Short
bec writes
skip this
In the last ten minutes
The humidtity must have reached 100% because it began to rain out of a blue sky with soft drops like the navy beans I'm soaking for dinner. I took Liz's last damp jeans from the line—waist 27, the size I wore in fifth grade—and soon enough the drops thickened on the tin roof in Weezie's room. She said 'oh, I can hear it now' when I came in to offer her South Beach afternoon snack. The secret to this offering, says Liz, is the baby wheel of cheese. I picked and ate cashews and peanut skins from the mixed nuts, and went to stand on the porch with some carrot sticks. The sun shone brightly, rain dropped gently from the thick blue sky.
4:05 pm tues aug 1 2006
the Thing about CMSes
Is that they don't make you get nitty-gritty with indentation and returns. I guess.
My real point is that I'm planning to keep another blog this summer, which will be for my parents and everyone else. This blog has been my "secret online life" (which should be funny, because it's not specifically secret and also it's not terribly lively) for a while now, and I want to make something that I feel comfortable sharing with parents, family, prospective employers, and anyone else. This blog is not going anywhere; it is just getting yet another sibling.
The new blog is hopefully only temporarily entitled "Travel"; it is located at http://circuitous.org/rebecca/. Also, is is machine-driven. I was introduced to Wordpress at work; I chose it because it proved acceptably usable and because I'm not sure about the availability of ssh clients at internet cafés. And because I'm no John Henry.
12:21 pm thurs may 25 2006
EKG
I've had a heart murmur since birth. At age two I had an echocardiogram (EKG, that's "Kardio") and, the murmur was deemed minor, and no one thought about it since. Until for some reason I started mentioning it to medical professionals when they asked, and they (understandably) would get concerned. So today I had another EKG.
The lady said that my heart looks really good. "Some people are just photogenic inside," she said. And she saw it from all angles: from under my left breast, from the left side of my ribcage, looking up through my ribcage from just above my diaphragm, and looking down through my ribcage from the hollow at the base of my throat.
EKGs examine the heart the same way UltraSounds examine a baby in the womb. They use the same squirt bottle of gel and the same white probe. A wedge of the beating heart is put up on a computer monitor, fuzzy at the wide round edge, but in the middle clear: a valve like two hands meeting parallel like silent claps. Underneath the slice of heart there is a line graphing the beat, presumably from the three electrodes I am wearing.
The lady could highlight parts of my heart and show them in color. She called this the 'doppler' because the colors the velocity of blood was moving toward or away from the probe. She was looking for jets, which she said would look like a mosaic; the highest velocity colors were brighter than the others, so higher velocity flows would be blotchy. My heart has a bit of back-flow, which is supposedly not unusual. Anyway, it is not the source of my murmur.
Sometimes she had me not breathe for 4 seconds, and twice she had me sniff. When I held my breath, my heart just went on humming, but when I sniffed little sniffs that would barely slow a snot-drip, my heart twitched.
After the lady had taken "eighty or ninety loops," she went and got the more important dude and two other technicians to watch my heart beating. "Maybe we'll learn something," they said. I got pretty excited about being an educational experience. The dude looked down the aorta, pressing the probe into my throat and highlighting one core flow on the screen. The heart pushes blood up out of it, and about 30% of the blood goes to the arms and head. The other aorta bends down, carrying the other 70% to the rest of the torso, kidneys, and legs. Just after their bend, my aorta narrow, creating an short stretch where the blood flows more quickly: Bernoulli's Principle, inside my body. This is my heart murmur. Technically, it is called "coarctation of the aorta." [1] I am 1 in 10,000. [2]
Everyone mentions how I look like my dad. We have the same tics and the same lanky frame, the same half-assed athleticism and the same procrastination habits. We have similar aspirations in singing, writing, and politics. We both sadistically mispronounce words. And I think, at the root of it, it's because we have the same heart. Our hearts both sit murmuring behind "caved" chests [[3]], blood accelerating through narrowed aorta. Which means that I have a good chance of falling in love, because he did. That is kind of reassuring. At the very least I will get two more visits with my heart before I'm 55.
11:48 pm thurs april 14 2006
Vancouver mountains
I don't know about living under mountains; every time I look at them I think about getting all up on their ridges. I guess that is not very funny without me making euphamistic faces as I say it. Next time I come I will bring hiking boots and it will be summer.
Dear Mountain: I want to sit on your face.
3:32 pm (vancouver time) weds jan 4 2006
travelling
First I am going to the airport. Then I am going to: Vancouver, BC. Colorado College. Copper Mountain, Coloardo (trail map). I am travelling with my powerbook and my snowboarding boots and probably two sweaters if they will fucking dry already.
11:55 am mon jan 2 2006
five years
My sardonic glands aren't performing to spec right now, or I'd have something to say about post frequency and claiming that this is a continuous blog. But no matter; on December 1, 2000, I signed up at blogger.com after seeing an article about blogging in the October issue of the New Yorker with Megnut's picture. Now, five years later, I recall the first post of "bec writes":
yowser
I guess that was my word at the time. Similarly compelling material is contained in my archives, which live happily and healthily off of the internet.
12:36 pm thurs dec 1 2005
work worries
Every night at work I sweep the carpets in the kitchen and behind the register. The carpets are switched out for clean ones every Monday, rolled up off the wood floor and flung over a shoulder at the same time as the sack of kitchen towels. Brooms don't work well on carpet; I adjust my strokes so they just skim the nap, and forcefully. The only way to move debris is to fling it off. So sweeping is an aerobic activity--brush! brush! brush! Every stroke sends grit skittering over the floor; I worry it will hit the foot of some customer in sandals.
Wednesdays are trash nights; we carry boxes and boxes of boxes--cardboard boxes of broken-down boxes, and sometimes we tape up a brand fresh new J64 box to put other boxes in--up from the basement, wind through the door at the top of the stairs, the tables and the customers, and then get all "ass on the glass" at the front door to shove the crap all out to the curb. Drop it with a "thump," hop & skip back downstairs for another load. As well as putting broken down boxes inside of new boxes, we put bags of trash inside of bigger bags. I walk upstairs with a bag in each hand and I push them up with my legs; through the store each bump-bumps with every offbeat step. The bags clink with empty jam jars; they smell of mustard and leftover salads; they feel dirty and cold swinging against me; condiment leftovers and iced coffee cups from Starbucks and two layers of plastic hint at mystery liquids. Every time I drop one of these suckers on the curb I bend backwards looking over my shoulder; I worry about a smear of jam or drip of brown liquid from the back of my knee across my calf and onto my achilles tendon.
12:20 am thurs aug 22 2005
summer is all full of work
sweating is a full-time job these days. it has been consistantly above 80 degrees for the past week and a half. My theory that winter and summer were the same, because you stay the same temperature all year round by just adjusting the clothing you wear... that theory is out the window. The window that is wide open and beckoning, 'wind please come blow in! because my Gigantic radiator is still running like a marathoner.'
10:54 pm mon june 13 2005
quick life-update
I finished finals last week, after an intense week of studying. I have sprouted a green (actually more brown) thumb, raising seedlings over the past month and planting a few flowers in our apartment's little leaded garden. I was hyping the presence of "days off" this summer, but so far they are not materializing; it's been work or parents every day until today. I'll be working about 40 hrs/week at a combination of 2 jobs, with the goal of buying a Powerbook. Scheduled events: Family wedding, June 25. Moxie Festival, July 9. Hiking of some sort, July 10-13.
6:54 pm weds may 18 2005
65° F today
I took my dinner to the Western Prom tonight, and I swear the sun didn't set; it dropped. It couldn't have taken me more than forty seconds after I saw the sun (huge and red, just resting on some hills) to cross the road, sit down on the grass, and open my salad. it might have been a minute more to take three bites, but when I looked up I just caught the last sliver of the sun. while I was chewing the next mouthful, the sun disappeared.
So I ate my dinner of salad and cake and stayed to read a while in the dusk. When I left, all the street- and parking lot lights below were glowing the red color that the sunset had been a half hour before. Almost it was like the sun shining up through holes in the ground.
for serious, 40 seconds: I timed it when I left.
8:14 pm sun april 17 2005
(it was too quiet here)
here is me with a new keyboard, am still getting used to the thump of its' space bar. I have seen the heads and tails of every running thought so many times and I can not find the edge.
ah, crap, still nothing to say
12:07 am sat april 15 2005
happy Pi day
Today I am wearing pinstripes and my pi shirt, and tonight I am having a small-to-medium celebration of the number pi. There will be pizza, pie, and perhaps pink lemonade. Anyways. If you are so inclined, order a pizza! wear some pink! or go read a couple digits.
7:12 am 3.14 2005
oatmeal
(is not undiscovered)
sometime in the past two months I became addicted to oatmeal. I found myself sitting around the house on a friday morning, after a breakfast of oatmeal, wishing that I could go to bed so that I could get up and eat oatmeal again.
oatmeal is not undiscovered. oatmeal actually is common thing that people keep as their own personal morning ritual.* it's plain and most commonly used, along with the word "gray," as an adjective for something unappetizing. so people take it into their hearts and nuture it. oatmeal is a solitary love. everyone who loves oatmeal loves it alone, pretending that everyone else sees 'gray and unappetizing' where they see 'delicious.' though delicious probably isn't the right word.
so, alone I love oatmeal. it has actually evolved into a sort of super-oatmeal, a disgusting, over-enriched oatmeal. even mentioning my oatmeal makes me feel like a boastful food-weirdo. weirder still: my oatmeal-formula provides about 60% RDA protein, 30% calcium, 30% iron, and 475% B-12(!). dis! gust! ing!
* for example, this dude obviously sees his oatmeal as a deep philosophical experience.
10:32 pm fri march 11 2005
oh yes, yes.
(spotted at Yankee Pot Roast)
1:33 pm sat feb 19 2005
girl hardware
Sometimes I am looking at a picture of a naked woman and it's like I'm in the hardware store. The hardware store man is standing there with his hands on his hips; "Well, there it is. this what you wanted?" And I press my lips together and nod, "yep, this is it." After the man goes back to the front counter I stand in the aisle and read the differant boxes. I'm pretty sure which doo-dad I want, but I've never rewired a lamp before, so I'm not positive which socket will fit or which has the right terminals. logically, I find the right one, but later the screwdriver is in my hand and the logic falls away, giving out to inexperience and fear.
12:59 pm sat feb 12 2005
insulting
Here I am sitting around and talking to myself again. Every other sentance I say to myself is "I am such a fucking space-cadet." I guess I am not getting my RDA of insults, and my metabolism has automatically adjusted to deal with it (this happens the same way that a body cannibalizes muscle mass to deal with a protein deficit). The upside of insulting myself is that I can immediately turn around and do something awesome, like make brown rice and heat up leftover curry. Or do a little jump and touch my heels.
6:39 pm thurs jan 27 2005
written & read tonight
The Next Poem I Will Write
This was a poem I meant to write between Yoga and dinner.
Actually how can I lie like that?
This was a poem I planned for months. At first
I was explaining myself, then
explaining how good Alone is.
This poem was about walking
alone and about how I
want to touch—run my fingers along a ribcage
Plant my forearms on shoulders
and PUSH. Now, it is only
about the next poem I will write.
soon I will scan it from my notebook, because it looks more alive to me that way. before I read it I marked it all up for inflection etc., hence the underlines, italics, and box.
10:49 pm tues jan 25 2005
spray paint scholars
there are tags all over portland that say "thot" and "lern" which I think are kindof sweet as far as tagging goes. so when I was walking on the trail below the eastern prom today, and saw the tag "THRO," I thought, "Thoreau." on second thot, it's probably definitely not...
4:53 pm mon jan 17 2005
my secret identity is:
cute.
So in the bathroom at the show last night, I'm coming out of the stall and another girl is going in. There was brief verbal contact about not knowing if someone was in the stall or not, and then she paused.
"Hey, you're really cute."
"um,"
Then her phone rang. Next time, when I have $20 in my wallet instead of $3, I'll know what to do:
4:35 pm sat jan 15 2005
why you* haven't called
"You can't get up the guts to call my cell phone?
"Really, you shouldn't worry about it...
"I mean, my cell phone, I'm very private about it. Nobody else ever answers my phone. I don't even save voicemails! Also, the phone is knobby and has vibrate mode."
(I'm not actually waiting for a call.)
9:58 pm sat jan 8 2005
the plan
Tomorrow I'll wake up triumphant and healthy. After blowing my nose one final time I will put out a new hand towel in the bathroom and new dish towels in the kitchen. I will change my sheets, scrub the sink, then go ice skating in the park and grocery shopping for something green to eat.
Also on my healthy horizon: yoga, coffee, alcohol, mornings, afternoons, and nights out, phone calls, finagling a way hang out with people who I usually only see at parties.
4:16 pm tues jan 4 2005
sometimes I think the word "sexy"
(I almost never say it)
I am sick and coughing. I get a pair of clean coughs (not barking or choking) every 40 minutes or so, and about every fourth of these coughs rattle up some phlegm. My throat doesn't hurt but the voice is all scratched up. Unfortunately I seem to have skipped the sexy voice stage. Me and sexy are so many miles apart, what with all the nose blowing and mouth breathing, coughing fits and lethargy, early bedtimes and sheets that feel fevered and dirty from lying awake, so there is some consolation in being able to talk sexy. Of course, the only one I'd be talking to is myself, while cooking up some miso soup and boiling water for tea.
8-ish pm mon jan 3 2005
my head is stuck on pickup lines: "wanna do some integrals with me? we could start with e to the x." [1/17/05]