My family has the best luck on Christmas

Last year, my grandmother fell and broke her hip as she was walking to the car after Christmas dinner.

This year, my aunt is in the hospital waiting for surgery to remove her appendix.

Who will it be next year?

In happier news:

This year my dad bought two presents for himself, wrapped them, and put them under the tree. He acted surprised while opening them.

Excellent. I love family. And there was a case of Black Butte Porter waiting for me in the fridge when I arrived (sans luggage).

!!!!!

After compulsively checking my e-mail all day hoping I would hear from the PiA program about whether I got an interview for the position teaching English in Kazahkstan, by 9 pm I had finally given up. But then...at 9:01 pm...I got an e-mail saying that...

I got an interview! I could potentially be going to Kazakhstan!

I'll be going to Princeton in January to, hopefully, win them over with my charm, good looks, and spirit of adventure.

Now I really won't be able to focus on studying for my probability final...

No, I haven't died...

...I've just been up to my ears in uteri and torsion of shafts and forced vibration and Markov chains. But soon (oh very very soon) I'll be up to my ears in quality microbrews, temperate weather (I hope?), books, fleece jackets, amazing sushi, running trails, urban forests, and everything else that makes Portland great.

I feel like a neglectant parent, so...

Here:

The view out my window

No way!

Right now there's a simultaneous blizzard/thunder-storm. This is by far the craziest weather I have ever experienced.

Trying to get from one building to another a few minutes ago (a distance of oh, about 50 meters), I:
-almost got run over by a bull-dozer clearing snow
-slipped and fell
-couldn't get inside the door because it was too gosh-darn windy
-got completely coated ice and snow...completely...

Insane. Absolutely insane. How am I supposed to focus and do work when there's lightning intermittently blasting through the white-out...right outside the window...

And the saga continues...

This message was misdirected, but obviously meant for me:

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From: Jitka Stiger
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2005 8:58 AM
To: Cirillo Mallen
Subject: Re: spumy elves

obviously-see that the car is missing and get out of there fast, gunning your engine. And leave you alone? cried Alex. Its the only way I can take him. The only way he can be taken. Lunacy! spat out Krupkin, his jowls vibrating. No, Kruppie, reality, said Jason Bourne simply. Its the same as it was in the beginning. One on one, its the only way. That is sophomoric heroics! roared the Russian, slamming his hand down on the back of the seat. Worse, its ridiculous strategy. If youre right, I can surround the armory with a thousand troops! Which is exactly what hed want-what Id want, if I were Carlos. Dont you see? He could get away in the confusion, in the sheer numbers-thats not a problem for either of us, weve both done it too

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I find this endlessly amusing. Apologies to those of you who look to this blog for more, er, high-brow entertainment. Right.

Leaky Vessels

(Sorry about the high frequency of random--and inane--posts as of late...I'm a bit scatterbrained and stressed and stressed and scatterbrained...)

What an opening sentence for a paper:

"The incontinence on which this essay will focus is not the relatively comfortable subject of sexual incontinence in women but its much less comfortable analogue--bladder incontinence."

(From Gail Kern Paster's "Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy")

It's relevant, I swear!

Oh man...man oh man...

re: hunger

Possibly the most intriguing piece of spam I have ever recieved:

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From: "Mattithyahu Borgman"
To: "Poncio Dumbleton" [that's me, apparently]
Subject: Re: hunger



Wrap things up there and wait for the car. Ill take this one! No! Not unless you want to blow everything. Weve got time. Wrap it up out there. Cactus ... hes hurt-shot. Ill call Ivan. Hell get back in a hurry. Theres one brother left-only one, Alex. I killed the other two-I was responsible. Cut that out. Stop it. Do what you have to do. Goddamn you, I cant. Someones got to be here and I wont be! Youre right. Theres too much to keep under wraps out there and youve got to be in Montserrat. Ill drive out with the car and take your place.

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Wow, I'm not quite sure what Mattithyahu wants me to do (and he probably isn't either), but I'm about to run out and do it (or stay here and do it?).

Why don't my friends send me e-mail like this? Seriously.

From my cave...

I just read a really pretty sentence:

"For as Lear's undone button invokes nakedness and the heath, Bosola's departure is seaward, to the galleys, to the pathless wilderness from which he entered the play, a castaway looking for solid ground to call his own."

It's from "Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi" by Frank Whigham. And that's the kind of thing my life is about right now...

I miss Oregon...

Wow...Portland is so pretty.
I especially love the pictures of bridges.

Also, browsing the Library of Congress online prints and photos catalog is so fantastically addictive. At least for the moment I can claim I'm legitimately using it for homework...

A few notes...

First of all:

My dad sent me this link. Scary. Especially since I was attacked by a squirrel once. A black squirrel that looks just like the one in the story lept out of a trash can and used my shoulder as a spring board.

Second of all:

How odd is it that I go my whole life without running into so much as a single cheese phallus, then today I encounter two (yes two!) completely independent towers of chevre within a 6 hour window. Weird. Very very weird. (I took one home with me.)

Third of all:

K.T., I thought of you as I posted that essay...I somehow knew it would get you going.

Fourth of all:

That's it, I'm done.

Origins

His front paw was the size of my torso. When we performed the trick where the glistening knives embedded in his gums clamped down around my head, though carefully and deliberately enough so not a drop of canine saliva dampened my hair, the crowd went wild. No one had ever seen an eight-year-old lion tamer before.

Ok just kidding (obviously). An odd sequence of events led to an inquiry about the title of my blog, and unfortunately I have no scintilating stories about my encounters with vicious beasts (or even benign beasts).

If I can remember all the way back to May (which is surprisingly difficult), I think I chose "Jordan Meets the Animal Kingdom" because I was vaguely disappointed that I would be spending my summer in suburbia and not some unincorporated wilderness (full of furry and feathered beasts, no doubt). Perhaps if I give my blog an exciting title, I thought, my "adventures" at NASA will have the flavor and excitement of a wilderness safari...or something...

Maybe I should have just stuck with the lie. I'll come up with a better fake story tomorrow, when I've actually had some sleep (oops, I'm going to have to wait until after tomorrow if I condition it on sleep...).

Are my sleeping patterns really that erratic?

Yes.

Remember when I was smart and stuff?

I've been struggling for the past five hours on an application for a teaching position in Kazakhstan. (Kazakhstan? Yes, Kazakstan.) In a moment of desperation, I looked back to some of the essays I wrote four years ago when I was applying to college. Wow. I used to actually be able to write:

(sorry to those of you who might have already read this)
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Outdoor School is a magic act so sublime that the audience, a group of sixth-graders, never even finds out they are being beguiled. The illusion that High School students with less than 24 hours of training know exactly how to handle teaching, supervising, and entertaining rambunctious 11-year-olds is so well maintained that after a week illusion becomes reality.

With my right hand atop my head and my left arm rotating slowly in a massive circle, I carved meandering loops across the grass with my feet as eight sixth-graders trailed behind me following suit. My random bursts of song and uninhibited flails of excitement had superseded the apprehension and introversion that blindsided me at the training weekend as soon as the sixth-graders arrived. Changing my gentle pace into a high-kneed skip I led my girls off to our cabin to get them ready for field study.

Rita was loud, rude, and obnoxious, constantly pulling on someone's sleeve at the most inconvenient moment and pleading for attention. Her unkempt hair framed the round cheeks of her small red face, which was dwarfed by her awkward towering body. Her abrasive foghorn laugh caused my shoulders to involuntarily tense up and invariably meant she was brutally pointing out the shortcomings of one of her cabin-mates. I still hugged Rita every night as she settled into her bunk, but my smile in the face of her constant complaints came slower as the week progressed.

Sitting on the damp wooden log during our final campfire, I heard steadily increasing sobs and peered down the line of my cabin's flame-lit faces and saw Rita's profile shiny with tears. I looked at my co-counselor and, with the unspoken understanding that develops between two people after a week of being responsible for a group of kids, she communicated that I should go take care of Rita. Rita's trembling hand in mine, I led her, away from the campfire. She took a seat on a wet stump and convulsed with sobs as I knelt in front of her. I gave her an enduring hug and when her sobs receded I asked her what was wrong. "Everything," she sputtered before launching into a story that was painful to hear. I held her damp hands and looked into her face as she told me about her sister's boyfriend who had died in a car crash, and her mother who had been laid off. Rita had much more to cry about than she was telling me. I opened my mouth, found no words to say, and closed it again. When my cabin began the walk up the dark hill Rita and I slipped in at the end of the line.

Later that night I sat with my peer mentor, a 26-year-old who was as wise to me as I was to a sixth-grader, on a picnic table under a haphazardly strung tarp. She lit a small candle, draining it every few seconds to make designs with the turquoise wax that hissed as it fell onto the soaked wood of the table. Large globules of rain splattered around us as I told her about Rita and asked her advice. She looked at me and sighed.

"You're just like me. You want to save the world. Am I right?" she said with the wisdom of a sage. I looked at her and nodded. "Saving the world is hard," she continued, "you can't always do it."

I frowned. "That doesn't mean I have to stop trying, does it?"

A smile spread across her face. "You're more like me than I thought. Consider this: Rita is going to go home tomorrow, and nothing you can say will make the situation when she gets there any easier. I know this sounds cheesy, but sometimes you have to offer Band-Aids and not cures."

An hour after we put the girls to bed a dark figure appeared in front of my bunk and I recognized Rita's clumsy silhouette. Outside on the steps we talked about her day, and her favorite song, and I told her about the time I tried to unclog a mustard bottle and it exploded all over my face. Rita's laugh made me smile.

The next day Rita went home to her world and I went home to mine. A month later I received an envelope addressed in a large lopsided script. I opened it and found a letter written in pink magic marker. "Dear Jordan, Outdoor School was so much fun. Thank you for talking with me. Maybe we'll see each other again someday. Love, Rita" I took a pushpin and stuck my Band-Aid to the wall.
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Ok, so it's a bit cheesy (I'm convinced, at this point, that admissions people really like cheese), but at least it's better than anything I could come up with now.

Argh.

So I really hope I get this teaching job, but I feel like I can only spew crappity crap crap as I try to answer questions about "major transitions in my life." Let's hope Tapscott wrote me a damn good recommendation...