Tygře Tygře Planoucí

All the news that's fit to print.

Apparently last year the webmail server that UNC uses migrated to outlook, and they kept the old one around as a living showpiece of some sort. Since I was gone for the year and my e-mail was inactive, I didn't find out about it until I sent in a support request to the IT department to find out why my e-mail wasn't working. Some fascinating stuff in the backfiles there. In any case, as far as I am aware I am now fully integrated back into the UNC community and all of the technological accoutrements pertaining thereto are fully functioning, but I'm a little paranoid now.

Sections start this week, so I have nothing to report on that front. Started Polish, it's going well. The professor really knows what she's doing, and so far the main problems are pronouncing the words without an overpowering Czech accent and remembering which preposterous cluster of consonants goes where when spelling. Everything else is pretty much the same as Czech. Though there are some false friends to beware of. Other than my own favorite, šukat/siukac, I recently ran across chyba, which means 'mistake' in Czech and 'surely' in Polish. Turkish has been less interesting, considering we're still on drill and kill on the alphabet. Some of the vocabulary for the first test is somewhat odd, which is fun. Dwarf, earthquake, steel, paternal uncle, fever, and strawberry, for a sampling.

Mimo toho neřeknu nic. 

Nothing Wrong and Nothing Right

I dreamed about Kyle today. There were adventures, of the sort one has in a dreamscape – stuttered, frequently nonsensical, conveyed largely by impression – but I very vividly recall the very end of the matter. We were packing, he and I, and I knew in my bones that he was leaving for a long journey. In some manner this seemed right and proper – it had always been me who left, who packed the bags and strode boldly or tremulously into the future while Kyle stayed home. In any case, it was a tremendous packing job, one only fully realizable in a dream – a couch, for example, ended up zipped into a carry-on. When the dream shattered and I realized where I was (namely, in my bed in Carrboro), in that half-awake state wherein dream and reality are hard to distinguish, my strongest impression was of saying goodbye and watching him turn and walk away.

It took me a while to get out of bed this morning.

In some ways it's more challenging being here, since this is in the most direct sense real life; neither an interregnum nor a vacation. Here I stand, and every day I must decide on either paradise or prison. Penury continues to raise its ugly head, but I am familiar with every nook and cranny in that craggy visage. Frequently I feel alone, and frequently I wish Brad was still here for an adventure and a whisky, but Meredith has been kind enough to keep me company disproportionate to my deserts and bread cast upon the waters shall, I am confident, return tenfold unto the giver. Alex has moved in and now the house is much more closely approximating a home. I leave for Seattle on Friday, at a godforsaken hour of the AM, and the week after I return the school year begins.

It may or may not be shark week. I'm uncertain.