Cosmic revenge?

According to this article in The Boston Globe, my ancestors may have been getting some payback this weekend:

Honestly, the Quabbin Reservoir has bothered me for a long time. Not the water we get from it, just the whole dark story of its beginning. Its creation, in the 1930s, required the destruction by flooding of four towns in Central Massachusetts — a nearly-forgotten piece of history told, fictionally, by none other than former governor William F. Weld in his novel, “Stillwater.’’ In real life, the protests of the people of Enfield, Dana, Prescott, and Greenwich left state legislators unmoved, and they lost a lawsuit to save their towns when the Supreme Judicial Court ruled against them.

Maybe this weekend was some kind of cosmic revenge. To watch the mass municipal freak-out, you might have thought we were back in a Great Depression or some other epochal event. Television news was blizzard coverage ramped up by a factor of 10: health advisories, school advisories, updates from the mayor and the governor. On and on it went.

My grandmother was born in one of the towns that is now several hundred feet underwater, so it's a bit of a sore spot for our family. I've also been known to go a bit berserk when people who live in Boston don't know where their water comes from, which is distressingly common.

I'm just imagining my Bowen ancestors cackling at this whole thing. "You want water, you ingrates? Well here you go!"

Seriously, though, the freak-out level here was over the top. I heard stories about college students not showering all weekend. Um, guys? You could still take showers, you just couldn't drink it. Unless you had an open wound or something it was just like swimming in a lake, though hopefully with soap. We don't need any more reasons for smelly college students to be around since it's both hot and finals week for a lot of us. Also, you'd think no one in this city owned a teakettle or a hotpot, or a stove, all three of which I have.

Just goes to show if there's ever a real crisis everyone in this city will probably, to use a local colloquialism, flip their shit. Us country people are used to going days without electricity because of snowstorms and downed power lines, so I like to think I'm made of tougher stuff.

Wherin I delve into the hodgepodge that is Utena

A little while ago I had a dream about Revolutionary Girl Utena, and a short time later I was thinking while doing the dishes (as I often do) about one of the main relationships in the series, and then applying what I learned in my Women and Crime class last semester I realized that it's a remarkably or perhaps even disturbingly accurate portrayal of what an abusive relationship between a victim and batterer is like.

( Bigass spoilers for the series under cut )

Basically, I'm convinced Kunihiko Ikuhara must have studied this sort of thing at some point. It just lines up too well.

I actually have that same professor next semester, so I might just mention the show to see what he'd think of it. I think he'd come to the same conclusion.

Murphy's Law

Murphy's Law at work: If you are eating fried rice with chopsticks and happen to be wearing a shirt with even the slightest bit of a v-neck said rice will find its way down your shirt, necessitating an awkward reach in to remove it from between your bra and your skin.

This is one reason so many costume designers annoy me when they put cleavage exposing clothes on female characters in situations where they really would be a hassle. If there's even the slightest chance stuff will get down there, and no it is not fun and no it is not sexy! Especially when it's hot coffee or something similar, which has also happened to me and is about 10 times worse.