re: glistening white stuff....

I will say one thing about my iPod... it sure makes shoveling snow a lot more pleasant. Good LOUD music... I was able to do the whole driveway, with 12”-14” of snow, without even taking a break. I usually take at least one break, sometimes two. It’s a long, steep driveway, and I’m old and out of shape. So it was nice to have a little added source of energy.

I love my iPod, but there is one thing about it that bugs me...

Earbuds.

You know those things... the minimalist evolution of headphones... little padded speaker doohickers that you cram in your ear? I hate those fucking things. I always have. I can NEVER get them to stay in. I twist them and turn them and tilt them... nothing works. Do I have, like, a weirdly shaped earhole or something? Can other people wear these things without CONSTANTLY fucking with them? It drives me crazy. And even worse, the right one falls out WAY more than the left one. Is it because I move my right arm more than my left? Or is it because my ears are asymmetrical? It could be. I’ve never actually SEEN my ears... you know... “head on”. I’m tempted to grab my digital camera, photograph both of my ears and compare them in Photoshop – just to get to the bottom of this thing once and for all.

And you might ask – well, Dave... why the hell don’t you just chuck the earbuds and plug in your old headphones to your iPod? Because it’s an iPod! And the way you know that someone has an iPod are the little white earbud cords coming out of their pocket. And I’m far too appearance-conscious to abandon the status factor that accompanies iPod ownership. I know... it’s sick.

One other winter-related-iPod story. I was walking from my office to the subway on Monday, and I put on my iPod for the short (one long-block) walk. And how cold was it in Manhattan on Monday? Well, during that short walk, the rubber insulation of the cords to my earbuds FROZE and lost all their elasticity. You could bend the cords and they would hold their shape. This is what happened to the O-rings in the space shuttle Challenger’s solid rocket boosters, by the way... the 18th anniversary of that was yesterday or today or something. Just a bit of frozen-rubber trivia.

Anyway... I think that’s all I have to say on that matter. I’m on the train, Thursday morning, heading in for my first Astronomy class. It meets once a week, Thursday mornings from 9:00 to 11:40 or something crazy like that. It’s fucking insane. It’s like planning for three classes all at once. It’ll take a while to get used to feeling out that much time and planning for it. Right now I’m just treating it like it was TWO classes, with a brief “interlude”. I should also probably try to t-a-l-k... m-o-r-e... s-l-o-w-l-y... than I usually do.

The thing that’s bugging me today is that I didn’t get a chance to check out the classroom yesterday, and it’s a classroom I’ve never taught in before. I hate going in blind like that. I don’t even know the board situation as far as wipe-vs.-chalk. It’s this kind of uncertainty that unsettles me. Yet another tiny glimpse into my neuroses...

All for now. Time to decide on a HW assignment to go with the first lecture.

D.