Archive of things to do with 'feeling'

• 06.01.04 Tuesday, 1 June 2004:

  I think the solution I’ve happened on is a happy one: this way I won’t feel like I’m pestering you when you have to finish your papers, and I won’t feel I’m neglecting the three or four people who look forward to reading something here.

  I haven’t told you much about work recently. The Lawn & Garden section of Walmart is its own little walled-off kingdom, with bare, untiled cement floors, without the views down half the store that the other areas have. That makes it attractive to shoplifters - I usually find at least one empty package of something a night, and often it’s soda bottles or cookies - they bring them from grocery, hide out in my zone, and eat them. One guy I won’t forget for a long time, he came in around three a.m., walked past me without seeing me, wearing a black jean vest, a black safari hat, black jeans and silver belt and boots, and with tatoos on his arms and a well-trimmed silver beard and long white hair, looking fit, and when I gave my usual Hi there how are you tonight anything in particular you’re looking for? he stopped short and looked at me in astonishment and said No, I don’t know what I want yet, turning his shopping cart halfway around as he said it. I said my usual, Well okay, just give me a holler if you need anything, but he was already headed out, saying, I don’t know what I’m looking for yet, I don’t know, in a real defensive tone.

  
  Tags: thinking, feeling.
• 11.03.03 Monday, 3 November 2003:

  Say what you like about empire, it makes things simpler for the tourist. On four days and change on the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Chita, I had interesting conversation with, on my count:
  three Kyrgyz
  two Ukranians
  two Russian Russians (one with a Buryat grandfather)
  two Kazakhstan Russians (one of whom had, I think, some Kazakh ancestry)
  one Tatar
  one Azeri
  one Tajik
  one Armenian,
  and we can count the one Moldovan who drove my taxi to the train station.

  
  Tags: feeling, happening.
• 10.22.02 Sunday, 22 October 2002:

  Before last week, I had never seen an animal being butchered. I somehow didn’t expect it to be so conveniently built. If you keep its legs perpendicular up while you’re working, nothing falls out, but if you want to get something out you only have to cut a couple tubes. The skin slips right off, whole, and makes a rug, so the floor doesn’t get bloody and the meat doesn’t get dirty. The blood also won’t shoot out, if only you wait long enough after you kill it before cutting, but collects conveniently, so you can spoon it right out. The appendix is easy to find, and easier than anything else to cut out and throw away, since it’s only attached on one end, and the intestines make very useful sacks for boiling meat and blood in. I expected myself to be disturbed, watching it, since the last time I saw anything nearly as grisly was my freshman year of college, when I couldn’t watch a set of heart and lungs getting cut up; but I showed disappointingly insensitive, this time. I wasn’t quite capable of touching it, and didn’t join the others (including a five-year old) in a piece of raw liver. But I only felt a little discomfort watching it getting cut up, and that was probably only because it was a sheep. If it had been something less sympathetic, it wouldn’t've bothered me at all, I’m sure.

  For example cows, I don’t like, and I like them less the more I see of them. They are willfully stupid and small-minded, suspicous creatures. They are completely unaware of how awkward they carry themselves, they are even proud of what they consider is their grace, although they’re always inadvertently blocking roads or stepping on dogs. They love to act superior and snort at me. But you can see they’re really terrified, they’re incapable of hiding the fear in their eyes.

  
  Tags: thinking, feeling.
• 08.06.02 Tuesday, 6 Aug 2002:

  I’m right now sitting at a public email terminal in the LA airport, waiting for my connection to Honolulu. I’m waiting an extra four hours for it, because I gave up my seat to some standby passenger, a course I recommend to all. I get a fresh new (1st class!) seat, a free ticket to […]

  
  Tags: feeling.
• 08.05.02 Monday, 5 Aug 2002 (2):

  When I got off the bus from Chicago in DC last Thursday, lugging my far-too-heavy bags (I’m sure they were over a hundred pounds, but I couldn’t say how far over. I can say, though, that I would have been better off mailing some of those books), I was intending to walk to the metro, two blocks from the Greyhound station.

  But as soon as I got out the door, an old man with pop-eyes, crouching like a deaf, undernourished, stupid, hairless gorilla, said “Patrick?” I said “Yep,” which seems to have been accompanied, in his mind, with the implied continuation “I was indeed looking for a taxi, thanks”: he motioned me to follow him toward his.

  
  Tags: feeling.
• 08.05.02 Monday, 5 Aug 2002:

  After spending four days in Shennandoah County, I find, retrospectively, Chicago is very flat. I didn’t realize, or had forgotten, what terrain was like. It makes you live in places a little differently.

  In Shennandoah, there’s usually only one way to get somewhere and that way is determined by the land it goes through. Directions are limited to from town and to town, and when you’re walking, to upstream, downstream, uphill, and downhill.

  
  Tags: feeling.
• 08.01.02 Thursday, 1 Aug 2002 (2):

  So soon already, less than a month until I’ll be heading to Russia, to teach English. I’m extremely nervous. The high school where I’ll be teaching is in Aginskoe, Chita region, a predominately Buryat area. These people have arranged it for me, and I’ll be there all next year. I’ve never taught in a high school, and I wonder whether my Russian will be adequate: many of my students won’t have had English before I get there.

  The region is interesting, though: the Buryats (in my area) have been Buddhist for some time, in fact they are one of the few indiginous peoples whose religion the Russians (and later the Soviets) didn’t manage to suppress. Then there’s Lake Baikal, one of the natural wonders of the world by any standard. So I don’t think I’ll be bored, just cold.

  
  Tags: feeling.