"Do you have any idea how fast you were going?" "No," Heisenberg replies, "but I know where I am!"
So these past few days have been really good. I put some photos, and mementos and prints up on the walls, and I want to get some magnets so I can start putting things on the refrigerator door. But the room looks nice and homey now. It feels nice to be inside, and feel like I'm actually at home...or, at least, much more like "home" than it did a week ago.
The neighbors are okay...the guy who lives at the end of the hall, next to the kitchen, seems pretty cool. He's an artist, I think...next to his refrigerator in the kitchen are a bunch of paintings and art supplies, so since it's his fridge, I've just assumed it's his art. He listens to jazz a lot, and has crazy hair, and a really interesting face.
Down the hall a bit there's a youngish sort of guy with an accent. He makes a lot of rice in his room, and he seems so never be home, or always just hidden away within.
Next door to me there's one of two rooms belonging to a family. Their other room is up the hall just a tiny bit, and the family is comprised of a small Thai woman, a buff-ish white guy with sort of dead/piercing eyes, and a biker 'stach, and their two daughters...one is six or so, and the other is maybe two. Pat, Abraham, Asia, and Sara, respectively. Anyway, life next door to them, in the same building as them, even, is taking some getting used to. Abraham looks and sounds like, "I am going to abuse you", and Pat doesn't speak much English...or rather, she does, a lot, to me, while I'm cooking, and I can understand maybe half of what she says because her accent is so thick. Usually she's telling me that I can use anything I want in the kitchen, or about how much my cooking smells like Thai food (which is funny, because I attribute the smells of onions and garlic and tomatoes and olive oil to Italian food, or other Mediterranean cuisines, but lots of the same things are used in Thai cooking, apparently...therefore Italians and the Thai are the same. Thaitalians).
This Pat, she doesn't know much about parenting, I think...they let the little ones stay up till ten or eleven o'clock, and it always results in Asia crying about something, and Abraham getting mad, and I don't know whether or not he actually hits her, but he looks like he would without even thinking about it.
Things are moving along really nicely here. I go to sleep early, and wake up at 6 or 7 o'clock, have leisurely mornings, and take the bus to school. Classes are okay (I'll update about them later), I have lunch in the shade of a pine tree, and take the bus home, where I get homework done, walk around my neighborhood, read, watch movies. So far it's a quiet life, but I'm really happy here. I get lots of light in my room (not direct sunshine, just sunlight...it never gets very hot within), and I have happy curtains that billow in the breeze...it's a nice place to be.
Anyway, I'd better be off..I've got no internet access at home yet (except for the one or two bars of signal I've been able to use from someone's unprotected wireless), so I'm at the computer lab in the library, and my time is almost up. More when I can manage it, probably tomorrow.
Before I leave, though, I'm going to leave you all with a passage from the book I'm reading, The Canon, by Natalie Angier, which is about the science all around us..physics, chemistry, calibration, astronomy, geology, etc. and it's really amazingly researched, and so beautifully written. It makes science seem sexy and alluring, and mysterious, and easily understood, which has always been my trouble...not being able to wrap my head around these concepts. But this book explains everything so wonderfully, it's almost like poetry. It's also, mind-blowing. Listen to this...
On calibration...
"Scaling down to an even less momentous moment, we greet the attosecond, a billionth of a billionth of a second, or 10^-18 seconds. The briefest event that scientists can clock, as opposed to calculate, are measured in attoseconds. It takes an electron twenty-four attoseconds to complete a single orbit around a hydrogen atom - a voyage that the electron makes about 40,000 trillion times per second. There are more attoseconds in a single minute than there have been minutes since the birth of the universe."
The neighbors are okay...the guy who lives at the end of the hall, next to the kitchen, seems pretty cool. He's an artist, I think...next to his refrigerator in the kitchen are a bunch of paintings and art supplies, so since it's his fridge, I've just assumed it's his art. He listens to jazz a lot, and has crazy hair, and a really interesting face.
Down the hall a bit there's a youngish sort of guy with an accent. He makes a lot of rice in his room, and he seems so never be home, or always just hidden away within.
Next door to me there's one of two rooms belonging to a family. Their other room is up the hall just a tiny bit, and the family is comprised of a small Thai woman, a buff-ish white guy with sort of dead/piercing eyes, and a biker 'stach, and their two daughters...one is six or so, and the other is maybe two. Pat, Abraham, Asia, and Sara, respectively. Anyway, life next door to them, in the same building as them, even, is taking some getting used to. Abraham looks and sounds like, "I am going to abuse you", and Pat doesn't speak much English...or rather, she does, a lot, to me, while I'm cooking, and I can understand maybe half of what she says because her accent is so thick. Usually she's telling me that I can use anything I want in the kitchen, or about how much my cooking smells like Thai food (which is funny, because I attribute the smells of onions and garlic and tomatoes and olive oil to Italian food, or other Mediterranean cuisines, but lots of the same things are used in Thai cooking, apparently...therefore Italians and the Thai are the same. Thaitalians).
This Pat, she doesn't know much about parenting, I think...they let the little ones stay up till ten or eleven o'clock, and it always results in Asia crying about something, and Abraham getting mad, and I don't know whether or not he actually hits her, but he looks like he would without even thinking about it.
Things are moving along really nicely here. I go to sleep early, and wake up at 6 or 7 o'clock, have leisurely mornings, and take the bus to school. Classes are okay (I'll update about them later), I have lunch in the shade of a pine tree, and take the bus home, where I get homework done, walk around my neighborhood, read, watch movies. So far it's a quiet life, but I'm really happy here. I get lots of light in my room (not direct sunshine, just sunlight...it never gets very hot within), and I have happy curtains that billow in the breeze...it's a nice place to be.
Anyway, I'd better be off..I've got no internet access at home yet (except for the one or two bars of signal I've been able to use from someone's unprotected wireless), so I'm at the computer lab in the library, and my time is almost up. More when I can manage it, probably tomorrow.
Before I leave, though, I'm going to leave you all with a passage from the book I'm reading, The Canon, by Natalie Angier, which is about the science all around us..physics, chemistry, calibration, astronomy, geology, etc. and it's really amazingly researched, and so beautifully written. It makes science seem sexy and alluring, and mysterious, and easily understood, which has always been my trouble...not being able to wrap my head around these concepts. But this book explains everything so wonderfully, it's almost like poetry. It's also, mind-blowing. Listen to this...
On calibration...
"Scaling down to an even less momentous moment, we greet the attosecond, a billionth of a billionth of a second, or 10^-18 seconds. The briefest event that scientists can clock, as opposed to calculate, are measured in attoseconds. It takes an electron twenty-four attoseconds to complete a single orbit around a hydrogen atom - a voyage that the electron makes about 40,000 trillion times per second. There are more attoseconds in a single minute than there have been minutes since the birth of the universe."