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Name: Ashley
Birthday: 3/27/1981
Gender: Female
Interests: Making lists, illicit reading, microwaveable dinners, filling out surveys, inventing secret naughty codes, Disneyland
Expertise: Trainwrecking, neuroticism, and defending the women's studies/gender studies major.
Occupation: Student
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
10/26/2003
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| Well, who am I kidding? I want Meghan's raptor story. What has happened since I last posted? Nada. Zip. Oh, wait, Chris got a new job. Working for GEICO as a "business strategy analyst" -- in short, he gets paid for being a nerd. It's a good fit. Trust me. The condo is plugging along and we expect to move in the first or second week of December. The walk-through will be in a week or so. That's right all---after almost 2 years of building, we still haven't seen the place. At any rate, our new address will be: 301 Massachusetts Avenue NW #305, Washington, DC 20002 Thanksgiving will consist of just Chris and me obscenely stuffing ourselves, and then on Sunday we're doing it again with some friends. For Christmas, Chris is going to Tahoe and I'm going to the ever-lovely suburb of FRESNO, Sanger, to have X-mas at my grandma's. Then I'm going down to L.A. to see Nanners and, well, L.A. Hope all is well with everyone! | | |
| Humor me. I've done the most techie thing EVER (for me, that is) since beginning my xanga blog. I made a website for my dad's business. And I had to twist his arm to do it, but he let me. Granted, I plan on putting "website design" on my resume, despite the fact I used templates, so I had ulterior motives. Anyway, can y'all humor me and go visit it?
www.daleoppconstruction.com
I need it to gain some cyberspace weight. Yes, I know, five clicks won't do it, but it's a start.
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| So Chris and I watched "Crash" the other night. 15 minutes into it, we paused it and I asked, "Do you feel like we're in the midst of orientation week at Oxy?" Chris said yes, and I responded that he would need to make sure he joined his O-team for an in-depth discussion about the film.
I don't know why this thing is grating on me -- actually, yes, I do know. Overall, I like the movie. It was much better than I expected and I think it really shows how complicated and multi-layered racism is. And I also found it interesting that the only thing that can apparently topple white men is an HMO. I totally buy it, to be honest. So I do like the movie--
EXCEPT for two things:
1) Not all white women are upper-class, uptight housewives who tuck in their shirts and have hispanic housekeepers they treat like shit. Everyone else got to be multilayered, round, real characters, flawed but ultimately interesting --except for the white girl. I'm sorry, but realizing you're shallow and hugging the housekeeper at the end of the movie does not a complex character make.
2) All of the main -- as in really MAIN - characters are male. All the women are the WIVES of the main characters. As is typical when something focuses only on race and exlcudes gender, women's issues get sacrificed at the alter of men (and, less obviously, their blessed masculinity). You know, "let's get things squared away for [fill in racial descriptor here] men, and then we'll work on women." Please. You can't pull gender away from race. Think of the sentiment, "if we own your women, we own you" -- women as property--to protect from or lose to someone else, presumably someone viewed as more powerful. THAT is what role women played in this movie. They were the symbols / property of their men--pawns that measured each of their "partner's" (obviously I must use that term loosely here) masculinity. Oye.
Ok, I've had my say. Thanks. | | |
| Ok, if you haven't read my previous xanga about Virginia weather, read that first for context.
On the first day of summer, Chris got stuck in the elevator during a lightening storm.
On the third day of summer, another thunderstorm shut off power and suffocated us all night on the top floor.
On the fourth day of summer, Ashley complained.
And on the fifth day of summer, God got even.
If you've seen the news today, you've probably seen how parts of DC are underwater. Well, last night, Chris and I went to dinner at someone's house in Alexandria. Driving home, we got caught in a torrential downpour. Since this has been happening all week, my worries were focused mainly on not hydroplaning and my car roof not leaking.
The road that goes to our apartment was at a standstill, and we assume a road got flooded, so we hop on the beltway to go an exit and go the back way.
And before we are off the onramp, we're stuck. Everybody's stuck. Water, of course, is gushing by and I'm mentally measuring how high my exhaust pipe might be from the water. We inch forward, just barely on the actual road, and we are stuck. Though we didn't know it then, Cameron Run (you know, our address is Cameron Run Terrace) flooded and dumped five feet of mud and debris onto the freeway, shutting it down. The exit we wanted --Telegraph road-- was flooded as well (they had water rescues even) and so no one could leave the beltway. And I had to pee.
Chris found a gatorade bottle, but the opening was too small, so I waited. Meanwhile, it rained and rained, mocking me in little streams of water down the windows. Everyone had turned off their engines, which was so creepy -- the beltway, stuffed with turned off cars. We wandered around when it wasn't raining - it was too hot to stay in the car. The worst part was that we could SEE our building! We just couldn't get to it! But eventually, I just HAD to pee. And there was NO PLACE to do it! Cars everywhere! With people!
I rejected the bottle, but found a tough plastic bag and --yay me! -- paper towels because I had intended to clean the inside of my car. The car was all steamed up (not the good kind, mind you) so I had a fair amount of privacy. We pushed the front seat way up and in the back, and, well. . . . . don't judge! You don't what you'd do in that situation until you're in it!
I opened the car door and disposed of the bag's contents, thinking, In less than four hours, we have become animals, peeing in the backseat.
So we sat on the beltway. My allergy meds wore off, and I didn't have any with me, so then I fought allergies, not to mention a hair-do that was growing (from the humidity) like one of those sponge toys that grow in water. Chris and I tried to entertain each other, playing car games that don't depend on the car actually moving. (For example, the license plate game was NOT a game we played because for it to work, we would need to PASS cars.) After almost 5 hours and after 3:00 a.m., the northern exit for Telegraph opened, so we managed to get off and take sidestreets home.
It was a war zone. Stalled, abandoned cars everywhere - right in the middle of the road, covered in debris and mud. The road leading into our apt complex was closed, but Chris found a way to cross it through a bank parking lot that connected to it, and I don't think the cops even gave a crap at that point. As long as we didn't drown, we were good. FINALLY we were home, at 4:00 am.
The beltway, closed in both directions, didn't open up until after 7:00 am this morning. We were lucky because we were far enough back that we could exit at telegraph. Meanwhile, Chris' metro stop in DC was flooded and metro tracks on his route were flooded, so he stayed home. THe beltway was still closed (which I take to work), except to free the people there stuck all night, and so I stayed home, too. Then a health crisis broke out, less than a half mile away. Sewage lines broke and then a flash flood from telegraph has caused an entire neighbor to evacuate. Their homes are flooded with mud and water and sewage. Cars are just totaled, everywhere. THe first levels of some parking structures flooded over the roofs of the car. I'm on the 16th floor--we're safe and shit, we don't the own the place. BUT MY CAR! Telegraph is literally just down the road and I couldn't even recognize it on the news. I know it sounds shallow, but the thought of my car going underwater absolutely freaks me out. You know how I love that car. But to imagine it submerged . . .augh!
The next 36 hours are supposed to be nasty. I have no idea how i'll get to work tomorrow. But people are faring much, much worse then us. And it's mainly just dumb luck that separates someone's car washing down the street--literally where i drive every single day!-- and people like us, who, had we not taken some people to metro in arlington before heading home, we could've been one of those people stuck in flood, getting resuced. Seriously---it was just a difference of mere minutes.
But now I know that no matter what life throws my way, I am capable of peeing into a plastic bag in the backseat of my car.
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| When you think Virginia, do you think wild weather? Do you think of hurricanes or tornadoes? No, of course not. You think of quiet Southern hospitality, white-columned brick houses on rolling estates . . . .Maybe Thomas Jefferson at his quiet, idyllic home, Monticello, looking lovingly down upon Charlottesville. Quiet. Maybe some birds chirping.
WRONG! That's Virginia SOUTH of Culpepper. Northern Virginia is a snarly traffic-infested place, with loudsirens, insane weather, and, let's not forget, snipers and terrorist attacks.
So NoVa (that's Northern Virginia, folks) has had thunderstorm warnings for the last few days. Fine. But on Wednesday, there's thunder, lightening, and it rains so hard that I can't see 2 inches outside my apt window. Then the power goes out. I panick and call Chris.
ME: "WHERE ARE YOU????"
CHRIS: "In the elevator."
ME: "NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!"
Yep. Now, I'm quite clausterphobic, so I project that onto him. It's super hot and humid, he's trapped, and I suddenly feel responsible for getting him out. Perhaps it's not rational, but it's what I feel. So I call emergency maintence. He tells me it's not his problem and to call the fire department. I call Chris to make sure he hasn't already called them, and the the guy he was stuck in there with had called management --who had left a message with maintenace. I inform him that maintenace won't do a thing and management was just waiting until 6:30 so they could go home, not deal with it, and leave my boy to rot. So i call them and I chew them out as though the elevator is a deathtrap (which is what i viewed it as, at the time), overcrowded and at least 900 degrees. The fire department comes and frees my guy about an hour later.
Then last night, Armageddon comes to Alexandria. Thunder and lightening nonstop for over three hours. In the middle of the night, of course. NOt only does it sound--and look--as though we're under bloody attack, but the power goes out again. Remember, I live on the 16th floor. Heat rises. And it is literally about 85 degrees (at night!) with maximum humidity. And we can't open the windows because rain was slamming against them.
So for three hours, we roast in the bedroom, not sleeping. Chris gets cranky, I get cranky, and just when I'm contemplating going out for ice so everything in the fridge doesn't go bad, the power FINALLY comes back on. We get about an hour of sleep. It was a long, miserable night.
And then I get to work this morning and the AC on my floor is broken. And the windows don't open.
Fortunately, at about 1 pm today, they got it going again. Eh. It's the third day of summer and I'm about to kill myself. | | |
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