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November 6, 1998 |
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hi, steve | |||||
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Copyright © 1998, Janet I. Egan |
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I woke up this morning. That's a good start. Still too late - I heard the alarm at 8:05 AM and promptly went right back to sleep. I didn't even shut the radio off. By the time I came to again it was a little after 9:00 and the demented orange wacko was seeking petting rather than food. What is with him? Instead of demanding that I go downstairs and feed him, he rolls over on the bed and demands a belly rub. Is this normal? By the time I get downstairs and feed him it's nearly 10:00. I got out yesterday's list of things to do and proceeded to do them while listening to WBUR on the radio. As I was making phone calls and composing e-mails (e's-mail?) I heard Steve Schalchlin on The Connection (my favorite radio show). How cool. When I first started my on-line journal, Steve was the first reader I got e-mail from. His journal was particularly helpful to me given my family's elephant in the living room treatment of AIDS. (shoot, I can't find the entry where I called it the elephant ...) Anyway, I wanted to call in to the show but I was bound and determined to finish my planned tasks first, which took longer than I thought. Besides, I don't know what I would've said. One of the calls I made was to QI to set up some time tomorrow to get his computer set up in his office. This was made more difficult by the fact that he gave me the direct dial number for on-campus calls. When I dialed it I got "the cellular phone you have dialed is no longer in service". I finally figured out what the problem was by looking at the college's web site and determining that the last 4 digits of the direct dial number were an extension I could punch in after dialing the college's main number. I'm sure he didn't realize I couldn't use the direct dial number from off-campus. Anyway, we connected and agreed on a time for tomorrow morning. I decided to drive into Somerville to buy tickets for the Natalie McMaster concert coming up on the 21st. I couldn't go all the way to Somerville without getting a latte at the Someday Cafe. I was sitting there with my coffee and Song for the Blue Ocean (yes, I've taken to carrying it around with me - you never know when you may need a dose of depression over fisheries decline) and half listening to the conversations around me. One guy was talking about writing a play that was about performance art or something. The voice that answered him sounded familiar. My ears just sort of focused in and I'm thinking I know the voice. I get up and turn around and it's MASSCOMP alumnus Steve Gilbane! We caught up for a bit but he had to go and I had to go and all that. How odd. I hardly ever go to the Someday anymore. The rest of the day didn't yield any more Steves. I spent a disproportionately long time this afternoon creating the coffee cup image above as sort of the emblem of the day. It's based on the Someday Cafe logo as it appears on my t-shirt in a photo of me taken in Russia with the shirt soaking wet. I bought it back when the Someday was in its original tiny space next to the Somerville Theater and had only been open for a short time. Somehow that became the shirt I swim in (I sunburn really easily so I usually wear a shirt over my bathing suit when I'm snorkeling or swimming). It's been soaked in the far reaches of Atlantic and Pacific. Anyway, I enlarged the detail of the logo from the photo and messed with it in Photoshop to get the effect I wanted, which looks very little like the Someday logo but is sort of evocative of it. This was part of my ongoing effort to learn to communicate by pictures instead of words since the new millennium will be non-verbal as well as non-narrative. Speaking of the upcoming non-narrative century, on Monday's Connection show they were talking about Oprah Winfrey's movie of Beloved and many callers and guests were saying how hard it was to translate Toni Morrison's language into pictures. So I'm not the only one who can't do it. I'm trying to imagine what kind of picture would convey such a day of encountering Steves. | |||||
