My sequestered weekend
Jan. 10th, 2005 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterI wrote the following account over the course of the weekend...
It's 5:40 p.m. on Friday and I'm in the lounge area at the BioKinetics medical study dormitory. Anchorman is playing on the TV set, and I'm sort of semi-watching it. As you may have surmised by the time at which this is being posted, there's no Internet access here. Not a sausage. So all I can do is type the entry and plan to post it later.
The movie is vaguely engaging...not my favorite kind of thing, but just enjoyable enough that I'm not going into another room to read. I've brought my own DVDs—the Lord of the Rings trilogy, my Batman cartoon boxed set, the Jackie Chan movie The Accidental Spy, the Miyazaki films Castle of Cagliostro, Castle in the Sky, and Spirited Away, Tron, and Serial Experiments Lain. Don't know if we'll actually get around to watching any of them, though.
6:30. Had dinner. Turkey sandwich, chips, root beer. Not bad. Movie continues to be silly.
9:20. After Anchorman, the few folks still watching were kind enough to let me put in Tron, a movie which I had borrowed from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tbutler a while back and never gotten around to watching yet. I hadn't seen it in years; come to think of it, I don't think I ever saw it all the way through. Well, maybe I did once; I just know I read the "storybook" repeatedly.
After that, the folks watching TV put in Troy, which I wasn't terribly interested in. So I went and took a shower.
Now, there are apparently only two showers in this entire complex—and I actually only know of one; I'm just guessing that the counterpart women's room has one too. I'm amazed to report that, even though there are about thirty people in here with me, there was no demand for the shower whatsoever. No lines, nobody in it, nobody knocking on the door asking when I would be out...I was able to take a nice long shower without any hassle. I can only guess that there are a lot of morning-showerers here, and there will be hellaciously long lines for the bathroom tomorrow. Funny how some people prefer to shower in the mornings to wake up, and others in the evenings to be clean before they go to bed. And neither one is really necessarily "right" or "wrong" to do it that way.
The dorm is noisy. A lot of people doing their things—playing board games, listening to music, watching movies on the big screen, watching movies on their own computer screens, people playing Xbox games in the sleeping areas...it's more noise than I really find that I like, these days. I'm trying to get my iPod to work with this computer at the moment, to play the songs from it through iTunes as I do on my windows box. Oddly, iTunes doesn't seem to be picking it up. Oh well, I can just play it in the "normal" way.
They're supposed to be putting us to bed in an hour or so; not soon enough IMO. Oh well, more later.
4:41 p.m. Saturday.
After getting to go to bed at 11 p.m., we were awakened at 5 a.m. so that we could "move around" and have a blood sample taken before breakfast. Quicker off the mark than most, I zipped into the bathroom and quickly shaved.
Breakfast consisted of a glass of milk, two hard-fried eggs, two strips of bacon, two pieces of buttered toast, and a hash brown patty. I'm glad I'm not finicky; the person I was sitting next to hated the taste of milk but he had to drink it anyway.
It was an oddly ritualized experience. We had to eat everything over the course of a specific 25 minute period. Thus, we had to start eating at the exact moment they said (which varied for each of us; we actually had a guy standing over us with a watch saying "15 seconds 'til you can start..."), but save a bite of food to take on the very last minute of the period. This was presumably to synchronize our digestive system for the order in which blood samples were to be drawn.
And were they ever drawn. Up 'til about noon or so, they were drawn every half hour. They actually had to have two separate collection stations going simultaneously. Every half hour, we'd get called in, stuck, and then given a bit of gauze to hold tight 'til the blood stopped. It all went very efficiently.
Lunch was a chicken-fried steak patty and mashed potatos with gravy, corn, a roll, and a glass of fruit punch. It's kind of funny...when you're in an environment like this where you can only eat what they give you, you start counting every calorie—in exactly the opposite sense of dieters. "Yes, I want all the fixings on that sandwich...hmm, I don't really like Miracle Whip usually, but it's more calories...will keep me going longer..." I imagine this will only be worse next week, when I'm in the "gets no breakfast Saturday morning" group.
I have discovered that the fundamental problem with getting a large group of ordinary people together in one place is that they will all want to watch fundamentally crappy movies. Tragedy of the commons, lowest common demoninator, whatever you want to call it. All I know is that today the movies that have been shown have all been crappy comedies like White Chicks or Someone and Someone Else go to White Castle or Without a Paddle or movies that I have no interest in, like Open Water or Wicker Park. I managed to sneak Castle in the Sky on when nobody else was watching anything—but nobody else watched it. The one movie I hadn't heard of that seemed genuinely interesting—De-Lovely, starring Kevin Cline in a musical retrospective of Cole Porter's life—got turned off early on.
I really miss Internet access...not so much in terms of having something to do, or even being able to communicate with my friends, but for the ability to find information quickly and easily. Half a dozen times today I've wanted to be able to reach out and look up information about movies or whatever on the Internet Movie Database...and then remembered I couldn't. This is really annoying.
Monday Morning. Well, I must have been tempting fate. Right after I wrote that about not being finicky, supper turned out to be a hamburger, some side dish I can't recall, and a fruit cup. A fruit cup that turned out to be one of those awful fruit salads made with marshmallow cream. Bleah. But I ate it anyway. Late-night snack was one Nutri-grain cereal bar and a glass of milk. The night before it had been a big cinnamon roll; I was disappointed.
Sunday morning I managed to snag the TV to show Castle of Cagliostro and about two people watched it. The rest of the day was spent in more schlockfests on the movie screen—but I didn't care. Because I had discovered the Xboxes that were networked together, and the game playing on one of them: Halo 2. It was a little difficult to get used to the controller scheme, but one of the other inmates and I played through a substantial portion of the game in 2-player cooperative mode. I don't know how near the end we were at the finish, but I sure do hope that the same 'box gets brought back next week so we can continue. I want to see how the game ends.
Thanks to all the FPS gaming, Sunday passed more or less in a blur. I intend to try to spend next weekend's Saturday morning that way, if I can; if I can get obsessed in the game I might just be able to forget I haven't been allowed to eat anything until noon that day. Goodness knows I've skipped breakfast for that long in real life just by being absorbed in the computer.
Sunday breakfast was a mini-box of cereal (I chose Frosted Flakes), two banana-nut mini-muffins, a cup of orange juice, and a cup of milk. Lunch was a barbecued chicken filet, garden salad, potato salad, and a soft drink. Supper was lasagna, green beans, and fruit punch; for a late-evening snack we had a rice krispie treat and a glass of milk.
Anyway, the day—and hence the weekend—finally drew to a close. We went to bed 11ish, got up 6ish, had one last blood sample taken, and headed out. My brother Aaron took me by my place to drop my stuff off and feed my cat, then it was off to work with me...and here I am.
All in all, it wasn't that bad of an experience, I suppose. I think I could bear to do it again, after next week, as long as it wasn't terribly soon. Which is good, because money being tight as it is, I think I'm going to have to.
The thing I hate the most about it is the lack of Internet, but the thing I hate second-most is how noisy it all is. It's a relatively small building, and there's just nowhere to go to get away from the racket of several TVs and/or radios going simultaneously. If you just want to curl up and read without distraction, you have to be able to block it out somehow...in your head, or with an iPod.
I need to find better ways to deal with that, as well as pick better movies to bring next time. Oh well, I'll get by.
And that's all I have to say here.
It's 5:40 p.m. on Friday and I'm in the lounge area at the BioKinetics medical study dormitory. Anchorman is playing on the TV set, and I'm sort of semi-watching it. As you may have surmised by the time at which this is being posted, there's no Internet access here. Not a sausage. So all I can do is type the entry and plan to post it later.
The movie is vaguely engaging...not my favorite kind of thing, but just enjoyable enough that I'm not going into another room to read. I've brought my own DVDs—the Lord of the Rings trilogy, my Batman cartoon boxed set, the Jackie Chan movie The Accidental Spy, the Miyazaki films Castle of Cagliostro, Castle in the Sky, and Spirited Away, Tron, and Serial Experiments Lain. Don't know if we'll actually get around to watching any of them, though.
6:30. Had dinner. Turkey sandwich, chips, root beer. Not bad. Movie continues to be silly.
9:20. After Anchorman, the few folks still watching were kind enough to let me put in Tron, a movie which I had borrowed from
tbutler a while back and never gotten around to watching yet. I hadn't seen it in years; come to think of it, I don't think I ever saw it all the way through. Well, maybe I did once; I just know I read the "storybook" repeatedly.After that, the folks watching TV put in Troy, which I wasn't terribly interested in. So I went and took a shower.
Now, there are apparently only two showers in this entire complex—and I actually only know of one; I'm just guessing that the counterpart women's room has one too. I'm amazed to report that, even though there are about thirty people in here with me, there was no demand for the shower whatsoever. No lines, nobody in it, nobody knocking on the door asking when I would be out...I was able to take a nice long shower without any hassle. I can only guess that there are a lot of morning-showerers here, and there will be hellaciously long lines for the bathroom tomorrow. Funny how some people prefer to shower in the mornings to wake up, and others in the evenings to be clean before they go to bed. And neither one is really necessarily "right" or "wrong" to do it that way.
The dorm is noisy. A lot of people doing their things—playing board games, listening to music, watching movies on the big screen, watching movies on their own computer screens, people playing Xbox games in the sleeping areas...it's more noise than I really find that I like, these days. I'm trying to get my iPod to work with this computer at the moment, to play the songs from it through iTunes as I do on my windows box. Oddly, iTunes doesn't seem to be picking it up. Oh well, I can just play it in the "normal" way.
They're supposed to be putting us to bed in an hour or so; not soon enough IMO. Oh well, more later.
4:41 p.m. Saturday.
After getting to go to bed at 11 p.m., we were awakened at 5 a.m. so that we could "move around" and have a blood sample taken before breakfast. Quicker off the mark than most, I zipped into the bathroom and quickly shaved.
Breakfast consisted of a glass of milk, two hard-fried eggs, two strips of bacon, two pieces of buttered toast, and a hash brown patty. I'm glad I'm not finicky; the person I was sitting next to hated the taste of milk but he had to drink it anyway.
It was an oddly ritualized experience. We had to eat everything over the course of a specific 25 minute period. Thus, we had to start eating at the exact moment they said (which varied for each of us; we actually had a guy standing over us with a watch saying "15 seconds 'til you can start..."), but save a bite of food to take on the very last minute of the period. This was presumably to synchronize our digestive system for the order in which blood samples were to be drawn.
And were they ever drawn. Up 'til about noon or so, they were drawn every half hour. They actually had to have two separate collection stations going simultaneously. Every half hour, we'd get called in, stuck, and then given a bit of gauze to hold tight 'til the blood stopped. It all went very efficiently.
Lunch was a chicken-fried steak patty and mashed potatos with gravy, corn, a roll, and a glass of fruit punch. It's kind of funny...when you're in an environment like this where you can only eat what they give you, you start counting every calorie—in exactly the opposite sense of dieters. "Yes, I want all the fixings on that sandwich...hmm, I don't really like Miracle Whip usually, but it's more calories...will keep me going longer..." I imagine this will only be worse next week, when I'm in the "gets no breakfast Saturday morning" group.
I have discovered that the fundamental problem with getting a large group of ordinary people together in one place is that they will all want to watch fundamentally crappy movies. Tragedy of the commons, lowest common demoninator, whatever you want to call it. All I know is that today the movies that have been shown have all been crappy comedies like White Chicks or Someone and Someone Else go to White Castle or Without a Paddle or movies that I have no interest in, like Open Water or Wicker Park. I managed to sneak Castle in the Sky on when nobody else was watching anything—but nobody else watched it. The one movie I hadn't heard of that seemed genuinely interesting—De-Lovely, starring Kevin Cline in a musical retrospective of Cole Porter's life—got turned off early on.
I really miss Internet access...not so much in terms of having something to do, or even being able to communicate with my friends, but for the ability to find information quickly and easily. Half a dozen times today I've wanted to be able to reach out and look up information about movies or whatever on the Internet Movie Database...and then remembered I couldn't. This is really annoying.
Monday Morning. Well, I must have been tempting fate. Right after I wrote that about not being finicky, supper turned out to be a hamburger, some side dish I can't recall, and a fruit cup. A fruit cup that turned out to be one of those awful fruit salads made with marshmallow cream. Bleah. But I ate it anyway. Late-night snack was one Nutri-grain cereal bar and a glass of milk. The night before it had been a big cinnamon roll; I was disappointed.
Sunday morning I managed to snag the TV to show Castle of Cagliostro and about two people watched it. The rest of the day was spent in more schlockfests on the movie screen—but I didn't care. Because I had discovered the Xboxes that were networked together, and the game playing on one of them: Halo 2. It was a little difficult to get used to the controller scheme, but one of the other inmates and I played through a substantial portion of the game in 2-player cooperative mode. I don't know how near the end we were at the finish, but I sure do hope that the same 'box gets brought back next week so we can continue. I want to see how the game ends.
Thanks to all the FPS gaming, Sunday passed more or less in a blur. I intend to try to spend next weekend's Saturday morning that way, if I can; if I can get obsessed in the game I might just be able to forget I haven't been allowed to eat anything until noon that day. Goodness knows I've skipped breakfast for that long in real life just by being absorbed in the computer.
Sunday breakfast was a mini-box of cereal (I chose Frosted Flakes), two banana-nut mini-muffins, a cup of orange juice, and a cup of milk. Lunch was a barbecued chicken filet, garden salad, potato salad, and a soft drink. Supper was lasagna, green beans, and fruit punch; for a late-evening snack we had a rice krispie treat and a glass of milk.
Anyway, the day—and hence the weekend—finally drew to a close. We went to bed 11ish, got up 6ish, had one last blood sample taken, and headed out. My brother Aaron took me by my place to drop my stuff off and feed my cat, then it was off to work with me...and here I am.
All in all, it wasn't that bad of an experience, I suppose. I think I could bear to do it again, after next week, as long as it wasn't terribly soon. Which is good, because money being tight as it is, I think I'm going to have to.
The thing I hate the most about it is the lack of Internet, but the thing I hate second-most is how noisy it all is. It's a relatively small building, and there's just nowhere to go to get away from the racket of several TVs and/or radios going simultaneously. If you just want to curl up and read without distraction, you have to be able to block it out somehow...in your head, or with an iPod.
I need to find better ways to deal with that, as well as pick better movies to bring next time. Oh well, I'll get by.
And that's all I have to say here.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 09:46 am (UTC)So this is why I couldn't find you over the weekend the few times I brought Acinonyx on Victory?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 01:21 pm (UTC)But yes, that's why the last two weekends I've been completely off-line and deprived of the Internet. I'm looking forward to being around this weekend, ohhh yes.