I Had No Idea So Many of My Friends Were Into Cutting

There are checklists?
I thought they wore their hair like that too look cool–who knew they were purposely blocking out half the world?!

Another Reason to Learn Lots of Languages

This is taken from BoingBoing, where it was likely taken from a reputable news source. It's about a foiled hijacking attempt.


"Speaking to the gunman during the hijacking, the pilot realized the man did not speak French. So he used the plane’s public address system to warn the passengers in French of the ploy he was going to try: brake hard upon landing, then speed up abruptly. The idea was to catch the hijacker off balance, and have crew members and men sitting in the front rows of the plane jump on him, the Spanish official said.

The pilot also warned women and children to move to the back of the plane in preparation for the subterfuge, the official said.

It worked. The man was standing in the middle aisle when the pilot carried out his maneuver, and he fell to the floor, dropping one of his two 7mm pistols. Flight attendants then threw boiling water from a coffee machine in his face and at his chest, and some 10 people jumped on the man and beat him, the Spanish official said."

When I was writing that title, I was thinking about the hijacker and his fatal flaw, his lack of francophonic ability (yeah, I made that word up), but looking at it again, the same applies to the passengers.

Anyway, this little blurb caught my eye and my brain, leading me to think about post-911 airline passenger courage. It's kind of cool: people banding together to take down the bad guy, but, I don't know... Were hijackings never fatal pre-911? Or just not fatal on a large scale? Are there pre-911 stories about passengers outwitting and outgutsing hijackers? I suppose that there was always a chance that you would "just" be a hostage in the past; now people assume the whole plane's dying. It must be interesting and terrifying, experiencing that moment where you have to contemplate whether or not you are going to risk your life to attack the guy swinging around large guns. To be a little hokey, it makes me feel a little proud (or something) that everyday people face that decision and take the risk. Maybe it's just the terror talking, but I like to think that it's altruism.

You Know You're Back in Georgia When You Hear Stories Like This

Last night I was hanging out with my new friend K. She told me that her mom, who lives in Woodstock, GA (I don't know where that is, I'm told it's north of here), recently experienced the following while at a Chinese restaurant in a food court.

Mom K was getting her General Tso's when the woman serving her wished her a happy New Year, telling her it was the year of the pig. The man behind her in line (who was shortly to reveal his true redneck status) got all worked up and said, "We don't celebrate that shit here. This year is the year of the eagle and the flag. Go back to China." His wife laughed a little nervously, "oh, Ted!", K's mom berated him for being an idiot, and then he went right on and ordered his food, totally unaware of the irony.

I guess it is the year of the pig. Unfortunately, it's not this kind:



It's this kind:



This is the kind of person all my friends in Spain think that this entire country is composed of.

I Have a Lot of Catching Up to Do

Okay, so I've been home for a little over two weeks now and I've only written one blog post. I've felt very disorganized lately–being homeless will do that to you.

The three main themes of what I've been doing are: 1) social 2) car and 3) job.

Social: Catching up with old friends and my once again BF. It's been quite nice. I have such good people in my circle!





Car: One morning I was walking my favorite dog and I noticed all these birds in the trees. At first I noticed them because they were kind of weird looking. Unlike a regular ol' swallow, these birds had fancy haircuts. Then I noticed that there were HUNDREDS of them. This I noticed when the dog's presence scared them and the flew out of the tiny tree they were sitting in. Fast forward about 20 minutes, when I am leaving, weighted down by my backpack, purse, and a basketful of freshly laundered clothing. I am walking towards my car when I notice what looks like a bunch of blueberries all over the ground by my car. Then I notice all those birds in the tree above and realize that the "blueberries" are actually dark birdshit (I guess they were eating some kind of berries or something). I'm trying to get my keys out of my pocket while juggling all my stuff when I realize that the birds above me are actively shitting all around me! I could hear the little drops of crap falling dangerously near. I panicked as I realized I was in the middle of a poop gauntlet carrying newly cleaned clothes. Of course the panicking made it worse. I finally put the basket down and made a human shield over it as I tried to get my keys. I managed to get the basket safely in the car and was shutting the rear door when the inevitable happened–I was hit. On the arm. It was a good thing that the bird feces happened to be dark blue because my coat is black and you can hardly tell.

At some point during this episode I noticed that the birds had been at it for a while and my car was COVERED in bird shit. I had to go directly to a gas station because I could barely see out of my windshield. I got a lot of looks at the gas station. Why not? I was driving around in a poopmobile. It was totally embarrassing, but I drove around like that for a day because the line at the car wash was too long. When I finally did go to the car wash, the attendant took one look and said, "Birds really don't like you." They had to give it a chemical bath prior to the wash, but it came out good as new (or used). I took a picture before I went through the car wash. It doesn't totally do it justice because the windows had already been cleaned and because it's only part of the car (I felt weird taking a picture of my crap-infested car at the car wash).



Oh, also on Monday I got rear-ended. I'm fine, she's fine, and she's paying for it, so it's all good. I will have to empty everything out of my car when it gets fixed, but things could have been a lot worse considering she was in an SUV (of course!).

And finally: In my first 14 days back here in Atlanta, I saw an astonishing FOUR people purposely run red lights. As in they were stopped and then started again before it turned green. I'd NEVER seen this before, so four times in the past two weeks is kind of freaking me out.

Job: I still don't have one but I'm starting that whole process. It's exciting and daunting and it's what I spend a fair amount of time on, so I don't really feel like talking about it here. But, if you know of any project manager or producer jobs in Atlanta, feel free to let me know. Or if you know me and can think of something else I might enjoy doing... thanks.

Here's a shot I took from the plane as I was leaving Spain.


Thanks for being so patient! I'm going to make a concerted effort to write on here on a more regular basis.
♥☠
p.s. rereading this, I wonder if something's wrong with me that I put a picture of a bunch of Macs under the "social" category.

I'm Still Here!

By "here" I mean in the blogosphere, not in Spain. Because I'm in Atlanta now. Sorry I've been crappy about keeping this up for the past week... I am getting back into the swing of things, working on finding a job, hanging out with my friends, and I'm staying somewhere that doesn't have internet. Oh yeah, I also haven't really thought of much to write about.

Here's something moderately interesting (kind of, maybe not really): I was driving today and looked over at the car next to me and the lady in there was smoking. That's not really the weird part–the weirdness is that I thought it was weird. Which makes that the first time in over five months that I've seen someone smoking and thought it was strange. If you've been to Spain, you know that A LOT of people there smoke. It's not as bad as it was in the past, but it's definitely noticeable. Another thing about smoking in Spain is that it crosses gender, race, and class lines that it doesn't cross here so much. The result is that pretty much no one in Spain looks weird smoking (ok, probably if I saw a baby lighting up, that would be weird), but an older woman puffing away in her car in the U.S. made me do a double take.

Yesterday was the coldest day of the year and today I sat outside in a short-sleeved sweater. And if you know me, you know I can't stand even one little smidgin of coldness, so trust me when I say it was unusually warm today.