stansted

i was in England for a brief period of time. three days to be exact. Friday Saturday and Sunday. well technically Sunday night as well. see our flight left at 7 am on Monday morning.

you do the math.

7 am flight. being international, must arrive 2 hours prior. estimated traveling time to airport, 1.5 hours. time to wake up and get things around and in the car, 15 minutes. so what time would the alarm need to go off?

if my math is correct (and i was an English major) it would be a 3:15 start. and who on this side of the planet would want to take someone to the airport at 3:15 in the morning, not to mention hitting London traffic on the way back.

thats a big no one. and the truth be told, i wasn't up for it either. so we went to the airport the night before. and we slept on the floor. on the cold, hard, dusty floor. all in all it wasn't the worst night i've passed. i think back to a night i spent in Madrid, waiting outside the bus station for a good 5 and a half hours. that was definately colder, harder and dustier. okay, so i didn't sleep loads but as long as you've got something to lay your head on...

which brings me to my main point. we weren't the only ones sleeping in the airport. i figured there would be a handful of other weary travelers and a couple of smart homeless guys. but truth be told again, there were MASSES of people. i am often a conservative guesser and but i reckon we were nearly touching 300 people. this is in lovely Stansted Airport by the way. if you don't know the size, well you can walk from one end to the other in about 10 minutes.

nothing personal against stansted actually. just its in the middle of nowhere, thats all. it faithfully serves the 70 people who live that side of london, which the other 3.5 million everywhere else are left with an eternal drive along Britain's busiest carpark. oh i mean road. oh i guess i didn't mention it. on the way, leaving the airport, we sat on that very road for 3 and some odd hours. bumper to bumper. who puts an airport at the end of a crowded road anyways?

but back to the airport, so people everywhere. hundreds of them. and what is more, some of them were professional airport sleepers. placing all joking to one side, we saw people on blow up matresses, with sleeping bags on top and about 4 pillows. who carries blow up mattresses, sleeping bags, and a 3 to 1 pillow to head ratio?!?!? obviously quite a few. and so to say its a sight i won't soon forget.

small airport, many people sleeping, or perhaps just trying to sleep. and a few, apparently smart souls snoring soundly away on their blow up mattresses in the middle of the Ryanair checkout line.

next time i'm going to Heathrow.

z z z

i've realized that the previous post was nothing more than an attempt at making myself tired so i would want to go to bed. occasionally i suffer this phenomenon where, tired or not tired, i don't want to go to bed. so i prolong the inevitable, doing meaningless tasks that have no eternal purpose, or even momentary for that matter. funnily, in the morning i always feel the opposite and ask myself what the heck was i thinking and why would anyone put off going to sleep?

i think it's connected with an subconcious fear of laying in bed for an hour, wide awake, not being able to sleep. but really, wide awake and not being able to sleep aren't that different.

obsessive compulsive paranoia comes to mind.

there's got a be a picture or at least something... anything!

nearly every time i sit down i don't know what i'm about to put down. i think it's what keeps this thing going.

but then sometimes i sit down and i just stare at the screen. or i type a sentence and delete it. retype a sentence and redelete it. till i either give up or go down a completely different line.

then there are the instances like what is happening right now. instead of giving up, i am just going to post what i've got down.

proverbs

a few i've stumbled upon.

I
he who lets offenses pass by,
creates ties of love;
he who does not, alienates his friends.

II
even idiots can pass for wise and intelligent
when they shut up and keep silent.

III
the fool has no desire to learn;
only the desire to flaunt what he already knows.

III
it's stupid and shameful
to respond before listening.

IV
what is at first easy to acquire,
in the end doesn't bring much happiness.

further spacing and a scorpion

the other day i stumbled upon a scorpion. yes a real live scorpion and it was carrying the body of a cockroach (previously mentioned) off somewhere... to eat it? (i dunno if they are carnivores or not.) but anyways it was my first experience with a scorpion in a live, anything goes environment. after a brief moment of incredulity, then a rush of adrenaline, and at last a brief panic attack, i analyzed the situation...

1- i am bigger than him.
2- i am faster than him.
3- i am stronger than him.
however,
4- i don't have a tail that i can jab into things leaving a poisonous trail.
but,
5- i do have shoes that i can use to squash his little jabby tail.
that being said,
6- i have nothing against the guy.
7- i hope he has nothing against me, other than the murderous thoughts i am thinking.
8- all he is trying to do is take some supper home to his scorpion children.
9- how would i feel if someone were to squash me while i was trying to feed my children? (not that i have children, but when i do...)
however,
10- my children will not be born with a tail with which they use to kill things.
11- it's not his kids' fault though that they do.
sidenote: i wonder if he used his tail to kill the cockroach? if that were the case than it would be a point in favor of the venomous tail. a small point, but a point.
moving on...
12- he hasn't cornered me.
13- i haven't cornered him.
14- there is nearly always a non-bloody solution if both sides are willing to work towards it.
15- we are 5 miles away from my house so it is highly unlikely that he will hunt me down tonight, come in through my open window, and stab me to death while I sleep, just for taking so long to decide how to maneuver this situation.

so we both went our separate ways. he to his home to feed the cockroach to his children, and me to my home to ponder how i would like to be treated if i had an awkward tail that instilled fear in 89 percent of gringos...

spacing

this is really just a post to get that ugly thing a bit further down the page so it's not the first thing one sees. that being said I'm going to have to write a bit more than this to move it along.

so an update ensues.

I've got short hair and no new teeth paranoia's. i am currently listening to my new Snow Patrol cd which I bought on iTunes. it's dang good. i haven't put on much weight I don't think, but then again, I don't feel as skinny as I used to. maybe that's cause it's been two weeks since anyone has made a comment. that's a pretty long time. cherries are in season in Spain. for those who don't know, Spain has the best cherries in the world. i currently have the pit of one in my mouth. I'm not chewing it cause they are pretty hard, but rather I've just got it there between my teeth and my cheek. it's like a comfort thing. june's a hot month. july and august are hotter but we aren't there yet. gets to be like 95 around here pretty easily. by the end its regular triple digits.

what else is new? well i am gonna be home for about 6 weeks in july and august. that's not new but it is coming up.

well I'm gonna leave it at that for now. i could think of more stuff to say but that would involve thinking for certain periods of time. what was written above came up spontaneously, and i feel like i might ruin the post to actually ponder what write. a pondered post deserves its own space.

la cucaracha

not to be gross or anything, but tonight we had a cockroach killing. now before you go all crazy and start saving their fur, let me just say they are pests. they are ugly, foul, with hairy legs, wings, and crunchy little bodies the color of... well why not just have a glance at the pic?
there is a drain outside of the house. at about 10 something at night Az made a trip out to the garbage bin to drop some stuff there. a few minutes later he runs up to the window motioning for me to come out. something about make sure you put some shoes on...
coming out of the drain of the house was nothing less than an army of roaches. big ones, little ones and all sorts of crunchy, dirty sizes in between. our neighbor had taken to spraying half a bottle of insecticide down the hole. what ensued could only be described as a massacre.
when it was all said and done we had taken the lives of between 150 and 200 of the suckers without suffering a single casualty ourselves. Az took one in the hair. I had a couple bounce off my arm, and Abby, well Abby didn't stick around too long. Az and the neighbor were dancing like lunatics, squashing the life out with the bottoms of their shoes while I was using a lethal right arm, armed with a flyswatter, to pick them off the walls. the downer with the flyswatter was that they occasionally bounced the little buggers back at you. and let me just say that they aren't easy to kill. more than one swat was often needed.

well after a good 20 minutes, no joke, they weren't coming out so fast. so we taped up the drain, finished off a few stragglers and swept the corpses into a pile on the road. all the while listening to the scratchings of few late comers trying to escape the now taped up drain. there was no sympathy floating about...

maybe the city will get those fumigators out here finally...

why not a random picture? i'm having trouble sleeping.

it's june now and time stops for no one.

i figure that sums up the recent blogging activity.

i'd like to express myself here. i'd like to explain what is new and where my life is headed. but. but it seems like the ink is dried up. that or someone has turned my pen upsidedown and the force of gravity is no longer drawing out the words. so either i need to get one of those pressurized pens or somehow get the pen back to rightsideup so gravity can do it's thing. maybe i'll opt for the second since pressurized things have the tendency of exploding on white shirts.

on the way to weddings in an elevator.

it's my screensaver right now. i thought i'd share.