sing along and it might just get you through
livejournal's been pretty quiet, but i'm assuming that everyone's been watching hurricane rita bear down on the gulf coast. as of 7 p.m. it had dropped in intensity from a category 5 to a category 4 storm (winds are at 145 mph, down from 175) and is expected to make landfall late tomorrow.
galveston's 17-foot sea wall is sweet, but i wasn't sure what it was going to do against a 25-foot storm surge with accompanying waves at high tide; turns out the city is designed to drain to the north in the event of flooding. texas is trying to evacuate itself. there's the small problem of over a million people trying to leave at the same time, and they're all sitting together in 100-mile back-ups, running out of gas. they only just todaythis afternoon, i thinkopened up their south-bound highways to north-bound traffic. can i just say, that's the first thing we do in florida. a mandatory evacuation warning means all highways are outbound and tolls are lifted on the turnpike. they're pushing the evacuation order really strongly this time (the mayor of new orleans basically said if you stay behind, you're as good as dead; actually, she said you'd better write your social security number on your arm in indelible ink), but stillstill!no one is worrying about or making arrangements for people without the means or resources to leave: people with no cars, people who can't afford gas for their cars, people who can't afford airfare, people who went to the airport but can't get anywhere: the baggage handlers didn't show up in texas today; they had to leave.
i want to know what preparations were being made a week ago, when rita first started threading the needle between cuba and key west, because i can not have been the only one paranoid and pessimistic enough to project it doing exactly what it's done. don't they pay disaster-planners to come up with worst-case scenarios? i can't believe they didn't say to themselves, "wow, things are really, really bad here on the louisiana coast. what would be the worst thing that could happen to us right now? ah! another catastrophic hurricane!" but i can see how they might disregard something so calamitous and far-fetched, since it's only the dead middle of hurricane season in one of the biggest and busiest hurricane seasons on record; and it's not as if there's recent precedent for a region being targeted by multiple hurricanes in a single year. there's going to bei mean, i can only hope there's going to be an enormous hue and cry when this is over, redoubled fury at fema and the bush administration, but i'd like to think that somewhere in the angry hubbub is toby's voice shouting and nobody saw this coming? i know i want my twenty bucks back.
*
. . . and now to completely personalize and trivialize this entry, let me say that i learned how to shimmy-walk tonight! which is just what it sounds like, shimmying and walking at the same time. your body seriously does not want to do this, but you can lull it into a false sense of security and then bludgeon it into submission, at which point, hey! you're shimmy-walking! and your body can't take it back now.
rita put the keys under water but it barely made a dent in broward county; we all got to spend tuesday wandering around a dark house in our pajamas anyway, while forty-mph winds occasionally gusted and it sometimes rained. and then more wine! and cheese, and my mother's cornflake chicken, and cousin m. taught me new psychology vocabulary terms during a jeopardy! interlude, namely ego dystonic and ego syntonic. and we watched house:
it was, you know, okay? the girl kinda annoyed me, in that composed-and-poignant-child-actor way, but the episode was fantastic for the house-wilson interaction (throwing pebbles at wilson's door! because he is TWELVE), the markers, the chase/foreman that i'm totally seeing this season, and house snorting his antihistimine. that was priceless. house may be even more fucked up than we think. wilson's got his number so well, i don't know if he's going to pull house into the light of day and help him feel again, or if house is really going after some kind of rock bottom and we'll get to see him spiral out of control on his way to an intervention and broken office furniture. won't that be fun, kids? or possibly everyone will one day realize that this is just how house *is* and will finally leave him to his curmudgeonly fate. oh wait, this is television.
gym tomorrow, and studying for the gre; requesting books from the library again, and replying to email. i have a to-do list as long as my arm. it's almost time to rejoin the human race. it's late already, and i'm tiredbut ship_recs just updated, so what can you do?
galveston's 17-foot sea wall is sweet, but i wasn't sure what it was going to do against a 25-foot storm surge with accompanying waves at high tide; turns out the city is designed to drain to the north in the event of flooding. texas is trying to evacuate itself. there's the small problem of over a million people trying to leave at the same time, and they're all sitting together in 100-mile back-ups, running out of gas. they only just todaythis afternoon, i thinkopened up their south-bound highways to north-bound traffic. can i just say, that's the first thing we do in florida. a mandatory evacuation warning means all highways are outbound and tolls are lifted on the turnpike. they're pushing the evacuation order really strongly this time (the mayor of new orleans basically said if you stay behind, you're as good as dead; actually, she said you'd better write your social security number on your arm in indelible ink), but stillstill!no one is worrying about or making arrangements for people without the means or resources to leave: people with no cars, people who can't afford gas for their cars, people who can't afford airfare, people who went to the airport but can't get anywhere: the baggage handlers didn't show up in texas today; they had to leave.
i want to know what preparations were being made a week ago, when rita first started threading the needle between cuba and key west, because i can not have been the only one paranoid and pessimistic enough to project it doing exactly what it's done. don't they pay disaster-planners to come up with worst-case scenarios? i can't believe they didn't say to themselves, "wow, things are really, really bad here on the louisiana coast. what would be the worst thing that could happen to us right now? ah! another catastrophic hurricane!" but i can see how they might disregard something so calamitous and far-fetched, since it's only the dead middle of hurricane season in one of the biggest and busiest hurricane seasons on record; and it's not as if there's recent precedent for a region being targeted by multiple hurricanes in a single year. there's going to bei mean, i can only hope there's going to be an enormous hue and cry when this is over, redoubled fury at fema and the bush administration, but i'd like to think that somewhere in the angry hubbub is toby's voice shouting and nobody saw this coming? i know i want my twenty bucks back.
*
. . . and now to completely personalize and trivialize this entry, let me say that i learned how to shimmy-walk tonight! which is just what it sounds like, shimmying and walking at the same time. your body seriously does not want to do this, but you can lull it into a false sense of security and then bludgeon it into submission, at which point, hey! you're shimmy-walking! and your body can't take it back now.
rita put the keys under water but it barely made a dent in broward county; we all got to spend tuesday wandering around a dark house in our pajamas anyway, while forty-mph winds occasionally gusted and it sometimes rained. and then more wine! and cheese, and my mother's cornflake chicken, and cousin m. taught me new psychology vocabulary terms during a jeopardy! interlude, namely ego dystonic and ego syntonic. and we watched house:
it was, you know, okay? the girl kinda annoyed me, in that composed-and-poignant-child-actor way, but the episode was fantastic for the house-wilson interaction (throwing pebbles at wilson's door! because he is TWELVE), the markers, the chase/foreman that i'm totally seeing this season, and house snorting his antihistimine. that was priceless. house may be even more fucked up than we think. wilson's got his number so well, i don't know if he's going to pull house into the light of day and help him feel again, or if house is really going after some kind of rock bottom and we'll get to see him spiral out of control on his way to an intervention and broken office furniture. won't that be fun, kids? or possibly everyone will one day realize that this is just how house *is* and will finally leave him to his curmudgeonly fate. oh wait, this is television.
gym tomorrow, and studying for the gre; requesting books from the library again, and replying to email. i have a to-do list as long as my arm. it's almost time to rejoin the human race. it's late already, and i'm tiredbut ship_recs just updated, so what can you do?