Let's start with the Sad Things, shall we? The world at large has lost two wonderful artists last week--Luciano Pavarotti, fabulously amazing opera singer, and Madeline L'Engle, unparalleled sci-fi/fantasy author. According to my news sources, which I may or may not be reading correctly, they both died on Thursday. It may not interest anybody but me, but I'm going to share a memory or two of each of them.
I'm not strictly an opera fan--I don't dislike it, but I don't usually choose it, either, and I'm sadly uninformed/uneducated on the subject. My mother, on the other hand, is at least a bit more aware of who opera singers are, and who she likes the best. Pavarotti was always one of her favorites. When I was little, she had a record (yes, a record, does anyone still know what those look like?) of him--I can't remember what the album was, for the life of me, but he was on the front of it, wearing a pierrot-type clown costume. She played that record often, usually when she was cooking something Italian (like baked ziti, yum!). I forever associated his voice with that clown costume and with my mom's best food--needless to say, I have fond memories of his singing.
Madeline L'Engle was much more present in my consciousness during my young life, and still today. Her books, with their inevitably fascinating blend of science fiction and fantasy elements, as well as a truthful and compelling portrayal of characters who seemed like real, actual people, were favorites of mine. There was the best known set,
A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door and
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which nearly everyone my age has read, but there were so many others that I discovered and loved later on...
An Acceptable Time, Many Waters, A Circle of Endless Light, and on and on. There was one summer when I entirely devoured every book by Madeline that the library had. I think it actually took about a week and a half, because I couldn't put them down. Her blend of science and spirituality and her vivid metaphors helped shape my understanding of the world, and have remained with me ever since. In the Fantasy class that I took last fall as part of the Children's Lit program, I was shocked that none of Madeline's books were on the syllabus; out of that amazing assortment of fantastic writers, she was the only one of my idols who was missing, and her absence seemed incomprehensible to me. I've been thinking that maybe I should email the prof, who's teaching the course again this semester, and ask her to consider fitting something from the vast L'Engle bibliography into what is otherwise an amazingly complete and diverse study of the genre. At any rate...we'll miss you, Madeline.
Now, on to the Scary Things. I'm sure Becky will write about this incident from her point of view, so I'll write from my own perspective here. Yesterday (Sunday) morning at about 5:30, a man broke into our apartment. I say "broke," but really he didn't break anything; he climbed through an unlocked window, didn't steal anything, and interacted briefly and non-forcefully with Becky before running away. It could have been tons and tons worse--but still, a scary experience.
As is my habit on nights when I don't have to get up for anything the next day, I stayed up until all hours doing homework and reading and generally putzing. Becky came into my room at about 4:30, half-asleep and mumbling about how the curtain on her window had moved while she was in the bathroom. Her window had been open while she slept, because it was hot. So, I pulled on my robe and made the obligatory check of all the rooms in the apartment, to make sure everything was okay. Things seemed copasetic (the spell check tells me that's wrong, but I'm not sure what's right), so I convinced Becky that she must've moved the curtain herself in her half-asleep state and just didn't notice, and that everything was fine, and that she should go back to sleep. She closed her window, and I watched her turn the little latches to lock it, and once I was satisfied that she was okay, I went back to my room to continue reading. I kept it up until around 5, at which point I was pretty dead and not processing the books anymore, so I turned off the light, shut my door, and rolled over to sleep. About half an hour or so later I was jolted awake by Becky's scream. That, in itself, wasn't exactly unusual; as much as waking up to a scream frightens me, I'm getting sort of used to it. Becky does on occasion have a weird dream, then wake up and get confused about something she's half-seeing in the dark, and screams before she knows what's actually going on (previous to yesterday, nothing). Usually I hear it, register what's going on, take a moment to put on some clothes, and wander into her room to make sure things are okay. This time, though, there was something unidentifiably different about the sound. Maybe because she kept screaming, or maybe there was some note in it that told me, somehow, that she wasn't dreaming and that something was extremely wrong. At any rate, something about it made me very sure that there wasn't time to put clothes on, so I came racing out of my room buck naked, yelling "Becky! Becky!" in total confusion. I think I must have looked pretty wild, with my hair every which way and my eyes bugging out. It's actually a funny picture in spite of the circumstance. Anyway, I came out and found Becky standing by the open front door (the inside one, leading from our apartment into the front entryway) looking completely shocked and terrified. I don't remember exactly what she said, but it was something like "there was a man, he touched me." I remember thinking, as I heard that and made a really fast assessment of what was happening, that in the next few seconds one of us was going to completely panic. So I followed my first instinct and started talking. I'm not sure what I said, or if Becky actually heard most of it...stuff like "okay, okay, slow down," stupid stuff to make both of us be okay enough to deal with the immediate needs. We closed the door and locked it, got the phone, and retreated into my room to call 911. Me still entirely naked. (I sort of wonder what would have happened if the dude had still been there when I came charging out--a scene out of a comic strip, for sure, me probably yelling and swearing like a maniac, him probably totally caught off-guard by a naked fat girl with crazy hair hitting him with whatever came to hand...like something out of SIP.) Anyway, Becky got on the line with the dispatcher to give a description of the dude; I found us some weapons (two pieces of the disassembled coat rack that we used as a tree in
Gallathea) and put on the first clothes I could find that I thought I could run/fight in. We stayed in my room, for the most part, until the police arrived just a few minutes later. We saw the flashing lights first; then they knocked ("Who's there?" "The police!"), and I opened the door and peered around it with coat rack bludgeon in hand, ready to beat the shit out of anyone not wearing a readily identifiable uniform. Luckily, there was no crazy officer impersonation going on, just a really nice man, shorter than Becky but stocky, who came in to take our statements and reassure us, and a tall older man who checked out the empty upstairs apartment and the grounds to make sure the guy was gone. With the police there, we discovered that the man had gotten in through Becky's bedroom window, though he had tried and failed to enter through the back door and one of the kitchen windows.
After the police left, we were too wired to do anything remotely like sleeping; we checked all the windows to make sure they were all locked, and it was at this point that I understood how he'd actually gotten in. When I had watched Becky shut and lock her window earlier in the night, she turned the latches to the right. When we were checking the other windows to make sure everything was locked up tight after the police left, I realized that the locked position is actually the other way; the latches must have been in the locked position while the window was open, somehow, and when Becky turned them, she accidentally left the window unlocked. With that mystery solved, I felt a bit better about the general security of the house; after all, the same guy had been foiled by the locked back door and locked kitchen window that he tried to get in through.
At any rate, after everything was secured, we camped out in the living room and watched Deep Space Nine episodes, because somehow Star Trek is calming in a crisis. I dozed for a bit on the floor, having slept for only half an hour or so; Becky, naturally, was too tense to sleep at all until way later yesterday. We spent the afternoon slowly going back to normal, getting dressed, calling our parents and the landlord to tell them what happened, watching more DS9...we went out for dinner, just to get some air, and then came back to our now-stuffy house (windows all closed, air conditioner and fans turned off so that we could hear every noise) and eventually went to bed locked securely in my room. Given everything, I slept pretty well, and I think Becky did too. Now we just have to get through the next few weeks, when certainly every little noise will be scary, and get back to a normal (if more cautious) existence.
Whew, this is a long, long post. But I'll end with the Happy/Confusing Thing, and I promise to be brief. I have an interview for an internship in the design department at Candlewick Publishing! This is a very good thing! I want to go into book design after I leave Simmons, and an internship is the ideal way to learn the ropes, not to mention the computer programs I should know, before I start applying for real jobs at publishing houses. The only problem is, I already have four (count them, four!) jobs this semester, and I'm taking two classes. Fitting in 12 hours a week for an unpaid internship is next to impossible. I think what I'm going to do is explain my situation to the interviewer, and try to work out whether the week-to-week schedule for the internship could be flexible enough to allow me more time when I can spare it and less time when I can't. If that's not possible, then I'm going to ask them to hold on to my application until spring or summer, when at least one of my jobs will have ended, and consider me for the internship at that time. But really....YAY I'M SO EXCITED THEY EVEN ASKED ME TO INTERVIEW!
That's all the news...sorry it's been so long since my last post, and that this is such an insanely verbose message. I'm turning into Becky as the years go by.... ;) Love to all who read this.
