Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Home Again, With Apologies

You know you've been away from the blog for too long when your mother calls to say your father was worried about you because you hadn't blogged since Monday.

I DID try to post something late Wednesday night, after newly-divorced friend and coworker Laura and I went off past dirt road farms to a middle-of-nowhere chapel (with an outhouse instead of a flusher toilet, no less) to see an honest-to-goodness honky-tonk all-girl band called, happily enough, Girlhowdy. We stopped at local tavern Taylors, home of the best darn buffalo wings in greater New England, for far too many beers on the way home, and talked about relationships -- why mine works, and why hers didn't, maybe, and what her newly budding relationship with Pete, a ten-years-younger Religion teacher we work with, might turn out like. I was pretty drunk when I got back to the empty-but-for-laptop dorm apartment, my last night blogging there, so perhaps I just hit the "Post" button instead of the "post and publish" button. Maybe the post will have appeared by now; see below, I suppose?

And then it took me a few tries to figure out how easy the dial-up connection from the new off-off-campus apartment turned out to be. One of the perks of working at a prep school with a technology perspective better than its peers is that teachers get a laptop every three years or so, much like folks who work in some business fields get to drive a company car. Being a bit techosavvy, I deleted the then-unneeded icon for auto-dial-up from my laptop screen long a go, but darcie's laptop hasn't been recalled yet since her contract wasn't renewed at the end of the year, and she still had the shortcut there; turns out off-campus connection is as easy as clicking on the icon; the IT preprogrammed shortcut does the rest.

Not that the connection's anything to be thrilled about. Back when we lived in the dorm, network access was through the LAN; during the day, I shared three parallel T1 lines with as many as 500 students and on-campus faculty at a time, and when midnight came around and the student hubs shut off their network service, I had a T1 all to myself. Such power is heady; the network is never slow, and I used to laugh at Darcie's father, living at the end of a dirt road where the cable company refused to go and cellular phones couldn't reach the satellites for the hills, a district-wide director of technology calling in to his own network with a dial-up modem. Now the best connection I get on these old farmhouse phone wires is 21.6, and the web seems slower than it's ever been.

But increasingly I know it was all worth it. The chaos of a move up two narrow stairflights in the midst of a heatwave, the lack of a yard that a third floor walkup ultimately entails, the LAN loss, the home with no laundry hookup and a basement only accessible from down the stairs and outside and then back inside again, the challenge of moving an outdoor cat into a space with no real potential for outdoors, even the big picture windows we left behind for headbumpin' eaves and attic heat -- we've traded it all for more space, long hallways the baby's learning to walk teeteringly down, privacy, quiet. The streetlights don't come out this far, here on the farthest turn of the faculty housing loop behind the well-lit-for-students campus; the stars are brighter, and the view of the hills from this big sliding door fire escape is incredible.

Today I went back to the old apartment for one last look around, and, man, that place was tiny. It's hard to believe we lived in three rooms for the last five years. Funny how much more spacious it felt when we added our minds to it.

The blogging might drag a bit, but I think I like this place, this home, after all.

Empty

Big ol' empty apartment. Laptop on the floor; the screen's literally handing by a steel thread. Still haven't gotten an answer from IT about dial-up access, and someone else is moving into the old apartment tomorrow, in theory. Might be a while before I can blog from home.

Apologies for being blog-lax these past few. We're trying to get used to the new apartment, cleaning and unpacking all day and sitting exhausted among the boxes at night, and it's uncomfortable blogging on the floor in a now-sterile apartment.

The baby's taking a step unsupported every day, but kicking me in the head while I sleep; just got back from a bar-hop with friend-and-coteacher Laura after an odd honky-tonk girlband show in a church at the end of a rural dirt road, and that's about all I'm sober enough to report so it'll have to be enough for now; more later. Stay cool, folks -- looks like the heat wave's over, at least.

Monday Mosh

Welcome, newcomers; welcome back, frequent moshers. Apologies for missing a week; we've been switching apartments and only managed to reconstruct the stereo this morning.

But we're back with a vengance, and with Monday Mosh newly listed in I Am Pariah's Memeslist -- yay, traffic! -- I thought a little refresher might be in order.

Mondays being Mondays, the premise of the Monday Mosh is designed to be simple, energizing, and quick. Basically, each Monday, participants turn on whatever music they're in the mood for and dance around their living room/office/bedroom/sauna/whatever. Participants then answer three short questions about their experience. Then they post the answers to the questions in their own blog, and then leave a comment here, in THIS blog, so others can go see what they moshed to this week (this is the part that's like all those other memes).

Unlike most 'net memes, however, Monday Mosh does not post new questions each week, nor does it have a fancy web page just for the meme itself -- it doesn't need one. This is a meme for the busy and/or lazy, for those in need of a moment of ecstasy in the midst of the mundane. Although we here at Monday Mosh believe that Dance is a vital and too-often neglected creative outlet with important stress-reducing and other health-related properties, we also believe that such expression comes best from the dancer, so we're not here to impose musical genre or raison d'etre on y'all. Instead, it's all about trying to make the world a slightly happier place, one where people are prone to dance with impunity just for the heck of it at least once a week, and then share their experience, and, in doing so, celebrate the wildness in us all.

Wanna try? Here's my own Monday Mosh for this week to get you started -- the questions are the same ones as last week, and they'll be the same next week, too:

What song did you mosh to?
In memory of Barry White, this week's mosh was a slinky disco mosh to Can't Get Enough Of Your Love, Baby.

What did you step on or bump into? (bonus points for breakage)
Sadly, nothing -- this week's mosh took place in an apartment empty of all but a few trash bags in the corner. (The new all-attic-all-the-time apartment has serious low eaves, though, so expect to hear about me bashing my head on the walls in the next few weeks.)

Why did you stop?
Heard women's voices in the hall, startling me; I had forgotten that some basketball camp uses the adjacent dormitory for the camp referees. Hope I didn't wake anyone up.

Okay, now it's your turn. Turn on the tunes and dance, dance, dance; when you've finished, blog your own Monday Mosh, and leave a comment for us below. In keeping with the no-frills meme approach, there's no fancy icon to use as a linkback, but please leave a link to this blog nonetheless so we can keep spreading the word. Remember, the three questions are:

1. What song did you mosh to this week?
2. What did you step on or bump into? (Bonus points for breakage)
3. Why did you stop?

On your mark, get set...mosh!

The small print: Standard disclaimers apply. Neither Monday Mosh nor your Monday-moshpit host boyhowdy can or should be held responsible for a) loss or destruction of property or b) injuries to self or others which may result from participation in Monday Mosh. Common injuries may include stubbed toes, bruised knees, and loss of pride when your spouse, coworker(s), or children walk into the room unexpectedly during the Monday Mosh.