kopia lustrzana https://github.com/thinkst/zippy
97 wiersze
5.3 KiB
Plaintext
97 wiersze
5.3 KiB
Plaintext
|
|
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
|
|
|
|
|
|
The effect of not being on vacation in Italy on a man with a tall stack of
|
|
papers to grade.
|
|
|
|
As you probably noticed, my wife is currently on vacation without me -— which is different
|
|
than a vacation from me, although given how frequently insufferable I am,
|
|
I could understand the appeal of such—in the le Marche region of Italy, which is immediately
|
|
south of Tuscany and full of communists. As evidence of how thoroughly corrupt the region is, I
|
|
present a picture (courtesy of her) of the cabin she'll be staying in free of
|
|
charge until July:
|
|
That's the view she'll be writing her dissertation to the next two months. The region is poor
|
|
(though not so much as I thought) and
|
|
poorly serviced by internet and wifi: there's a router up the hill from her which sometimes
|
|
provides wifi, but only then into a loft too unbearably hot to occupy during the day. So the
|
|
only opportunity I have to talk to her (via Skype) is that last hour in the late evening when
|
|
the loft cools enough to be habitable—provided, of course, that the wifi strength that evening
|
|
is strong enough to establish and maintain a connection. Which it frequently isn't. But this
|
|
post isn't about how melancholy I become when I haven't heard from her by 3 p.m. (which would be
|
|
midnight over there), because anyone who follows me on Facebook already knows that and because this post concerns Urbino, not my daily descent into emo.
|
|
I've written about Urbino before , but because the wife is providing me with such dazzling photographs
|
|
of the city, I feel compelled to do so again. As I noted in that post, Urbino is not a
|
|
"built" city so much as an "evolved" one. (The De Landa seems to
|
|
have become an unwitting
|
|
theme of late.) Of course it was built , but it was built vertically
|
|
within the city walls, meaning that new buildings were constructed atop
|
|
existing ones like so:
|
|
The effect is the sort of architecture one only finds in dreams or representations of them,
|
|
like the one in the finale of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire
|
|
Slayer , wherein Joss Whedon took advantage of contiguous three-walled film sets to depict
|
|
Xander Harris moving seamlessly from the upstairs bathroom at Buffy's house:
|
|
|
|
Into the Initiative's underground bunker:
|
|
Then, from the bathroom-Initiative across the hall:
|
|
Into his parent's basement:
|
|
And into an ice cream truck:
|
|
Past the the come-hither lesbians:
|
|
Through the back of the ice cream truck:
|
|
By means of a passage:
|
|
That returns him to you guessed it his parents' basement:
|
|
In which he exits the same door he originally entered it from Buffy's house only to end up in
|
|
the halls of Sunnydale High and (shortly) an Apocalypse Now parody:
|
|
The only difference between what Whedon did and Urbino is that you could travel through the
|
|
side streets of Urbino with a camera and accomplish such feats (minus the Coppola) without needing to cut once . Because without leaving officially sanctioned
|
|
lanes of transportation, pedestrians can venture into and through outdoor kitchens, university
|
|
departments, the central hallway of apartment buildings, and so on. This photograph of the
|
|
dueling signs for the Hotel Raffaello the wife snapped the other day typifies the way the city
|
|
feels:
|
|
You can enter the hotel either through the door with the green awning or the second story
|
|
window of an adjacent building. (This isn't technically true, but it accurately describes how it
|
|
feels to those unaccustomed to the city's geography.) The city is even
|
|
more disturbing, though, because of the tendency of its sidewalks to transform into recessed
|
|
brick ladders when the street becomes too steep for bipeds
|
|
: That picture is not from the current set, as the relative quality attests, and if I remember
|
|
correctly—by which I mean, "recognize the fingerprints of amateur photographers the world
|
|
over who think a 'good' photograph is one framed in the most dull and predictable way
|
|
possible"—snapped by me.* I only mention that because in 2002 I visited the city with the
|
|
wife and, as you probably guessed, the real point of this post was to indulge in a bit of
|
|
vicarious vacationing before returning to a stack of ungraded papers that no amount of actual
|
|
grading seems to have the power to reduce.
|
|
*If it wasn't, even Homer nods? No, but seriously, if that's not a picture I actually took,
|
|
it's exactly the sort I relentlessly take, whereas check out the wife's chops above: the woman has
|
|
an eye.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If she is working, she is not on vacation. AND this time apart will make you stronger and
|
|
make you realize marriage is work and you need to put some in or the marriage dies and you are
|
|
left with an empty hole in your heart. I know this is over kill, but you need to get out of
|
|
the funk you are in and grade the papers and finish the course so you can get some down time
|
|
and catch up on your sleep.
|
|
Posted by: alkau | Wednesday, 26 May 2010 at 11:11 AM
|
|
|
|
|
|
have a happy vacation that place looks fascinating I should get a passport
|
|
Posted by: happyfeet | Wednesday, 26 May 2010 at 09:57 PM
|
|
|
|
|
|
happy, I don't normally like to contradict you, but in this case I must: I'm not the one on
|
|
vacation, sadly. I'm having to live it through my beautiful, vacationing wife.
|
|
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 26 May 2010 at 10:18 PM
|
|
|
|
|
|
oh. Sorry I got confuzzled.
|
|
|
|
I can't wait to get Alzheimer's so I can watch Buffy again like it was the first time.
|
|
Posted by: happyfeet | Saturday, 29 May 2010 at 12:23 PM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|