04 I 2002 - 00:00 - vita18

Oh, so my sister and I never had the talk, and she left on New Year's Day, and the euro is here, and I have managed to put off feeling like the scum of the earth for that much longer.

On the other hand, she'll probably want to have a Talk with me as soon as I visit her in Pittsburgh, which will happen sometime in mid-February.

Did I mention that the guilder and the punt, among others, are dead?

Yes, I know, the euro is a wonderful thing blah blah blah cross-country trade is easier because exchange rates don't have to be dealt with and those poor businessmen who travel everywhere will not have to carry the currency of seven different countries in their wallets. I'm genuinely happy for that. But couldn't the euro have been, I don't know, prettier? I mean... look at the US dollar. It gets uglier with every modification, but hey, it's ours, and it has neat pictures on it, and if you want to see the framers of the Constitution, just find the back of a two-dollar bill!

But... guilder notes had sunflowers on them. And the one-punt coins had some sort of graceful bird on them, and lire had women, and escudos had...

And the euro notes have... doorways. Bridges. Not even particular doorways or bridges, I'm led to understand - symbolic ones. And there are pictures of them in many newspapers and I am led to believe that they are ugly ugly ugly.

Sigh.

To shift to a completely different topic, there has been much rain out here of late. They said we'd get a dry period soon, so I'm happy about that, but there has been much rain. Too much rain. We won't have to worry about drought unless there is some freak warming tomorrow and all of the snowpack melts, causing massive flooding, and then we will have more immediate concerns than drought. My sisters came home talking about how dry the East was and went back joking that we must have stolen all their water - in the paper yesterday, it said that December was rated as the wettest December since 1955 and the seventh-wettest December since the 1860s or so, when records were started. Right now, we are three inches away from getting as much rain as we are supposed to in an entire season, which runs from July 1 to June 30; rain does not normally stop until March or April, although December and January are the wettest months of the year. We have received four times as much rain right now as had recieved on this day last year. The plants are happy, but the rain is not so good if you want to do anything like visit Muir Woods with your sister and her friends.

In case you hadn't noticed it from the topmost table, I have surrendered to the music dork within. I mean, this is more than simple embracing. We've passed to sharing of bodily fluids here, which, you know, could be oh so gross, but I'm really not thinking about that right now. And while you're thinking about that, why don't I brainwash you about my abilities? Just click here.

Now that that's taken care of... I mailed an application today for my sister. By standing in line for thirty minutes at the post office. It must have been hell for the clerks - while I was at about the middle of the line, the stamp-vending machine broke, which made the line even longer. And people were getting testy. I felt sort of bad - I was able to walk away from all of that and breathe something that passed for fresh air, but the poor clerks weren't, and they were the ones who really deserved the break. *sigh*

Oh, speaking of the postal service, I've resolved to write more mail now. Except, you know, I don't really have anyone to write to. If you suspect that I read your diary and would like to have a postcard or a letter from me or something, which you can later use to, I don't know, maybe you'll use it against me somehow - if you'd send your mailing address of choice to [email protected], where it will be taken down into an address book and then destroyed - well, within about a month or as soon as I take a trip (hello, Pittsburgh in February), you'll get some mail. You're happy, because you feel loved because something came through the slot that WASN'T JUNK MAIL! I'm happy, because I love writing, because it allows me to babble endlessly - and the recipient can merely burn the paper, not being obliged to read the stuff, really, as they'd be even sort of obliged to listen to me if I were speaking to them, and I have made no sense. So. Send me your address. You get mail. We're both happy. And I'm not a stalker. Teenagers - not generally all that good at getting across the country to find people who give them their addresses. I am babbling again.

I'm going to go to sleep now. Maybe I'll write an entry tomorrow. Or maybe not. Time is getting precious to me now that I have only six days of break left. And a whole bunch of reading that I have yet to do. But maybe I'll comment on the fact that the authorities in Australia think that many (well, the news is now saying at least 40 from 100 - call that what you will) of the fires threatening the Sydney area were set by arsonists.

Actually, there's no comment. Because I can't understand why. I mean, if it had been an accident - yeah, the person was stupid, but to set fires just because...

So now on my short list of things to understand, which includes but is not limited to why I am the way I am and why the world is the way it is, is the question of why anyone can find it in themselves to do this.

Adam? Anyone? Can you help?