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one and a half faces
Wednesday, July 9 2003
Today was a day spent taking care of neglected loose ends, such as hooking up the second phone line properly so I can have both a telephone and a modem operating in my laboratory (that modem supplies an internet connection for every computer in the house via a proxy arrangement). I was down in the boiler room this afternoon hooking up all the neglected yellow and black wires on the live secondary phone circuit, my sweaty knee solidly grounded against a copper pipe, when I touched one of the phone wires with my fingers. Bzzzrt! I could feel a powerful jolt of electricity coursing through my body. I don't normally think of telephone wires as being dangerous, but I've received startling shocks from them on more than one occasion.
For whatever reason, I mailed off another resumé from the Hurley post office today. It was for a Bard College web design job I'd already responded to once before. Since the effort required was so minimal, I thought I'd give it another shot after Gretchen told me the job is still being advertised (and it's not the Bard College web developer job for which I was perfectly qualified).
While I was in Hurley, I thought I'd go check out the brand new Hudson Valley Credit Union branch on Hurley Avenue and then price cordless phones and "obtain" high-output LEDs at the Radio Shack in Uptown Kingston. Sally was riding around in the truck with me and I couldn't get her to eat any of my Stewart's fried corn chips (though she did lick the salt off one of them). These Stewarts chips look and taste exactly like traditional Fritos, a flavor my preferences abandoned for Mexican-style corn chips back in the mid 1980s. Lately, though, my corn chip preferences have taken a surprising turn for the retro. I think it's the chips' incredible fat content.
Every other time I go to the shopping center housing the Uptown Radio Shack, Herzog's Lumber, and the Uptown Hannaford, I see this one black guy who has a horrible facial deformity. Half his face is normal, but the other half is both swollen and stretched to cover an area much larger than a human half-face. I can never bear to look for long, but from the glances I've stolen I'd venture to say his unusual half-face has a leathery texture and extends well above his hairline, which he keeps covered with a baseball cap. This deformity may actually be an entire face, meaning this poor gentleman has one and a half faces. I saw him again today, as usual, from a distance of hundreds of feet. He was walking away from Hannaford, where he either works in a back room or goes to recycle bottles. I have great compassion for the guy, but after I saw him I lost most of the interest I'd had in my corn chips.
In the evening I completed the automation of most of this journal's update procedures. From now on, the posting of new entries requires the uploading of a single file. (In the past, a proper update - which I was often too lazy to perform - required changes to four files.)
At bedtime Gretchen and I were having a goofy conversation on the subject of puns. She said that men pun much more than women, and had a theory that this reflected a mild linguistic hang-up resulting from testosterone. Though she admitted that I don't pun very often, she said that when I do, the results are absolutely horrible. I asked her to give an example, but she claimed she couldn't, it had been so traumatic that she'd repressed the experience. This led directly into a series of exchanges in which the puns were all about the word "pun." To say such puns, one must extend the pronunciation of the punned word. So I'd say something like, "Okay, well then, I'm going to pun-ish you!" The exchange grew increasingly ridiculous until the syllables that "pun" replaced had no similarity whatsoever to the word "pun." Here's an example, "Pun-stronauts ride pun-kets into pun-ce to go to other pun-ets and learn more about the pun-iverse."
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