There is a young woman who lives in this student residence thingy with me that irritates me quite a bit. One pet peeve I've actually developed specifically because of her is that I dislike people prefacing their opinions with the statement, "As a/an X", because almost every time she offers her opinion, she prefaces it with something to the effect of "As a lesbian", or "As someone from the South", etc. I'm always so tempted, when talking with her, to say things like "As someone who really hates statements that start with 'as someone'", or "As I am a carbon-based life-form, you annoy me"...things like that.

I also dislike her because she talks bad about me (I hear through reliable sources) behind my back about four beers I took last summer. Now, they weren't even her beers. They were the beers of the third woman living with us that summer (we shared an apartment). Also, I did not take the beers; Stone did during a visit. We offered to pay the third woman back, but she was weird about taking money and insisted I had to give her liquor to re-pay her. At the time, I was working 14-hour days and was (and am) underage. So that didn't happen. To the credit of the woman who holds this whole thing against me, I never really did re-pay the other woman (who's completely over this now). While we're on the topic of holding grudges, I felt that story was worth mentioning. And ranting about. Rant rant rant.

But I got started talking about this because, reading Calliander's last post about McVeigh, I was thinking to start writing something prefaced with something like, "As someone who was closer to the bombing",...but then I realized that doesn't really give me any special insight into the matter at hand.

So, in response to Calliander's post, I have a variety of thoughts. I'm opposed to the death penalty, but I agree that the delay won't prevent his execution, and the circumstances of the delay are awkward at best. On one level, I can understand it, because it's the technical procedure, and not delaying might set a dangerous precedent. Imagine another federal case where, unlike this one, the person slated for execution had maintained his or her innocence the entire time, and then new evidence arose? No confession of McVeigh's has been taken under oath -- they've all been post-trial in that book, or pre-trial to Steven Jones -- so the technical legal circumstances aren't that different.

But on another level it seems a bit ridiculous. We know he did it. Even if the survivors of the bombing only want this for revenge, not justice, the US Government in its policies allows that, as long as the "official" rhetoric is one of justice, not revenge. I think also that many of the survivors just want the satisfaction of "closure" more so than any sort of satisfaction of revenge per se, because even though only one survivor (a devout Catholic) has actively spoken against the death penalty for McVeigh, a large number have expressed a wish just to see this settled, indifferent as to whether it's life imprisonment or the death penalty that makes it "settled". My sympathies are with the people who were hoping this to be over with as soon as possible.

In the long haul, though, I think the delay is the "right" thing, for the technical reasons mentioned above.

I hate the way this case is bringing up all sorts of "failure of the system" stories, though, specific to this case and the federal government, when the vast majority of "failures of the system" are happening at the state level with a clear-cut racial and class bias, with people who actually might be innocent.

I hate my cat. She just peed on a chair in my room. Baby-sitting her has been educational at one level, at least: perfumed body washes are actually excellent at removing urine odors, and they don't seem to stain (though I've only tested this on wood and indoor/outdoor carpet). Just so you know. Her old owner is finally coming back to re-claim her after within a few weeks. It will be a bittersweet, but mostly sweet, good-bye.

I am extremely bothered by loud noises (except in certain obvious circumstances), so my sympathies go out to Levres and Wilson and all those around them similarly irritated. I'm amazed sometimes at how University planning really never thinks about, oh, the students' education; there was a bunch of construction going on on campus last year (still is, but the noisier part was then), and it would start at 8 am every morning. During the week I can see that maybe being justified, but it would continue on through the weekends and into study periods, when you can't logically expect college-age students to be willingly up (unless they haven't gone to sleep yet, in which case they won't get any sleep until you stop the bulldozers at 5 in the evening).

On a much less abrasively annoying scale, the walls and floors of the co-opish place where I live are extremely thin, and the extent to which the normally very nice people (well, most of them) I live with are often insensitive to this fact baffles me occasionally. It's always the same group of people that are loud though, so I suppose it's harder to realize how much the sound travels when you're always on the noise-making end of things. There are some people here, though, that I (and others) have actually asked repeatedly over the years to quiet down, since they don't quiet down on their own after ten minutes like everyone else.

They always apologize and are quiet for that evening and then a week later, at two in the morning, all over again they are talking so loud I think they must actually want me to get out of my bed, walk up the stairs, and join the conversation, blasting their alternately amazingly arcane or trendy music, running up and down stairs repeatedly to get exercise (!), conjuring up demons or the holy spirit or something in between with chants, etc. One of those statements was an exaggeration. You guess which one. My money's on "etc". So, it seems even when the message is directly expressed, it just doesn't go through. Or people just don't give a fuck. But I'd like to think more of them than that...I do have to live with them, after all.

Sometimes I'm tempted to randomly walk down the halls of the building at 4 am mooing, doing hare krishna dances, or yodeling or something, just to see if that makes people acknowledge the reality of our acoustic situation. Plus it would be fun for its own sake. But then again, I'm usually asleep at 4 am (hence the fact that it's me who gets woken up), I don't like loud noises even if I make them, and people who make loud noises tend to be sounder sleepers, I find (dirty-minded people: see unfortunately unfunny, unintended double entendre in that last statement). So I guess I'm doomed to cope. There are worse fates. But perhaps one day I'll snap...perhaps I should arm myself with duct tape and wave it around menacingly when someone's talking loudly at 4 am. Or get ear plugs. But that would be giving in to their will.

The one occasionally fun aspect of the acoustic poorness of this building was getting to monitor the sex lives of the people who live in the rooms above me, but they're not very innovative, I guess, so after the first few times it got easy to tune out and I'm not really even aware of it now. So much for free real-time noise porn.