bad metaphor

Everything has gone crazy. My sister’s gone off to the Carribean to elope, my old roomie is going off to Cairo for a year and a half in two weeks, New Orleans has been flattened by what appears to be a giant, pissed off water monster. I was bored at work Monday morning, so instead of browsing blogs endlessly, I followed up on Little Ms. Katrina. She was a wee little CAT1 when she hit Florida a few days ago, but apparently there is something in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico that acts as super-steroid-turbo-boosters for baby hurricanes. They are lucky that she weakened a bit and did not hit in her full blown CAT5 fury, but nevertheless, the good old town and like half of Mississippi has been flattened. I’m sad I didn’t get a chance to see NOLA before; now all’s left are floating tombstones and big balls of floating fire ants:

“Red imported fire ants (RIFA) are extremely resilient and have adaptations to contend with both flooding and drought conditions. If the ants sense increased water levels in their nests, they will come together and form a huge ball or raft that is able to float on the water, with the workers on the outside and the queen inside. Once the ball hits a tree or other stationary object, the ants swarm onto it and wait for the water levels to recede. To contend with drought conditions, their nest structure includes a network of underground foraging tunnels and tunnels that extend down to the water table.”

I know people that are new to Kansas freak about tornadoes, and certainly I freaked out about tornadoes when I was little. I used to cower under a blanket (because it afforded that much more protection) in the southwest corner of our basement, and cry if my dad refused to go downstairs. Since I’ve grown up, though, I’ve realized that as far as severe weather goes, we Kansans are not in a bad way. Tornadoes are pretty easy to avoid, as long as you have access to a basement or even a bathroom with no windows, and don’t live in or near a trailer park (tornado magnet). Sure, they’re all windy and angry and everything, but they touch down for maybe five minutes max and you can see them coming. Blow a few cows around, cut some power lines, maybe smash a couple of idiot X-treme! storm-chasers, then it’s done. Plus, the sky takes on this really cool greenish gold tinge right before a storm.

Compare tornadoes, then, to other severe weather. Hurricanes are BAD. They are extremely angry and, though mildly predictable, sometimes pull stunts like this last one (running around the Gulf of Mexico and powering up majorly). Also, fire ant balls? Jesus, forget that. I’m sure it would be very nice to live on a sunny beachfront property, and be able to swim and surf and lay out in your own backyard – but not at the price of having your house smashed to bits and then, on top of that, be swarmed with giant floating balls of stingy death. Ugh. Also, hurricanes often summon fleets of tornado friends to assist them in the noble cause of smashing people. Proverbial cherry on top.

And earthquakes? Never having been in an earthquake, I don’t really know, but I don’t like the sound of them. What are you supposed to do? Yeah, stand in the doorway, but from what I hear, it’s not as foolproof a charm as going to the basement or not living in a trailer park. Plus I don’t know about dealing with big chunks of falling plaster and shattering glass and whatnot. Earthquakes have a much larger area of effect range than tornadoes, hence I’m guessing they are harder to deal with. Supposedly Kansas isn’t totally free from the risk of an earthquake; my roomie informs me that there is a deep fault line under Missouri or something that, should it quake, would be the Ultimate Quaking Devastator. But if that happens, North America would be split apart and half would fall in the ocean anyways, so we’d take all the coastal states down with us. Ha.

Volcanoes? I’m not even going to go into how stupid one would have to be to voluntarily live on the side of a giant lava spewing rock of DEATH.

So Kansas isn’t that bad, really. Sure, we have lots of cows and boring driving scenery instead of access to a beautiful, majestic ocean. But no fire ant balls, no danger of being totally annihilated by beefed-up hurricanes. And that I wouldn’t trade for any amount of high-property value shoreline.

p.s. – Here’s a link to the Red Cross – I believe their site is getting hammered now with traffic (a good thing, really!), but it should be back up soon for donations to hurricane victims.

As usual, not much to do at work so I’m reading through several transcripts released by the NY Times of interviews with firefighters and medics at ground zero, conducted a few weeks afterwards. Most feelings I’ve had about that particular day have been numbed due to all the resultant jingoism and fearmongering. But reading through some of these first-hand accounts has put Sept. 11 back into perspective, past all the crying-eagle image collages and flags on SUVs, beyond all the racism and political bullshit (on both sides). What intrigues me most about these accounts is the little details, subtle but haunting – one EMT, since that day, has a panic attack every time she hears thunder. Another one I read describes people on the scene crying blood, because of the concrete hitting their faces and getting stuck in their corneas.

Terrible, tragic stuff. I’m not sure why I’m reading all of these, instead of maybe Google-Image searching cute kittens or something – but I can’t stop.

…so I have written a story. I didn’t like any of the prompts I found online; they were all things like “lol describe your worst experience” or “write about three objects in your room,” and I am not quite bored enough to write a story about my computer, desk, and Nalgene bottle. This morning Quark, my little hellacious fluffball, met Pandora, who belongs to Tracy and who briefly escaped the guest room she’s been trapped in for the past few weeks. Here’s a story about their encounter:

She smelled funny. Not funny like the bizarre new mush-in-a-can that his owner had been dishing into his bowl for the past few days, the can certified ORGANIC with a smiling dopey tabby on the label, but funny in a bad way. Here before him, three yards away, was a fellow member of his species, and he didn’t like it.

She narrowed her eyes. Not a hiss or meow, which offended him. This was his territory. He had been hard at work every day, rubbing his fur against every square inch within reach, and there had been a lot of surface area to cover in the vast and cluttered living room. This was his territory, by all rights, and who was this thing anyways? That was his cardboard box lid she now perched upon, narrowing her eyes at him and not even having the decency to say hello or touch noses.

She crept forward. One of the big clumsy beings, not his own, was making nonsensical noises at the intruder, attempting to coax her out from under the table, no doubt. His table. Avoiding the big clumsy being, she crept closer to him, and he now had a better look at her. Suddenly confused, he drew back, sitting up straight and tall, hoping he’d fluffed up his tail enough to give the impression that he was bigger than her.

Which, as he now discovered, he was not. In fact, now that he could see her, she looked uncannily like what he saw in the tall reflective glass that his big clumsy sometimes stood in front of in the mornings, blocking his way to the food bowl. He had some vague notion that the image he saw was himself. Now the image had escaped the glass and perched before him, in his cardboard box lid, smelling funny and pissing him off.

Wiggle, said a voice from within, the same voice that urged him to eat the tasty houseplants when the big clumsy one wasn’t looking. Wiggle.

And he wiggled his rear end, gathering momentum for the kill. And he pounced.

The act of pouncing evoked some ancestral memory, deeply wired beneath the domestic softness and torpitude that generations of inbreeding and co-habitation with the big clumsy ones had engendered. The three yards of cheap, dingy gray carpet beneath his thundering paws transformed into the wild savannah; she was the rival lionness that had strayed into his territory. His non-existent front claws extended to become long blades, sharp as the knives in the adjacent kitchen. Alarmed and humbled, the lionness turned tail and scattered, into the welcoming arms of the clumsy one, who ushered her back into the guest room, out of his territory, off the lush savannah.

Satisfied, he reclaimed the cardboard box lid. It didn’t matter to him that he could not quite all the way inside, and that his fur and fat draped over one of the edges. It was his.

…And I’m not referring to the KU parking department this time. Last week, when I started work, the parking lot closest to my building was blissfully empty. Even if I happened to roll in late, closer to 10:00 than to 9:00, I would always be guaranteed a spot in the first four yellow spaces. Imagine my surprise on Monday when I pulled up, 9:00 a.m. on the dot, to find a sea of SUVs and sports cars stretching over three fourths of the parking lot. Grumbling, I found a spot on the opposite end and examined the cars on my way to work, trying to deduce what had happened. I noticed several greek-symbol decals on the cars, and sure enough, out in front of the row of sorority houses were big groups of blonde, over-tanned and underweight girls in sweat-shorts and pink tube tops chanting their sorority mantras and clapping in rhythm. Ahh, the joys of rush week.

Now I know people in sororities in fraternities – you can’t avoid them on this campus, really. I’d heard that there was a large Greek community at KU before I came, and I was pretty confused about why they would come to Kansas until someone enlightened me – no tasty baklava or gyros, just keggers and girls in teeny pink skirts that, for the life of me, I’ve never been able to figure out how they can sit down in them without revealing their clam-friends to the rest of the universe. I’ve never actually seen anyone in the act of sitting in those skirts; one minute they are standing and then the next minute they are sitting down, legs crossed and cell-phone/i-pod glued to the ears, fused to bad-bleach-job hair. Indeed this is a quandary for Physics-Boy and his friends, who would no doubt be happy devoting research energy to such a matter.

Anyhow, I’ve digressed. The point is that I know frat/sorority people that don’t fit the stereotype, and that are actually people and not some sort of party-monster that thrives on booze and bronze tanner. Yet the prejudice persists, in part because the cool frat/soro people I know have either quit/are quitting their houses, or just think it’s all a big joke anyways. For every cool person I know, there are thirty more that reaffirm the stereotype. The girls that remain utterly mystified by the bus system, halfway into spring semester, that stand at a bus stop for hours, whining about how stupid the bus drivers are into their cell phones while staring at me in my bohemian/Indian looking clothes like I am from Jupiter (assuming she knows what Jupiter is). Fair enough, sorority girl. You stay in your territory, and I’ll stay in mine.

Prejudices notwithstanding, rush week hasn’t really bothered me thus far, as for the past few days there have been spaces left at the other end – way, waaay at the other end, perhaps, but they were there – but not this morning. They took up all the spots this morning (god, how many more of them can there possibly be? They are multiplying like bacteria). Thus forcing me to park over at Memorial Stadium and having to walk up the big hill in the Kansas summer heat, which feels like being trapped in a sauna with the door sealed. Now if it had been for a worthy event – say cars were here for Relay for Life, for example, or maybe even some sort of track meet, I’d be more understanding and willing to put up with the longer walk.

But having to park on the other side of campus and walk over the bloody hill, so that a bunch of ditzy ex-prom queens can stand outside and annoy passing cars with their rhyming cheers all damned day?

It’s on, bitches. Nobody messes with karenology’s ability to park (save karenology herself, that is).