January down
Well, the deadline is past, anyway. I was nervous because the submissions had gone so well up until about Wednesday last week, when the problem children began to surface — and oh, were there some spectacular ones this time around.
Let’s just say I’m continuously amazed that TPTB are perfectly willing to give some of these people a PhD and send them out into the big bad world with their stamp of approval. We joke that the first test to see whether someone is eligible for graduation ought to be a simple one: following instructions. How do you possibly make it through four years of undergrad and up to eight years of grad school and still not know how to follow directions?
/sigh
My hand is killing me. Far too much PDF viewing, mouse clicking, arrow key pushing and all that fun stuff. I think I’m developing a sensitivity to the Icy Hot adhesive tape I’ve been slapping onto those swollen tendons all week.
On the plus side, I accompanied Mom to her office dinner last night. She works for a surgeon, and his family and her office mates are all pretty cool. The doctor’s toddler grandkids were in attendance, and were scary cute, I have to admit. Also, the pomegranate martinis were as delicious this year as they were last. Sadly (*cough*) I’m skipping my own office party this week to go gaming. My head may not be in the games so much these days, but still — given a choice? Story time trumps office politics and Christmas speeches. I just don’t have the patience for the dean’s sermon this year, it turns out.
Mom and I drove past the old St. Joe hospital campus on our way downtown to the dinner last night, and later I borrowed her camera and went back to take pictures. The pavilion where she worked is all but gone, a skeleton of steel girders and wilted sheets of steel that remind me of a strange sort of seaweed hanging from its bones. You can see the ambient glow of the winter night straight through on the other side. Most of the main hospital itself is gone as well, and what’s left looks like the bombed-out set of an apocalyptic zombie flick. I’m just waiting for it to show up in my dreams — I dreamt about the old Studebaker corridor as a setting for years and years when I was a kid. That sort of massive structure urban decay seems to stick with me, for some reason.
I keep forgetting to mention the hospital at the LV game — I drive past there on the way over. When it was still light out at that time, you could see it very clearly. I find abandoned school and hospital buildings to be very creepy; the ones in ruins doubly so.
It’s true — they’re places that should be full of people and things and a thousand little moments in time, all at once. To see them standing desolate and alone just feels like something’s gone horribly wrong. I think that’s why I love them — that type of abandoned structure has such a presence and expectation about it that you can’t help but feel the weight of its ghost all around you. Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes, it’s very, very creepy.