I had my first confirmed California earthquake Thursday morning--no longer will I be able to say that I've experienced more earthquakes in Ithaca than in California! It was only a 4.7, but I've been waiting for one I could actually feel for so long that it woke me from a sound sleep. And knowing I was in an earthquake zone produced quite a different thought process from the Ithaca quake--I more heard the rumble than felt the shaking. It coincided with a plane going by, and once I was conscious enough to realize that the noise was far more than a plane could possibly make, I thought 'it's like the sound of thousands of voices crying out in fear and suddenly being silenced'. Yes, apparently I am that geeky, I not only quoted Star Wars in my sleep, but I paraphrased it to account for the fact that the quake wasn't loud enough to have been made by millions of people. Yes, I'm very proud! On the other hand, this was a slightly more rational mental reaction than the Ithaca one, the rough shaking of which woke me from a sound sleep to the following thought process:
'The bed seems to be shaking. Why is the bed shaking? Perhaps there is a loud truck outside, so loud that it is shaking the bed with its noise?' *listen*
'No. No loud truck noise. Perhaps my housemate needs to wake me up and has come in and begun shaking the bed?' *pry eyes open, attempt to focus*
'No. No housemate. Also, cannot focus eyes at 4:30 on Sunday morning. Mental note. Why then is the bed shaking? There is nothing visible, audible, or otherwise perceptible shaking the bed--it must be something invisible and imperceptible. It must be ghosts!! And if they are shaking the bed, they must be angry ghosts! I was dreaming...something. It must have been something bad. It must have been something very, very bad, because it upset the angry ghosts who are shaking the bed so that I will stop dreaming about it. Only angry ghosts can possibly be shaking this bed. Yes. Must try not to dream about...whatever it was. Must stay awa...'
Earthquakes have moved from the reaction of dream-censoring ghosts to a disturbance in the force. One can only imagine to whom I will attribute them next...
I went out near Yosemite with an odd mixture of drama folks and particle physicists to go prospecting today. It was surprisingly fun, spending the day digging in a muck-filled pit, hauling heavy buckets, and sitting in a creek swishing dirt and rocks around in a sluice. We actually found about $300 worth of stuff, which divided among us all was not all that much, but I still feel slightly rich. Is it sad that all it takes to make me feel rich is a $40 chunk of gold? Even more excitingly, the nugget i got is shaped like a little fat woman sitting. And who doesn't love fat woman shaped gold? Certainly not I! (Heh, evil money-making scheme, I could bring it along this summer and charge the crazier of the goddess-worshippers who come around to look at it. But I suppose that would be 'wrong'. Should I be obligated to protect the foolish from themselves? Besides, they do have more money than sense and need a non-insulting direction to use it in. It takes a special kind of blindness to think it was a good idea to move into the tiny local village and tell the women that they have been oppressed and need to throw off the patriarchal yoke of Islam, and then be shocked when the women hated them and their building mysteriously burned down)
The man who runs the place loves gold more than any human being ever. He tells long, involved stories about the different kinds of gold and how they form (did you know that the purest kind of gold found in nature actually comes from an extreme bacteria which lives about ten miles under the surface of the earth, eats oxidized metals, and then poops out gold? I didn't! And hey, I've circled back around to excrement, so I'll stop this parentheses before it goes any further out of control), and about specific pieces of gold that he found years ago, and all of his travels to various gold-rich areas around the world. I can't imagine feeling that strongly about a metal. I was seriously thinking of Terry Pratchett's dwarves, who only say they love gold to get it into bed!
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