all honor to the tiny, tiny rockshitters of old

In the midst of the gruelingest week of work this place can provide. Heehee. Still not all that bad; just long hours. Like I said to Dave on the phone last night, Hey, nobody's yelling at me. Plus, what needs to be done never changes. I don't have to switch from paper wrangling to something else to something else again and then back. This is a cakewalk. Though our entire team will, it turns out, be working both Saturday and Sunday. Early and late, most likely.

Right now our house phone / internet service is cut off. Me and Dave talked it over on Monday or Tuesday (I forget which) and decided groceries were more important than internet in the short term. This evening after work I'm'a check the ATM and see if my direct deposit from last week has gone through. Thank dog for the insurance money not being gone yet. This month's rent, I mailed on Wednesday. Shoulda done it closer to the first of the month, but we'd run out of stamps and I took awhile getting around to buying more.

Last night Dave sat with me and watched most of the rest of "How the Earth Was Made", the History Channel special I'd DVR'd more than a week ago. Man, that was good. I got so excited about granite and strombolites I was dancing in my chair. The cores of the continents are granite, which is lighter than other types of rock and tended to stick up near the surface more. Then the strombolites (not sure if I'm spelling it right) coated the granite and photosynthesized like their asses were afire. They absorbed light and shat oxygen and more rock. Layer after layer, countless ages of them. They spent a billion years building the hearts of continents, cell by cell, life by life, like coral reefs building their crazy spires on the skeletons of their forebears. Dave's favorite part was the massive fifty-million-year ice age, when the continental mass (the one before Pangaea, I forget its name--started with a D) blocked the warm ocean currents and the planet froze. First the poles, then everything. "It was so shiny it froze over and got even more shiny," he said. Either my giggliness was infectious or Earth really is that cool. (Hehe. Cool, get it?) For fifty million years! Then the lava roiling underneath cracked the supercontinent apart, and the massive magma outflows melted everything again, paving the way for the Cambrian explosion of life. The graphics of the magma breaking open the crust under the ice reminded me of that awesome line from The Left Hand of Darkness:
" 'There is nothing,' says the Ice, 'but Ice.'
But that young volcano to the north has another word it thinks of saying."
Then it was all like slowed-down "Do the Evolution" footage and they started explaining stuff like how people figured out what happened to the dinosaurs and where the Grand Canyon came from. Which to us was a bit less exciting than the cataclysmic changes the early Earth went through back in deep time.

Ah, Chaos. Beautiful to contemplate...at a distance. Lovely to form in the mind, this vision of the manifest world as an ittybitty fingertip poking out from the mighty stream of chaos, always just emerged breathless from a fluid roil beyond order and disorder, only lightly coiled in the slippery grip of time.

But I bet it wasn't all that much fun for our distant predecessors (ancestors, whatev), doing the unicellular fighty dance for space on a rock in the hot, hot UV-rich sunshine. For me, too, there is only so much rockspace and only so much light. And to god (or gods or God or dog) what matters most is that whatever it is gets done. Not by whom, or even especially when. Just that it happens. If you are born a strombolite and decide not to spew out oxygen and shit rock, then some other strombolite does it. If you are born a door into summer and choose to stay firmly shut, then the cat will go out another door and have its nap in the pretty, kindly, ozone-protected sunshine without your help.

I'm rambling. 'S what I get for interspersing the occasional sentence with piles and piles of paper-assembling. Nuff for now.