In Transit, O'Hare Gate F11

Just pulled a pack of tissues out of my pocket. They are part of a 3-pack I got at Target, in fact while killing time before my cousin's concert in Steven's Point (about an hour drive from Appleton). So, these tissues that have been in my pocket for a while are local ones, with a design by the folks that work in the next building over from me, and not the standard dark blue Aussie pack.

As time passes the Australian stuff runs out and gets thrown away - the Aussie shampoo bottle, the Aussie toothpaste, the Aussie tissue packages. Consumables - get consumed, and replaced by local stuff. The fine-grained fabric and texture of everyday life gets more and more local. The evidence of the old home disappears. The same thing happens to your memory - forgot my best friends' phone number and my old post code - and your sense of hot and cold, and eventually your accent.

Human beings are permeable, and end up saturated in their local environment.

Review of I Am Legend

* spoiler alert - skip this if you haven't seen the movie *

After the solstice. Stuck in Appleton, Day 2. But my sister was once stuck for 17 days trying to get to the Pole, with one outfit. And my cousin who works in the airline industry says in situations like this (dense fog), it's better to be where your own bed is, rather than stuck somewhere in the system.

So I went to the movies and saw I Am Legend, which is the buzz movie of the moment and was starting at the right time.

My review? I think, from a script point of view, it might be the perfect film. I can't think of any classic movie story it doesn't incorporate (although maybe romance - they could have done more with the boy-meets-girl story, probably ended up on the cutting room floor).

It's got:
Last man on earth
Post-apocalypse New York
Cop/Soldier whose wife and kid were killed and he's seeking revenge
Buddy movie
Action movie
Vampire movie
We've created a wonder drug and now it's got loose and is going to kill us all movie
Yuppie in a glamorous New York apartment with amazing stuff scenes
Die Hard hero can't walk but must get away from bad guys in a tight time frame scenes
Dawn of the Dead breaking through the boarded up windows zombie scenes
Panic Room/safety=prison/retreat into secure part of home scenario
Kill-the-puppy movie (literally, and also wife and kid)
People in authority (military and government) actually preventing the good guy from doing good (border scenes)

white

Last night I was at a family Christmas dinner (technically a Boxing Day dinner because they'd had a Christmas one the night before). For dessert they had two cakes, both from the one daughter and son-in-law's wedding in December last year - yep, frozen and eaten one year on. One was a traditional American white cake with white frosting, and the other one was the traditional UK fruitcake with hard white icing. They had both because the family is British. Another guest who is also British remarked on how hard the icing on the British-style fruit cake wedding cake was, but he promised he likes it that way.

Tonight I walked out of work and passed a two-week-old slab of snow, that had iced over on top as hard as the British cake's icing. The sides, where the plow had pushed up the snow, looked like the flowers and edging on the cake. But the slab of snow on top was glistening in the light, like it had a million tiny silver flakes in it.

Baby doll, I am lost too.

There's a process that the chemicals in one's body go through in an accident or a trauma. First is shock. Adrenaline makes everything rather crystal clear and it kind of goes in slow motion. Clarity and a kind of excitement. Vividness. Attention, acute awareness. You can kind of get addicted to it, there's a power to it, and simplification. Crystal clear focus on the thing before you and no attention to anything else.

Then in a few minutes the pain kicks in. You start to hurt. This stage is probably more of a smarting hurt or a sharp hurt, but could be a throbbing. All physical, though.

The upsetness, the emotional aspect, maybe a delayed feeling of fear, doesn't come on for about an hour. That's the tears.

And then there's the especially horrible, unfun stage, this could be a couple of weeks into the recovery. You're just sick of it. There's no excitement, there's no clarify of focus, there's not the fun woozy out of it feeling from the pain drugs. You're out of the hospital and at home, it's dirty, your dishes aren't done. Your bandages are grimy, your cast is starting to smell. Your arms ache from the crutches and you worry that you're doing your posture or muscles or bone structure some permanent damage from walking or sitting favouring the good side like that. Your friends have gone back to their lives and won't help you. You can't sleep properly. Food loses its taste. You don't think you'll ever drink again, or dance or laugh or drive down a road just to see what's down it or be attractive to anyone ever again.

Maybe that's the phase I'm in at the moment.

The best cure, I suppose, is to take a damned shower and clean the dishes and tidy up and put everything away, just get some beauty and order and grown-up-ness back in your life.

The ultimate cure, of course, is just time.

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Out my window I can see a tower with four red lights, two of which (top and 3rd one down) blink on and off regularly. Just a coincidence that it looks just like a shot out of Lost in Translation?

A station that understands us

A few other ones go in before this (first snow included), but tonight's revelation is: TLC has worked out how women watch television, and it offers it to us. How smart are they? Because almost all the women I know watch television this way - they buy or rent DVDs with whole seasons of a particular show, and then watch one after the other after the other, stay up too late, think "Just one more and then I'll go to bed," and on it goes.

Wisconsin Language School

Two new acronyms on the TV weather report - FZFG and FZRA.

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Official term on the news for the traffic conditions: "becoming treacherous".