Natural Disasters
British Quakes and Lunchbox Dynamics
TUESDAY: Lunch today is more basil tofu on a Ploughman's roll, i.e. a small baguette, accompanied by a container of fruit. Today it's a mixture of slices of Clementine, Conference pear, big bulbous white grapes, and blueberries. (Sure, I'm a bit particular and eccentric about my food; but any former workmates from Northrop days will be reminded of the "Dining With Jamie" column in the Impact Enquirer.
This week I was going to relate the entire story of my current job: how I ended up with it and how, since October of last year, I've been mistreated by the Human Resources department to the point where my pay rate was lowered; and how, in light of the European Directive on Part-Time Workers, certain sectors in Britain, most notably the academic sector, are not doing what they should be doing but are instead exploiting their casual workers (who have established continuity) by withholding the rights and benefits they have legally earned. If you want to read my entire spiel just ask and I'll e-mail it to you. But it's not really very amusing.
My final word on this subject is simply that if anybody out there in the Sheffield area wants to hire a creative-thinking, hard working, detail-oriented writer, proofreader, and/or HTML/CSS whiz who has a decade of experience as a software developer and can easily learn new programming languages and systems, and who can type 95 words per minute and converse and spell in both British and American, who believes in correct punctuation and grammar, and who can speak a spattering of Russian, French, and Spanish, who is physically fit, who wears red lipstick, and who can draw, play piano and mandolin, juggle and be witty in the face of adversity, please don't hesitate to contact me...
THURSDAY: Yesterday my lunch was a bit odd. In other words, it consisted of whatever I could find in the fridge: a cheese and onion roll with old bits of Edam and Wensleydale cheeses, a spring onion and red pepper, and a bit of Dijonnaise. But at least the round sandwich fit into my square plastic container (with rounded corners), just like the standard bap. Today it's cheddar, onion, and English mustard on the only option I had: two large slices of Hovis Granary. Sadly whenever I use regular sliced bread for my sandwiches they don't fit correctly into my square plastic container (with rounded corners). So if the bread is small it flops around uncomfortably, flapping its slices apart and spewing its ingredients here and there. If the bread is too big, like today, the only way I can fit the sarnie into my container is by placing one half snugly inside and then cramming the other in, squashing half of it onto the first half. And this creates a very ugly-looking sandwich. Ah, well, I'll eat it anyway.
The night before last I experienced my first non-Pacific-Coast earthquake. Registering 5.2 on the Richter scale it was centred under Market Rasen in North Lincolnshire, felt as far away as Edinburgh, Northern Ireland, and the South Coast, and it caused some damage in South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Only one person was injured, but that's still a lot for a UK earthquake. I mean, these islands are not exactly known for their seismic activity. Even though this is the third British earthquake I've heard about in the past 7 years, I would be very surprised if British faultlines ever gained tourist attraction status like they have in California. (Witness the "Now Crossing the San Andreas Fault" signs on Interstate 5.)
But still, this week's quake was an E-ride for me. Having grown up in Southern California, where earthquakes are as common as movie premieres, and having personally experienced the 1971 Sylmar quake -- which measured 6.6, killed 65 people, and damaged two hospitals and a major freeway interchange -- and the 1987 Whittier Narrows quake – which, at a lesser 5.9, still killed 8 people and damaged masonry buildings in Whittier and Pasadena -- I figured one of the things that I would be giving up by moving to the UK, along with good Mexican food, would be earthquakes. And I would also be giving up all the habits that come with them, such as bolting one's furniture to the walls, never hanging a glass-framed picture over the bed, and keeping a safety helmet handy at all times.
But how wrong I was! At 12:55am Tuesday night I awoke instantly, possibly as a result of the usual babbly trail of drunken students staggering up my road, but possibly as a result of an initial tremor. A few seconds later I realised we were having an earthquake and I lay in my bed, enjoying the tremor like a surfer enjoys a rare wave. This is brilliant!, I thought to myself, even though I'm ashamed to admit I was a tad disappointed that there was no sound of breaking glass or at least the sound of things falling off shelves to accompany the quake. But a nearby house alarm did go off and stayed screaming for quite some time.
I feel sad that so many of my British friends slept through the quake, completely oblivious, because it is such a rare occurrence. When I lived in Seattle in the 1990s, my friend Robert left his hometown of Chicago to move to Seattle. In 1996, during the only earthquake I experienced there that was strong enough to feel, Robert was living in a basement room with his dog Soter, who was the size of a small planet; and upstairs was a woman with two large dogs. So Robert thought the tremors were simply caused by the dainty feet of giant canines romping about.
Apparently, like Robert, quite a few Brits didn't realise they were experiencing an earthquake. Some of the scenarios imagined included intruders in the house, an intruder under the bed, a plane crash, a nuclear attack, a gas explosion, a vivid nightmare, an elephant stampeding around the room, a sleeping partner snoring violently, and a giant lizard attacking the city. Personally I like the Godzilla idea, because when I used to play SimCity on my computer with the sole intention of destroying a city I always ended up bringing in the Creature from Outer Space which looked a bit like a jar of Marmite left in the microwave too long.
FRIDAY: More on my square plastic container (with rounded corners): I find a long crusty roll, such as the sesame roll I have today, fits perfect into the container if I slice it on just the right diagonal so that the cut end and the shorter end of each half fit into each corner (see below). But then I've always loved mathematical and spatial puzzles. (Did I mention that in my above list of employable assets?)
Flying Away From Disaster
TUESDAY: Considering how overheated the library in which I work is kept, it's surprisingly cold in the area where I eat my lunch. I seem to be the only person in this officially designated eating area who isn't wearing a hoodie, a heavy cableknit jumper, or at least a scarf. Walking to work today in the frosty fog was magical. I've spent the past two decades of my life residing in climates with cold winters, and I've experienced plenty of snow, hail, sleet, snowy rain, and black ice. But today was the first time I'd seen snowy fog. What a brilliant experience...
THURSDAY: Lunch is a lovely sandwich with basil-marinated tofu, cream cheese, and red pepper on a rustic roll. This week I meant, for the purpose of venting a little rage, to relate the history and details of my dissatisfaction with my current job as a result of the unfair practices of the organisation that employs me. But I got distracted during these short lunch recesses by the Guardian's daily extracts from Susan Faludi's book The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed About America. Faludi discusses how the news media, in their conjectures about the rescues by firefighters in the Twin Towers and by the passengers of Flight 93, glorified the idea of male heroes while ignoring the possibility of female heroes, or even the possibility that these "heroes" were all victims acting as anybody else would. It's a fascinating read, and I haven't even finished Extract Number 1.
As an American who was living in the UK and living on Marmite during and after the September 11th bombings, I felt strangely disappointed that I couldn't have been with my American friends and relatives when this occurred - not because I felt like I was missing something but because I wanted to understand what it felt like to be a liberal American living in America during that time. But I had to rely on later conversations with my mother and friends and also my subscription to The Nation.
I suppose I'm lucky in my habit of just happening to be somewhere else when a disaster strikes. The Rodney King riots broke out in Los Angeles just a few hours after I flew home to Seattle. And I missed the 1994 Northridge earthquake by only a few hours as I once again flew home from Los Angeles to Seattle. When the WTO riots occurred in Seattle I had moved away a few months earlier, and a few years later when I flew out of Manchester to spend a few months in California, the Midlands experienced a rare earthquake just a few days after I left.
Sure, it has occurred to me that I might be inadvertently causing these disasters through the innocent act of hopping on airplanes, perhaps as a result of some unbalanced altitudinal chi which results in a rather catastrophic demonstration of the butterfly effect.
Or perhaps not. What do I know?
