Emz-the-geographically-variable

Today I attended “Fire Safety Training” at work. We got to light things on fire and then put them out again. The thing that made the most impression on me was that we were shown a video of the “Rhode Island Inferno” which was an event in 2003 in which a club caught on fire and lots of people died trying to get out. You can read about it here: http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/02/21/deadly.nightclub.fire/ The thing is, we saw an actual home movie taken by an attendee, including the people getting trampled and stuck and all the screaming, which is a little bit disturbing. Or rather, it’s disturbing that it’s not disturbing since we’re so used to gore on TV you have to remind yourself THIS IS REAL. I think I will have weird dreams tonight.

 Added to that, this afternoon I attended The Guggenheim exhibit at the Bonn Kunst (Art) Museum with a couple of French and/or German friends. I haven’t been to the real one in New York, but I have to say I really like the collection very much. Particularly the surrealists because they have freaky and weird things in their heads, like me. So it’ll definitely be an interesting sleep. I’ve been having a lot of vivid dreams recently, and I also has sleep paralysis once, which is when the system which turns off your muscle control when you’re in REM sleep stays on after you wake up. Meaning you are alert but can’t move. At first it was very scary but then I decided to go with it and see what happened, and then I fell asleep again. You can learn more about sleep paralysis, and most other things on Wikipedia, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

 Gio is going to Korea right now, in a large flying machine, which takes 10 hours from The Netherlands. I am writing a bit strangely since I am reading a book in French called “Le bizarre incident du chien pendant la nuit”, so please excuse me. And if you can read French,  read it

Oh! I nearly forgot about the colours, see title. In Ottawa, the seasons are violent. Here, by comparison, they are feeble. I have been complaining about the lack of fall colours a bit to my colleagues, mostly in a visual manner, since on my door I have appended a large picture of Ottawa in fall with a sticky that reads “Colours (!)”. And so for my Ottawa people, who probably have difficulty picturing how deciduous trees can rid themselves of their foliage without an ostentatious use of chromography, I realised today how I can describe it to you. You know in the Louvre or any other old art museum the very first landscape paintings? After patrons of the arts got sick of paintings of Jesus and everyone and they started focusing their monetary efforts on other things, there occured a lot of treed landscape paintings, usually including well-dressed people strolling or sitting about. And since that time, what I imagine were once the life-like green pigments of the trees have since faded to a sort of uniform sickly sludge green-brown colour. As has happened here. Not all of them; once in a while a single tree takes the initiative to produce a little yellow or orange, but for the most part is just kind of fades, as if the green of summer has become old. Another spin around the sun… this life is an interesting thing.