Car accident

I was in a car accident today. Details are coming soon.

Dreaming in iambic pentameter

Bert and I were late for class, and we started running.

We were already inside a building, which looked strangely like a fancy hotel lobby. We slammed open the gold-rimmed double doors and ran up some stairs. It soon became clear that all this building had were stairs and short hallways. Most sets of stairs looked like it was from Fallon Memorial School in Pawtucket. One set looked like it was from the Harvard T Station.

With Bert to my left, we kept running and running, and we looked like cartoon characters, our heads and bodies leaning forward, our legs converted into a circular blurred wheel of motion.

"214... 214..." one of us said. There were no sign of doors anywhere.

I looked back at Bert and was surprised to see him replaced by Jenny, the most beautiful girl from our high school class. Her face was looking forward, determined not to be late, with a half-smile, as the background of the staircases and hallways whirring by.

I did a double-take. "YOU'RE going to poetry class, TOO??" I said.

"Come ON!" she said, encouraging us to go faster.

I laughed and wrapped my arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer. Our feet were still going and going up the stairs. Soon our wheeling feet were sharing the same axis, as if she was riding a bike and I was riding the back wheel with my hands on her shoulders.

Finally we came across a sign at a T-intersection at the top of the stairs. It had two arrows pointing left and right, each corresponding to a range of room numbers. 214 fit the range on the right. We ran in that direction, where there were more stairs.

We realized we had lost Bert. "He must have gone the other way!" I said.

The stairs here weren't that wide, more for single-file use. Then I realized it felt like we were on a roller coaster, and we changed from the warp speed of our blurring feet to the clunking, inching forward up a spiral tunnel. We sat together in our car, her in front of me, facing forward. I held her close. I saw her neck, partially bare from her blonde hair, and I started to nibble. More playfully than anything else. In mid-nibble, I stopped and opened my eyes in shock. What was I doing? She's just a classmate!

Luckily, coincidentally, I noticed something outside the staircase window (the whole wall was glass). To distract her from the nibbling, I said, "Hey, look at that rainbow!" The sky was a sulfur, dark brown, and cloudy, and the rainbow could only be seen if you looked hard enough. It was fuzzy. A double rainbow started to appear next to it.

"Are you sure it's not us?" Jenny said. At first I wasn't sure what she meant, but when I looked back at the rainbow, I noticed our reflection superimposed, stretching across the curve in the window.

The roller coaster completed its turn around the spiral staircase and leveled out. Our car was suddenly floating in water. I was aware of other people also half submerged, in their own roller coaster tracks, in this dark cavern.

There was a way out on the other end. When it was our turn to exit the hole, I realized we were high above ground. I could see we were on the other end of the Orono campus, near Public Safety and Chadbourne Hall. We were high above ground. The water emptied us out into a parking lot. It was just after dusk and drizzling.

I found a parking spot far away from the building, from the one that was where Chadbourne Hall is located but it was an altogether different building. It was to the left of the spout we just came out of. We stepped out of the car and collapsed on the gravel ground. We were exhausted. I tied my shoe in the rain, with Jenny slumped over in a dead-tired pose.

I heard a rumble of an engine and looked up to see a black F-150 pickup truck pull up and park on the grass, on the edge of the parking lot near the building. Bert got out of his truck, and I could hear the "more power" grunt he liked to do. I don't think Bert actually grunted, it just happened. He looked over at us slumped in a pile near a puddle and laughed.

"Let's go!" he said. We were probably late.

We quickly walked up the stairs to the building, and when I arrived to class, Bert and Jenny were already seated and engrossed in the class's lesson.

Our first snowstorm

At least 12in.

7 relatively obscure things about me

My friend Kate tagged me in November with the challenge to come up with seven random or obscure tidbits about myself.

I usually don't care for this sort of thing, but truth be told I have been reflecting on my life pretty heavily since the summer, and this gave me the opportunity to determine to see what about myself I obscure from other people. I tried to come up with seven aspects that NOT ONE person knew about me, but that was tough. So, finally, I've settled with these. (And part of the challenge is to ask seven people you know to do the same. Their/your names are below.)

1. No one in my family calls me Stan or Stanley, except for my mom's new husband. Everyone else calls me Stasiu, which is Polish for Stan. It's pronounced STAH-shoe (with each syllable sounded short, not drawn out).


2. My interest in writing began early, with a two-page story assignment in fifth grade. I picked the title "The Burglar and the Bear" out of a hat. I wrote and illustrated it. I then wrote three sequels in the eighth and ninth grades. I wrote a lot of fiction in high school and then in college, where I became a journalist, whose focus on reporting and accuracy helped shape my writing style. However, the first time a story of mine was published was when I was age 16, in Echoes magazine, for my profile of an elderly man and family friend in my town.


3. You know how sidewalks are comprised of square blocks? For the longest time, walking on a sidewalk required me to step in each block with my left foot first, which meant I could only do two steps a block. This started when I was really young. Sit back for a moment and imagine a little kid doing that.


4. For a full decade, my family lived in a cellar. We moved from Rhode Island to northern Maine because my father wanted to own a slaughter house. That deal went sour, and my father ended up starting to build a house on one of the two pieces of farmland he had owned. The basement was built in the autumn of 1988, and we lived in there during the winter. We started building the rest of the house in the spring but we didn't have enough money to finish it. We stayed in the cellar while the upstairs remained an unfinished skeleton. The cellar was unfinished, and there was no sense of privacy. There was a bathroom, a kitchen area, and the rest of the home as one big room. Our bedrooms were separated by bureaus, dressers and racks of clothes. Thus was the environment of my formative years.


5. I have never been grounded by my parents. I think perhaps it never occurred to them to try that form of punishment. That, or the way in which we lived was punishment enough.


6. I joined Kappa Delta Phi, a small but national fraternity, in my second semester of college. Even weirder, I was known among them as "Demon" or "Sir Demon" because up until one night during the pledging process, I was a quiet, shy guy. Then one night I spoke my mind. I think I sent the pledgemaster a quick verbal (but funny) jab, which took everyone by surprise. They joked that obviously someone had taken possession of my mind and body. My mom never liked that nickname. But nicknames stick around for a long time. I've had two others: DANK and STANGO.


7. My hearing is within normal range, but I sometimes have a hard time processing what I am hearing. I have not been diagnosed with central auditory processing disorder, or CAPD, but I need no more convincing. My ears work fine and my brain works fine, but the auditory connection between them is at times faulty. In a conversation with you, the first few words of your sentence simply sound like noise, and I either have to ask you to repeat yourself, or I have to figure it out based on the context of what I did understand. If we are anywhere with a lot of background noise, then the background noise is the same volume as you and will thus cancel your voice out. If you're a mumbler, God help me. So if you ask me a question and I'm staring at you or look like I don't know what to say, it most likely means I'm still processing what you're saying, or still processing what I want to say in response. This is why I do not enjoy the bar scene, cafeterias or socializing in group settings of three or more. (I enjoy the crowded dance floor at tango milongas specifically because I don't need to talk, and when I do try to, it feels awkward even to me.)
   

Now I am interested to know seven random or obscure things about the following people. Answer in your blog, and if you don't have a blog, reply to this post here at dankoski.com/blog.

1. Krystyna Emmons
2. Kasia Landry
3. Teresa Ngunyi
4. Jenny Bergman
   
5. Josh Nason
6. Amy Beaudet
7. Ryan Robbins
   

Blog topic ideas

No, I'm still alive. I haven't updated my blog in a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it. In fact, I have many items buzzing around in this hollow head of mine. So as a teaser, I suppose, this post is the list of ideas I'm brewing to write about.

• 7 obscure things about me. I was tagged by my friend Kate (more than a month ago). I'm still thinking about it. That's a tough one. (link added 12/20/2008)
  
• TANGO with STANGO. A blog post about my story with Argentine tango. I already have a request for this, and to that person, I can probably guarantee some surprises.
• Trip to Texas. I visited my sister and her husband in Dallas over Thanksgiving, and then went to Austin to complete the weekend.
• Calexico. They're my new favorite band. I saw them in concert in November.
• "At the movies" -- Ask anyone close to me, and they'll make fun of the fact that I hardly watch any movies. Lately, I've been trying to change that.
• Craigie On Main. I developed this restaurant's new website, and learned a lot along the way.
  
• "Dealing with Loss" -- a title I thought of back in September that would track my (feeling of) transformation and all the stuff I was losing in the process.
• Impermanence and attachment. You may know I started meditating in the summer, and learned some principles of Buddhism along the way. These two concepts have still eluded my grasp to understand them. (As have the grasp of many other people, apparently, someone suggested to me recently.)
• Healthy eating. Almost every woman I either just liked or dated have been very health-conscious, even to the point of being vegan or becoming vegetarian. Being aware of this pattern is interesting and has affected my diet... slowly but steadily. (Please overlook my recipe for Crunchy Eggs Dinner for now.)
  
• Truth. Truth, versions of truth, how people act and react around their own perceptions of truth.
• Trust and patience. I may need to rollover this one into 2009. haha.
  
• Hair, and perceptions. Hmm, I wrote this idea down one day. This could be either one or both of two concepts.
  
• Life is a traffic jam. I thought of this while in one, and wrote it down in a notebook I keep in my car.
• Life is a dream. I first read this in "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle and realized how true that can be. Strangely, it also made me think of the campfire scene in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. That then led me to realize that its widely regarded bad storyline had some interesting points.
• Changing "never enough" to "never IS enough". Similarly, "not good enough".
• Jealousy and fear of rejection. Ah, this old chestnut!
• Clarity and perspective. Related to truthiness (see above).
• My accomplishments of 2008. Because there are a lot of them?
  

Any other requests?

I hope to address some of these in the next couple of weeks. At least one of them!