German to ask for a beer ("Bier?") and I don't even like beer! And to think, toward the end of my third semester of German, I translated that Christmas classic, "I Want A Hippopotomus For Christmas" into German. Sortof.
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