fingers

my roommate has this unusual theory about air conditioning. instead of pointing our electric fan in the direction of our rooms, he aims its whiring blades at the bathroom--that is, he sends the cold air in the completely opposite direction of our rooms. he claims that this creates some kind of vaccuum, fifth dimension, or high pressure system whereby our home will become magically cooler. mark's dad has a phd, so i tend to believe him about stuff life this. still, when i arrive home at night, i like to hang out on the porcelain throne--for some odd reason, the toilet is the coolest spot in the house....once i'm refreshed, i mosy into my bedroom and prop open the window.

this summer ritual isn't so bad except for nights like tonight when the window comes crashing down on your hand. then, as you nurse your throbbing fingers, you start to wonder about hot days in the artic. you curl up on the couch and sulk, cursing the heat, the fan, and that stupid window. or you might praise God that your name doesn't end in skeith.

that is, today i dialed up my long-time buddy jonathan skeith and learned to be thankful for aching fingers (at first my mood was celebratory: jonathan passed the cpa exam. that means he can begin reintegrating himself into regular life. but then i heard the news: his wife's grandmother died last week. jon and kim spent the weekend at the funeral in idaho. and the other news: last night jon's baby daughter, naomi, had a bad, bad fever. when it reached one of those bad numbers in the low one-hundreds, the family spent the night at the ER. thankfully, the doctors said that it was probably a one-time viral thing. and then): jonathan's brother jacob lost three this last weekend. as he was trying to fish his wife's diamond ring out of a lawn mower bag, the machine got greedy. it sucked his hands from the bag into the spinning blade. in a split second the fingers on his left hand were cut in half. agggggh. painful. unlike the film kiss, kiss, bang, bang (another finger story from this week), jacob's finger tips couldn't be recovered. he'll be stuck with stubs and odd phantom feelings of whole fingers. so, if you pray for random people that you read about on the internet, pray for jacob (or jonathan, or kim, or naomi...), and if a bad day's got you down, be glad for those happy ten.


no pictures today. i'm trying to decide how to handle my pictures of people. they're not great pictures, but they are fun memories. i need to decide what i'm hoping to gain by posting photographs. what's my purpose...?