Two things that keep me up at night

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping.

Sometimes there is a reason for this and sometimes not. Sometimes it's the rain, and sometimes it's the pipes.

At any given such time, whether there is a reason for it or not, there is always a thought that will present itself as the thing that occupies my mind at the time. Sometimes the thought is whether I should like sports more (yes, really) or whether architecture should be more open and accepting to amateurs (yes, really).

Tonight there were two thoughts which occupied my mind simultaneously, and made me both laugh and cry to the point of leaving my bed.

The first was a mental recreation of a tourist experience I had while visiting a site of Roman archaeological ruins in England, bordering a river by the name of Tyne. Among the building remains were many sub-structures that the site-designers (as the archaeologist-consultants must be described) went to great lengths to explain in the brochures as having served several and many specific purposes (“this is where they cleaned their coins”, “this is where they collected themselves and commented to each other on how clean their coins were”, “this building tells us how important the coins were to them, because it was structurally unsound, and they kept no coins in it” etc). And as we were walking through these various former-spaces I found myself saying to my husband “So… these Romans.. they had a steam bath here… according to the brochure.. and the water went out that way… Wow these Romans really cared about being clean… they went to great lengths to live up to this bathyness thing… you might say that they went all out to bathe in the Tyne daily.” … At which point the American tourists in front of us did an about-face and loudly expressed a happy “oh no, you didn’t.. [shame on you punster]”


The other thought was that Obama might be killed.