First Earthquake!

Well, that was exciting. By which I mean kind of scary. Tornado warnings? Uncommon but not unknown. Hurricanes? A little more used to that. Blizzards? I can deal with those as long as the power isn't out too long. Heat waves are old hat. But earthquakes? No I don't think so.

I didn't even know what it was at first. I thought a truck had crashed into a building or something had exploded because that is far more likely, but it went on too long. I moved to a doorway because I remembered hearing that was what you're supposed to do. Plaster was falling off the ceiling and everything was shaking like the building was about to take off. Nothing fell over at work but when I got back home several things had fallen off my shelves. My dad said the dog had been startled but nothing was damaged.

The students all rushed out afterwards to call their families. I had to coax one woman out from under the study table. Like me, the majority of them are from areas that don't get earthquakes. Fortunately the Pharmacology exam was over and there weren't anymore classes. The school closed about quarter to five. We're back open today though, which the Anatomy and Physiology students are probably a little disappointed about. Their exam is at 10:00.

The thing that makes this so much more freaky to us here than, say, in California is the rarity of the occurrence. We don't have earthquakes. Some blowhards in the paper are saying, "People are stupid. Earthquakes are normal here and everyone should know how to deal with them." Sure, minor quakes that feel like a truck passing by, where people sleep through them happen here. I've never felt one. But they happen. This was on a different scale. This hasn't really happened in living memory. If you have no experience with something so unnerving and your teachers and elders don't either and so haven't taught you about it, you have no set way of dealing with it. There are many people who come to this area who can't properly deal with humidity. We try to help them because not being able to can be dangerous to their health. What would be useful is advice without the attendant snobbery.

Exciting things happen so rarely. Which is another part of why everyone is all abuzz about this. I sort of want it to happen again as long as nothing gets damaged.

I don't even know what to say about the earthquake in Japan. The whole thing is heartbreaking and I hope that the reports about more than 1,000 people being dead are not true. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to have everything swept away, to have an entire town flooded and broken. Where I live there are basically no earthquakes. A little further north they occasionally have one that feels like a truck passing by. The ground is a solid thing to me. That picture in The Washington Post of the road literally split in two was awe-inspiring. Like those gigantic sinkholes that sometimes open up, it shows how fragile the terrain we walk on (or drive on) can be. The only good thing (if there can be a good thing) about the whole situation is that Japan is a developed country that has made massive preparations for just this sort of emergency. They've reinforced many larger buildings and they're not unused to earthquakes. This will not be another Haiti. My heart and prayers go out to the people of Japan and I hope that recovery will be relatively swift.

And now I will return to my (semi)regularly scheduled post.

Senescence: "The process or condition of growing old." From the OED.

I finished Perfume by Suskind last night. I stayed up late to do so. I hated it by the end. I was trying to be nice and give it the benefit of the doubt earlier but really? It was kind of boring and obnoxious. The writing was beautiful but the plot and the characters were rather uninteresting. There is very little dialogue in this book and as a result there is very little meaningful character interaction. The main character, Grenouille, is the only one that is fully developed. This would be fine but I found myself increasingly disliking him. I honestly couldn't tell if this was the author's intention or not. I did not find myself supporting Grenouille in his endeavors. I was wishing that he would fail. Admittedly this was because he was murdering young women but also because I had no vested interest in seeing him succeed. It was actually the opposite; I wanted him to be caught and punished.

There seems to be some sort of moralizing going on in the book. People are easily influenced by Grenouille's scents because their baser instincts come through in reaction to odors regardless of the civilized veneer they present to the world. Grenouille has no scent himself and is not affected by the perfumes he creates. I have several problems with this. One, I know we are all animals driven by base instincts that we counter-balance with higher feeling. There's little more irritating than being lectured by someone who thinks they've discovered some new truth when they haven't. Two, I just don't believe smells can have that much of an effect. You can't sneak by people just because you are wearing eau-de-wall-flower. People would still see and hear you. Sound is a very powerful force as well. Maybe Grenouille didn't rely much on sight but other people do. I won't even comment on the ridiculous nature of the final perfume. It was just plain stupid. Third, Grenouille is presented as having basically no human feeling (and believing himself to be above human instinct) and this is linked to his odorless state. One quibble; he does have human feeling. He smells a scent that sends his heart racing and he wants to possess it. He is obsessed with owning something that has great meaning to him. He wants it even as he knows that having means its eventual destruction. This is a very human trait. I could probably argue for others but this is getting too long already so I'll move on to a couple other annoyances in the book.

Beautiful virgin girls apparently smell the best of all. Oh good fucking hell. Really? You're going with that? You're going to compare the harvesting of their scent to harvesting flowers? Budding breasts and blossoms. Picking flowers to deflowering a virgin. Oh how clever. Suskind, your imagination knows no bounds, I'm sure.

There's more to be annoyed about but I'll stop there. Suffice to say that this is a surprisingly boring book with lovely, sensual prose and an abhorrent main character.

I'm still reading Life in the Cul-de-Sac and I'm also reading Missing by Karin Alvtegen. The idea of having a homeless woman as the main character is intriguing. She's on the edge of society and her life on the run (she's been falsely accused of murder) is exacerbated by her lack of funds and a support network. We'll see where this goes.