Monday, May 12, 2003

More Closure, Please

My sister continues to work on Miss Marjorie... it seems there's this object called an "Inertia Switch" that turns off the fuel pump in the event of a collision; my coworker JB's husband (who is an automotive electrician) mentioned this object to me over dinner last week, positing that my little encounter with the rogue curb might have fooled the machine into believing that it had been in an altercation with one of those famous Immoveable Objects; and though it struck me as farfetched, I told my sister about it; she had never heard of such a thing, but during her perusal of the half-assed Chilton guide to my car, she discovered that there's a good likelihood that exactly such a thing is installed in my engine, and that the likelihood that it was tripped by the curb is also high... however, she can't find the damned thing. She can't find the fuel pump, either. The drawings in the Chilton guide are vague, at best, and while there is a lovely illustration of the fuel pump of Engine B230F, the drawing lacks the little arrow-line that indicates where, in the byzantine innards of said engine, the fuel pump is actually situated.



But she continues the search, and has gotten our father involved in the project as well. In the meantime, I remain stymied by what to do next... if Marjorie is merely comatose rather than dead, what will I do with her when she recovers: keep her, sell her, donate her? And what of my plan to purchase a 2003 Ford Focus SE Sedan in French Blue with Parchment interior? While I deplore the debt and expense of buying a brand-new car, I am very comfortable with the idea and the visuals of a 2003 Ford Focus SE Sedan in French Blue with Parchment interior, and now I really want one.



Oh, well, the answer will be revealed in due time, no doubt. All questions are invariably answered (unfortunately, the rest of that quote is "by Death"... closure, indeed).



In other news, I have noticed lately that certain websites which are related by a common-factor individual, and which in blog parlance are my blogparent and bloggrandparent, are now gone. I speak of course of the sad termination of East/West and the mysterious disappearance of the Galaxy Girls site... it was Philo (the alterego of Rula Planet) who started the Galaxy Girls blog, inspired by the success of his East/West partnership, and it was from him that I caught the blogging bug... and when the Galaxy Girls' blog couldn't hold me, Mannersism was born. But now they're both gone, I am an orphan, and I don't quite know what happened. I want closure here, too.



It would probably seem somewhat less mysterious if I had been following Philo's solo blog, but I have not had the concentration necessary for keeping up with my more fluent blogsisters of late... but I did skim through it today and found no mention of the Galaxy and whether or not the sudden and unannounced absence of its webpage is indicative of anything.



If the Galaxy Girls show was at an end, I would totally understand... Rula Planet has been giving it her all for more than seven years, and I know that sort of thing wears one down. You start this fun little showm (or blog, for that matter), an outlet for your own creative energy and the energy of some of your friends; and then all of a sudden you aren't doing it for the hell of it anymore, you're doing it because people expect you to do it... it's no longer something that gives you outlet on your own terms, it is work dictated by the desires of others. This latest loss of venue was perhaps the last straw in a series of disenchantments; and I know that Philo is a creature of growth and change, who does not make a practice of toting empty and useless luggage around with him. And since no one stepped forward to keep the Galaxy spinning in its tiny Marin County orbit, perhaps it is time for it to die.



But nobody has told me whether or not this is the case. I suppose I could do the unthinkable and try to communicate with Philo about this issue, but that somehow seems too simple... and therefore ineffective. Still, I need to know one way or another. If the Galaxy is no more, then Candie Swallows is the last Miss Gay Marin and I can start wearing the clothes and accessories that I have been holding in reserve for the next Pageant. If on the other hand the Galaxy still lives, in a comatose stasis like Miss Marjorie, I will have to decide exactly how much effort I am willing to put into its resurrection. I just need to know one way or another... closure, you see.



And speaking of closures, I am currently engaged in one of my least-favorite work tasks, stuffing envelopes for an election. This is the big General Election that we have every two years, with the four officers, eight campus reps, and four committee chairs all up for election at the same time. Everyone votes for officers and one of the committee chairs, but there have to be separate ballots for all four campuses (two reps each) and three of the committees (special constituencies), so that there are twelve different subsets of faculty with different combinations of ballots. Just to make it more interesting, there's also a negotiations survey (one for full-time folk, another for the poor part-timers) intended to discover just how committed the members are to their PPO and what they're willing to sacrifice to keep it.



And oddly enough, I'm not minding this very much at all. I guess things have gotten so nutty in my life that I welcome a little mindless tedium as a change of pace. Besides, it's always a nice time to sit and visit with Caroline. Stuffing envelopes is a little like playing cards, it gives you enough to do that you aren't fidgeting, but leaves enough brain-space for conversation.



So I guess I'd better get at that... but first, dinner.



Finally, speaking one more time of closure, some things just don't need to be closed:



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