Monday, October 29, 2007

Interaction

I had a run in with one of my classmates today, tied in to a run in we had a week or two ago. He sits across from me in America to 1890, reasonably good looking, nice smile. Not much upstairs but that only becomes apparent durring group excersizes where we'll divy up tasks and five mintues from the end of class he'll decide he wants to do something else and hamstring us all.

Previously I ran into him in the parking garage as I was putting my iPod headphones on and he gave me a lecture about how are people supposed to talk to me with that thing on, and by the way was I scared about the drought. He made the word "drought" sound the way winter weathermen here say "blizzard" when there are flurries. I told him I didn't think much about wearing my iPod all the time, since I liked it, and that I wasn't scared of the drought because the government will probably arrange to buy water from somewhere else, or we could build a desalination plant on the coast and pipe fresh water in. He seemed startled there were solutions, and stalked off.

Today I didn't have my iPod on when I came to class because I'd been on the phone with a friend at the newspaper, and he smiled and waved like he usualy does because we sit across from eachother at the same table. I waved back, and got on with class. After class he lurked at the table, waiting for me to pack my bag, then closely followed me out into the hall.

"So, you said you lost your iPod?" He asked.

I said no, a little startled.

"But you're not listening to it."

I left my headphones in the car, I replied with a smirk. He laughed.

And then he grabbed my arm, just above the elbow, forcing me to stop in the middle of the hall, people rushing past and bashing into us.

"Well, at least you're not dissregarding everything around you for once."

And then he took off in the opposite direction.

I have to think that it's a good thing I cut my hair a few months ago, otherwise one of my pigtails might wind up in his ink well.

2 comments:

Jason said...

Sounds like Whitney has a boyfriend... if you were both in fifth grade.

^_^

Odd behavior, though. How old is he, 9?

~J

cliff said...

A tanker truck typically holds 3000 gallons. Metro Atlanta consumes 445 million gallons of water per day, on average. That means it would take 148,333 tanker trucks per day. That's 6180 tanker trucks full of water every hour. That's almost 2 tanker trucks of water every second, 24 hours a day.

A desalination plant would take several years to build. Acquiring rights of way and running pipelines capable of delivering that amount of water would probably take a decade.

You might want to rethink those solutions and start worrying a little bit more...