Archive of things to do with 'weather'

• 04.06.08 Beach hotel:

  We’re at the beach for the weekend. Our hotel is book-themed. Each room is named after an author: we’re staying in the Lincoln Steffens room, decorated with a desk and typewriter; and we have photos on our wall: of a grimacing Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson looking like the missing butler from the Munsters. They really look as dead as they are. Teddy doesn’t look like his end was restful. There are photos of authors everywhere, the hallways are hung with them all up and down their length, so dense they are at most a half a foot apart. Photos are standing on the bookshelves, arranged in layered rows on the mantlepieces, and for sale in the gift shop as postcards.

  
  Tags: reading, travel, water, sink, library, weather, window.
• 04.03.08 Looking forward, looking back:

  Technology, or new media, or google, or somebody, has helped take the mystery out. There are plenty of blogs written by Peace Corps volunteers in the Caucasus. And I actually recognize a lot of what they describe, though I’ve never been near there. There’s a certain post-Sovietness that seems to be common to where I was (from September 2002 until January 2004, I lived in a small, ethnically Buryat-Mongol town in Eastern Siberia).

  I can look forward to the same old exhortations to drink, the same condescending and infantalizing behavior by those who know me, the personal questions from strangers, unasked-for honesty, aggressive dogs, and mini-celebrity status. The same catechism of questions, even, persisting unchanged over thousands of miles of the previous Evil Empire. How much do teachers make, are you looking for a wife, is our vodka better than yours, how do you say kaif in English.

  
  Tags: blog, travel, siberia, future, time, memory, film, weather, caucasus, compulsion, garbage, illness.
• 03.29.08 Politics and self-abandonment:

  I am a sucker for what you might call political pathos. A large group gathered peacefully for a common purpose will reliably bring a tear in my eye and a lump in my throat. I’ve noticed the tendency for at least ten years. It’s a curious sensation: it’s longing, and happiness, and hope, but it’s mixed with a feeling of great loneliness and distrust: I mistrust the group and its aims, and I mistrust myself, and my own feelings. I feel like I want to be one with the group but I feel completely cut off on the other hand. There’s a certain exquisiteness, like a sensual tickle or a painful exercise session. But it’s a feeling I don’t like to sustain for too long.

  I suppose I could trace it back to church meetings and religious summer camps from my childhood. But the occasion doesn’t have to be religious, or political: I also get it at concerts, at parties, even, in the right setting, at a lecture or discussion. And I don’t have to be present at an actual gathering either, nor do have to be in agreement with its purpose, I can even be revolted by it, and all the same I will be carried along, and left with an inner core of coldness and non-committal feelings. I nearly wept at the end of The Battle of Algiers each of the three times I saw it, and each time my feelings of ambivalence towards the movement and the events celebrated in it only increased: in the same proportion as my emotion. It’s as if I have the urge to leap into the sea, and I can only barely hold myself back. There is a roiling, tumbling chaos of water below me, and I want to dive in, even though I am fearful of and sure of being smashed and torn apart in it.

  
  Tags: volunteer, water, nationalism, music, mood, anxiety, politics, history, memory, film, weather.
• 03.28.08 Outside my window:

  My west-facing window is divided in two. The north side slides laterally. I don’t think the panes or the frame are original, but the external setting contains some old wood indeed: it’s so weather worn it’s almost not there at all. It’s a bundle of splinters that continue to associate from habit.

  The south, fixed side of the window is on the outside. The moving side is backed with a screen, and has a permanent smudge which covers over half its area in a vertically elongated diamond shape; in combination with the screen behind it makes a double distortion. At night, the center of this area glitters and the streetlights beyond grow fuzzy spring dandelion heads.

  
  Tags: water, anxiety, weather, home, window, view.
• 03.26.08 Work and the otherworkly world:

  There was a sudden rain, and the view of the north-west warehouses from the fifth-floor window was sunk in the kind of blue that I usually see only in lowlit photographs from digital cameras. Other people weren’t surprised, it was predicted. But I didn’t know about it, and didn’t pack a lunch. I went stood underneath the canvas cover of the burrito cart outside my building. The rain wasn’t the usual Portland rain, but sharp and swift and it came in at an angle. The cart was empty, the surface of the salsa was getting filmy, the cheese was starting to drown, and the wind was knocking the tinfoil around.

  
  Tags: reading, work, taste, thinking, water, weather, plato.