~Thursday~ I didn’t mention yesterday that when I got home from work, there was a black Honda Civic parked in one of my two assigned parking spots. There was a time that it used to just set me off when someone was in my spot, but now I try to be rational and only get annoyed when I’m expecting a guest, since I can really only use one parking spot at a time.
When I got back from dancing at around 11:00 last night, the car was still there, and this morning it was still there. Deep breaths. Rational thought. Not expecting anyone, really.
Since I’d been lazy last night, and the trash men hadn’t come as early as they normally do, I wheeled my trash bin around before heading to the bus stop. I was tempted to put it right behind that car in my spot, but instead put it next to my neighbor’s trash bin, which was in the parking spot of theirs that they don’t use.
At the bus stop, Wiley was out, but he didn’t come up to the sidewalk, as his owner clearly said, “Wiley!” to him and he stayed. That confirms it. His name is Wiley.
It wasn’t the regular 8:15 bus driver this morning, and this guy had the A/C off. It was hot and stale aboard, with no fan even being on to circulate the air. I was hot in shorts and a t-shirt, and looking at this woman just about made me sweat:
Mercifully, after about five minutes, the A/C came on.
Directly in front of me, in the center-facing seats (so across the aisle from the woman pictured above who is also sitting in a center-facing seat), a young black couple sat flaunting their heterosexuality with their legs and arms all over each other. As we approached the Gorman and Western Blvd intersection, they fixated their gaze out the window over in the direction of the McDonald’s.
As we crossed the intersection, they switched seats, presumably so the girl could get a better view, and she leaned way over trying to see something. I don’t know what they were so interested in over there, but after we passed it, they switched their seats back.
I got off at my “new stop,” at the intersection of Clark and Gardner. Sweet.
My boss took me and my officemate out to lunch today in thanks for our contributions over the past year and to sort of celebrate having our annual reviews done. We went to a killer Chinese buffet over on Capital Boulevard, where I ate entirely too much, but loved it.
After work, I ran to Cary Towne Center to have my glasses fixed at LensCrafters. The left lens popped out on Tuesday, and between then and today, I also lost the little screw that holds them frame together.
I stopped at Kohl’s on the way back from there, where I bought a little leather wallet, since the plastic case I’ve been keeping my cards in started to crack and got all folded up when I accidentally sat the wrong way on it.
Whenever Twitter is over-capacity, a graphic comes up, which has been lovingly named “The Fail Whale,” and a colleague of mine pointed out to me that one version of it with oil on the whale has cropped up:
Interesting, subtle social commentary.
For some weird reason this made me think of rhetoric, specifically about something I’d read in my very first class in grad school by Karen Schriver in her book Dynamics in Document Design, where she enumerates five key rhetorical relationships among prose and pictures. (More accurately, she actually adds two of her own to previous research of Hegarty, Carpenter, & Just, 1991; Willows & Houghton, 1987a, 1987b.) So, these are five main ways—or reasons to use—a graphic associated with some text text:
- Redundant – characterized by substantially identical content appearing visually and verbally, in which each mode tells the same story, providing repetition of key ideas
- Complementary – characterized by different content visually and verbally, in which both modes are needed in order to understand the key ideas
- Supplementary – characterized by different content in words and pictures, in which one mode dominates the other, providing the main ideas, while the other reinforces, elaborates, or instantiates the points made in the dominant mode (or explains how to interpret the other)
- Juxtapositional – characterized by different content in words and pictures, in which the key ideas are created by a clash or a semantic tension between the ideas in each mode; the idea cannot be inferred without both modes being present simultaneously
- Stage-Setting – characterized by different content in words and pictures, in which one mode (often the visual) forecasts the content, underlying theme, or ideas presented in the other mode
I posted this to our Salon Entelechy Ning and a freaking incredible discussion ensued about it. I love those guys.
At home, I took a three-hour nap, and then met Joe down at Flex at 11:30 for Trailer Park Prize Night. I really didn’t feel like chit-chatting tonight, and after just a few minutes, I made my way over into a corner with a wall behind me, and two guys flaunting their homosexuality very close to me on the other side, leaving no room for anyone to easily join me for conversation.
Miss Mims hosted tonight, and the show started of kind of strangely tonight with about three drag queens performing before they drew for the first prize.
At one point, when I went to get drinks for me and Joe, I overheard this guy say to another guy, “I wish you’d liked me when I liked you.” That sounded a little [click here] to me.
I left some way into the show, although I’m not exactly sure at what time. Who cares? When I got home that car was still in my other spot. Tomorrow will be its Come-to-Jesus day.