« August 2004 | Main | January 2005 »

September 25, 2004

Escape from Florida

Hurricane Jeanne is coming, and I'm doing now what I almost did for Hurricane Ivan: I'm getting out of the state before the hurricane gets here. Thing is, I'm not doing it because of the hurricane: I'm doing it for a job.

I'm being interviewed for a staff artist position at The Pantagraph, central Illinois' leading (I think) newspaper.

And that means: I drive. For 17 or 18 hours. Each way. Because people who design airline seats are a gang of sadistic, skinny little midgets, and I am born of giant stock.

And because Amtrak, for some reason, is routing all its trains through Pennsylvania instead of through New Orleans right now. This almost doubles the travel time and more than doubles the cost. I'm hoping, for the sake of sanity, that they're doing this because their tracks in that area were damaged by Hurricane Ivan, and not just because they felt like messing with me.

The interview for the job is on Wednesday. It takes two days to get there. I was going to leave Monday, but thanks to Hurricane Jeanne, if I waited till monday I'd actually have to drive THROUGH the hurricane to make it to Bloomington in time.

Where is Bloomington? Well, it's in the middle of Illinois. What's it like? Well it's just a little bit outside of Normal.

While I'm there, hoops I'm jumping through will include 1 or 2 on-the-job style illustrations, a quick rehash of one of their page layouts in Quark Express, and the dreaded copy editing test, where I am presumably given a piece of writing that is ostensibly written in English, but in reality is only loosely assosiated with the language, and it's my job to turn it into something that isn't a literary WMD.

I still have much to do before I leave, and I'm shooting for getting out of town by 5pm, so I have to end this here.

I will be away from the net for a week (or more, if I get the job and want to look at apartments), so if you want to get in touch with me, the best way is to call me if you have my number, or email me at my google email address

Ta ta. See you in a week.

Posted by Eric Chapman at 03:00 PM | Comments (2)

September 06, 2004

One Crept Over The Cuckoo State: The Frances Ditty: Part 2

Previous episodes: Part 1
 

The Saga of Hurricane Charlie: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
 

"You have reached the voice mail of Eric Chapman! If you hearing this it means that I'm outside or away from my phone. I might be in the shower. Or I might be off in a volcano somewhere dying and my service area doesn't cover being submerged in molten lava. If you would like me to get back to you, after I've returned from outside, finished soaping up, or have somehow survived my ordeal inside the volcano, please leave your name, phone number, and what your want with me after the beep, tone, whatever... thing. Y'know, so I can tell if I want to talk to you or not, which I probably do, unless you're a member of some sort of global conspiracy and are out to get me. So anyway, I will get back to you when I can, as I'm a fairly busy person, as I will be spending most of my time saving the world as I will have become a superhero named, I dunno, Volcanor, but I promise you, as long as you're not a telemarketer or an agent of a global conspiracy or a super villain calling with the intent to taunt, I will get back to you. If you leave the number. Yeah. Did I already say that? Uh. Right."

See? Marvelous. So, having checked his voice mail greeting and verifying that he is still, in fact, Eric Chapman and not Charley, he went on to check the messages currently waiting. Of which there was one. It was Frances again.

Frances: "Hello? Charley? ... uh.. I still don't understand! Why do you have this message on here?"

Shock was not the word. No, the time for shock had long since passed. Annoyance might be a better word though, and Eric caught himself waving an open hand through the air in a circular motion, like someone with a beard (he was) and a large bank account (he wasn't) trying to direct a bunch of professional on-camera pretenders to hurry up and screw the damn pie already.

Frances: I'm still waiting for you to call. It's been a little while, and I want to be sure you're okay. I'm worried that you might have hurt something.

Eric: Like my ass, maybe?

He had suddenly become acutely aware of his prescribed inflatable fanny donut, upon which he'd still have to sit for a while yet.

Frances: Well, I'll try again later. My number's 555-6346. Please call me when you get this, Charley.

What the hell? He had checked his message, and it clearly said it belonged to him, not anyone named Charley. Maybe Charley gave this number to this Frances person, saying that he'd be here if she needed to get in touch. Right?

Do hurricanes even do that?

Post-graduation life was really proving to be much more weird than life as an art student, and that should really mean something, shouldn't it?

Maybe if he went to more drunken stoner parties it would make some kind of sense now. Ah well, it was too late for that, wasn't it? But that's not important, really, because Eric's much-cherished brain had just discovered something really important whilst digging in between the grubby cushions of the Goodwill couch in the living room of his psyche. . . along with some forgotten M&Ms, that were still good. (The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your brain.)

Frances. Calling for Charley. Hurricane Charley. Dumb ass, you have the phone number. All you need is the approximate location for the area code. That's what television is for. So he flipped on the Weather Channel.

There stood some poor schmuck, who was probably very well groomed by the make-up people back before they blew away over the horizon. He stood there, protected from the maelstrom winds of this hurricane by a sixteenth of an inch of school bus-yellow vinyl as aluminum roofs curled up and away from their moorings and palm trees bent over to touch their toes in the background. He looked like he had to pee. They didn't say whether that was because the wind was knocking him around or if he really was just dancing to try and keep from pissing his pants on live national television out of sheer terror while standing in the middle of a whirling storm of DOOM.

A boat washed by in the background, on its way to some other poor bastard's second floor roof.

The weatherschmuck, who was literally tied to his spot, either to protect him from blowing away or maybe prevent him from running away screaming in a bloody panic, was saying something and pointing to the black clouds of death behind him. He was pointing to the left side of the screen where lightning was flashing. His voice was easily drowned out by the roar of wind, but that wasn't the important bit.

The lightning was rhythmic. One second: Flash. Next second: Off. Third second: flash. Fourth: Off. Very odd.

The video feed went back to the smiling, well-groomed people in the comfort of their studio back in the weather channel's secret bunker. They were mentioning something about how there was a large population of elderly, and hopefully they all got to safety before the storm hit.

Frances. Who names their daughters Frances this century? Nobody. Elderly sounding woman, right? Right. Grandma Frances, in West Palm Beach, was calling him. The lightning flashed on the left side of the screen again.

The charming, safe, suede-suited weather people commented about how the hurricane had come to a dead stop in West Palm Beach and didn't seem to know where it was going. The lightning flashed again.

Everything clicked, and finally he had the opportunity to do what he'd wanted to do every time he got stuck behind somebody's ancestor-to-be at an intersection. He jumped to his feet, grabbed his cellphone, dialed West Palm Beach's area code and Frances' phone number.

Frances: He-hello?

Eric: TURN YOUR GODDAMN BLINKER OFF, GRANDMA! It's been on for 6 hours! If you're going to turn, TURN ALREADY!!! **click**

The lightning flicker on the left hand side of the television screen suddenly stopped. Fifteen minutes later, the people in the comfy studio reported that the hurricane was finally moving again, and had turned northwest.. which would've been 'right' from the viewpoint of the broadcast, but hey, she's old.

The weatherschmuck looked relaxed, too. Smiling, even. He was still being pelted by rain traveling parallel to the ground, debris, and the occaisional 30-foot storm surge, but that was okay. He was drenched from head to toe. If his dance was a peepee dance, now the world would never know.

He looked satisfied.

Posted by Eric Chapman at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)

September 05, 2004

One Crept Over The Cuckoo State: The Frances Ditty: part 1

The phone rang. Eric stood up off his inflatable donut (which his doctor mandated he use whenever he had need to sit untill things got back to normal) and carefully eased his way over to the phone. Unfortunately, thanks to Charlie, this was a difficult task and our brave hero had to tangle with his voice mail system instead.

Voice: He-hellO? Uh.. wow, that was such a strange message!

Eric thought this was a little odd. His voicemail wasn't strange at all. He had spent about four minutes recording it (to do it right, of course) and was very much of the opinion that it was marvelous.

A mental note was made to check to make sure that his oratory masterpeice outgoing voicemail message was working properly after he was done listening to the feeble-sounding lady.

Voice: ... Charley?

Crap.

Voice: It's Frances. I don't really understand what's going on. Why havn't ... you called? It's been so long since we've talked and I was just hoping this phone number still worked and well I just wanted to say hi and find out how you were doing and if you're still in the area and... well I just don't know! Your message is very strange!

Clearly this was not happening. It had to be a dream, right? Gotta be a dream. One phonecall from an aproaching storm about your impending buggering (er, metaphorically speaking of course) in the stretch of (let's say) one lifetime is already pushing the law of averages, isn't it? How many people get this? Was Eric really that strong a weirdness magnet? How can this sort of thing be verified, he wondered. What.. what do the people on TV do to test the most-obvious dream theory?

... Ouch! Not a dream. Who came up with this stupid test, anyway?

Francis: Well... call me. My number is 555-6346. *click*

AHA!

.... wait, no area code. Poop.

Posted by Eric Chapman at 03:57 AM | Comments (0)