The Wormlips Scrapbook

Sent by Eleni:

In 1986, Peter Davies was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from the University of Toronto. On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Peter approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee, inspected the elephants foot, and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Peter worked the wood out with his knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot.

The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Peter stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Peter never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Peter was walking through the Toronto Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Peter and his son Cameron were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Peter, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1986, Peter could not help wondering if this was the same elephant. Peter summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing, and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder.

The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Peter legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn’t the same elephant.

Linhong Zhou just e-mailed me a photo she took on our bowling night. I love it so much I want you to see it, even though it’s old news.

Frying one’s computer is not only expensive but taxing on time and spirit. Critical files have gone missing: passwords, financial records, four years’ worth of e-mails… and my entire address/phone book. They’re not on the hard drive I yanked from the bowels of my old computer. I’m hoping they’re on my backup drive, but when I tried to hook it up to this new computer, but they wouldn’t play nice. Now I have to wait three agonizing days till an adapter gets here.

And of course I don’t have any of my photo tools, so I feel like I’m missing an arm.

Other than that, all is well here. No denying it’s fall. When I look around I keep saying to myself, —”I’m in New England. What the hell am I doing in New England?” Many mornings and afternoons when I drive past the pond (you’ve seen pictures) I see one lump or two out in the middle: the head and/or body of a very hefty snapping turtle. And at night I hear bard owls calling back and forth as I drift off to the land of Very Strange Dreams.

—“Yesterday I spilled half a glass of lemonade into my computer,” I told Sehoon, the SIT tech person, this morning. “Why isn’t it working any more?”

He gave me the look that technical people with five monitors on their desk give the proletariat. —“What did you do when that happened?”

—“I turned it upside-down and shook some of the lemonade out.”

—“Did you turn off the power?”

—“The power? No. It turned itself off. Well, first it started making some really weird noises, and they got louder, and then the computer suddenly turned off. I couldn’t get it to turn on again after that. So I took it apart and cleaned the motherboard with some Q-Tips.”

Ginna’s Advice of the Day: If you pour sugar-filled liquid on your keyboard, turn off the power. Immediately.

I believe I’ve finally learned the difference between a glass half-empty and a glass half-full. The half-empty glass wouldn’t have killed my computer.

I think electronics are stupid. When I fell in the river in Costa Rica, that digital camera never worked again. I like mechanical things better. If you spill lemonade on a gear, you just hose it off and — voilà — good as new.

In the immediate wake of the mishap, which has cost me over $2,000, I: 1) popped a Klonopin, 2) kept repeating, —”I wish I hadn’t done that,” and 3) bit off all my nails. A new computer wasn’t in my budget. Neither was a 40K education, for that matter.

The good news is that Sehoon is going to help me try to salvage the 120 GB of data from my hard drive tomorrow, which is really, really nice of him. Also, he could have had a field day with telling me how foolish I am to drink lemonade and compute at the same time, but he didn’t.

At lunch today I learned the best way to get to New York from here. The train takes forever and driving means you have to find a place to park in Manhattan, so Jess said I should drive to New Haven, CT and take Metro North to Grand Central Station. Now I want to plan a trip. You know: with all the money I don’t have.

Happy Rosh Hashana #5770! Today at our first session of Language Analysis and Lesson Planning, our teacher (who is Jewish) passed around a plate of apples with honey for dipping.

As I climbed the stairs to my classroom today, I thought about the forces currently at work that will change my life, but that I can’t see or control. That’s true of every second we’re alive, of course. But I’m keenly aware of it now, knowing that people in South Africa, Mexico and Costa Rica are reviewing my internship application and their decision will have a profound effect on the rest of my days.

It’s kind of cool to be back in a place where people talk like me. “Orange” is “ahr-inj,” and all’s right with the world. (Oh, and morning’s at seven, the hill-side’s dew-pearled. There may be a lark on the wing somewhere, too.)

As long as I’m on a stream-of-consciousness rant, I’ll say one more thing, and it will be about dew. Two years ago I took Lulu on a whitewater rafting trip. She was 18 and grumpy almost all the time, particularly when woken up in the morning. But alas, I had to get her out of the tent since the rest of our party was packing up to hit the river. Her mood was foul as she poked her head out the door and surveyed the chilly morning. Reaching for her sneakers, she complained, “How’d this dew get all over everything?”

I’m really thirsty because my grape juice and fizzy water is way over there, across the room. I go now, to drink.