October 22, 1999
Spiders!
This morning I opened the front door to walk outside, and a spider fell off the top of the screen door onto the stoop. How odd, I thought. Then as I was walking to the car, I walked right through a strand of spider web. I turned around.. very... slowly.
There were frickin' spiders EVERYWHERE! There was a full web hanging off the tree in two separate places, there was a huge strand of spiderweb strung from the tree to the car antenna, and there were two more webs on the bushes. And that's just what I noticed in a quick glance-over.
It was also foggy this morning. This only added to the excessive creep factor. Keith took it very calmly. He said that probably an egg sac hatched recently, and that's why there were all these spiderwebs all of a sudden.
OK, maybe, but how come the neighbors weren't festooned with spiderwebs? Huh? How come it was JUST US? Answer that one, smart guy! This is the 2nd step in the nascent alien invasion, I'm telling you. (The 1st step, as you'd know if you'd been reading this regularly, is obviously the appearance of Starbucks vendors on every street corner in Seattle. Clearly run by the spiders.)
This never happened in Chicago.
In other, non spider related news. I think I want to go see Fight Club this weekend. I just can't pass up the chance to see Brad Pitt and Ed Norton get half-naked and beat the crap out of each other. I mean, doesn't that sound like a great way to spend a Friday night? I'd much prefer it to staying at home and cleaning the kitchen, or whatever.
Besides, I want to celebrate the occasion of Keith's first job interview. Of course, it doesn't take much for me to want to celebrate something. I celebrated my raise, I celebrated when we got our house lease, I celebrated the first day of autumn -- I'm a celebrating fool, I tell you what.
He has another interview set up for Monday with a different company. I'm finding this all very exciting. The one yesterday went really well, too, according to Keith. He said he hit it off with the interviewer, and that the guy was explaining to him how the second interview would work, and why would he be explaining this if Keith weren't going to be asked back for the 2nd interview? This particular job is located in an easily bus-accessible place, too, which is important to Keith. I wish it were more important to me, but unfortunately I just love the freedom of driving the car to work a little too much.
Rain, rain... where the hell are you? I'm still waiting for the infamous Seattle rain. Everyone keeps saying "you just wait, the rain is going to make you want to commit ritual suicide in a Fred Meyer parking lot by March, oh you just wait, you're going to want to throw yourself from a window onto a busy crosswalk, YOU JUST WAIT, THE RAIN IS COMING AND YOU'RE GOING TO HATE IT". Mmmkay, I've been waiting for the dreaded rain ever since June and so far all I've got is a few showers and a bunch of fog. This is not really what I was expecting. Where's the damn rain? I moved to Seattle and I want to see some freaking rain, goddammit. Jeez.
I console myself with the thought that this winter I will not have to shield every exposed part of my body from the wind and cold even for a 10-minute walk to White Hen, like I did in Chicago. I have to say, it's pretty easy to skip class when the minimum fatal exposure is 15 minutes and it's a 20-minute walk to class.
Jan's Mental Condition, Since You Didn't Ask I've been feeling really good about myself lately. I did have that episode with Keith the other night, but that was more a relationship issue than an issue of my personal mental state. In fact, I think this is the best I've felt about myself in a long time. I really feel like I'm pulling my life together. I have a job I like with a fair amount of responsibility, and good pay, I'm looking better than ever thanks to working out and rediscovering makeup, my relationship with Keith is great, and I love this city.
I feel much better now that the pace of my life is less frenzied, too. In college I had to rush everywhere. I never had enough time to finish anything to the degree that I wanted it to be finished, and I was always in a hurry to get somewhere, go somewhere, or do something. Fast, fast, fast. Maybe part of it was the city I was living in, but I'd say that college students everywhere live lives like that.
I'm much more relaxed now. I have more free time to do what I want, to pursue my hobbies and to read the things I like to read. Maybe that's why I've felt so good about myself, maybe it's just that I have more time for self-improvement, and I'm not constantly rushing to meet somebody else's deadline. I'm living in my own time now, not the time that is imposed on me by some outside source. It's a good feeling.
Sometimes I wonder if we, as a fully technological and modern society poised on the cusp of the new millennium, are unduly and unnaturally obsessed with time, or whether it's been this way for most societies throughout the ages. I mean, I think most people would say that they rush through some things in order to have time for the things they'd prefer to do -- yet, once you get into the habit of constantly hurrying and rushing, you begin to rush through even the things you choose to do in your free time. Is this part of the human condition, or is it simply an artifact of the times we live in?
I don't know. All I know is that I personally have chosen not to rush through my life, and I feel that I'm a better person for it.
A bit of musing on the Catholic church. I was raised to be Catholic, and one of the things they teach you is that there are seven deadly sins. And the deadliest of all the sins is PRIDE. Beware pride, it will be your downfall, that's what the church always taught us. I found this to be a very confusing concept, because at school they had pep rallies where we were supposed to have pride about our team, and my Mom was always telling me to "walk proud" when she noticed that I had bad posture.
So was I supposed to have pride, or not? I've been thinking about that lately. I've been thinking, specifically, about why the Church would decide that pride was the deadliest of all sins, and what exactly they're talking about when they say "PRIDE". I don't think they're talking about pride as I would speak of school pride, or that I was proud of my brother for learning to walk. I think the pride they're talking about is the pride inside a person that makes that person think she's better than others. It's not pride, it's arrogance, it's assuming that because you have some innate talent or gift, it makes you inherently more worthy than certain others who do not possess that talent or gift.
The Church is all about giving to your fellow man, and caring for your brethren, and all that sort of thing, so I can definitely see why that sort of pride would be a massive sin. That sort of arrogant pride in yourself leads to the belief that it is not necessary to help your fellow man, that if your fellow man can't help himself, you're sure as hell not going to help him, why should you, you're better than him? I think this is not a particularly uncommon belief. I think you'll find a lot of people that will say that it's that idea that America was founded on -- and I think that those people are wrong.
It's a national pride that leads to world wars, and it's a personal pride that leads to a dearth of social welfare programs, and THAT, I think, is what the Church was talking about. Except, they didn't manage to explain it very well to this ex-second-grader, so I was confused for a long time.
Hmm. Do you think this means that all Republicans are going to Hell? And if so, wouldn't that be pretty ironic?