My office is haunted...

This has been a tough week. So I am going to go off on something completely frivolous and meaningless to maintain sanity. For those of you who want things to think about, check out the NPR interview with Jimmy Carter. I am very excited to check out his book, and I will probably get a post organized once i read it. It could make very good airplane reading.

I don't know if it is because my office is in the basement of an ill-treated building that is going on 100 or if it is because the walls keep making noises, but I think that my office is unhappy with something.

I used to have a nice, clean office that had a huge plate window and a new door that opened onto a friendly hallway full of people to gab with. Now, I switched teaching assignments and have been sent to the dungeon. There is probably a direct connection there, but that is another issue.

It is always fun to describe to students how to get to my office. "Well, you go to H Hall and go in a main door. Then you walk as far as you can, find the stairway that goes down, and go down until you can't descend any more. If you pass the place where the school stores dead furniture and keeps old mops, then you are on the right track. If you get to the boiler room, then you need to turn around.

I know that there is a sort of mystique surrounding being a grad student in which scholars and artists are expected to dwell in a tumbling garret, but frankly, I like the sun. I like heating and AC that works, and I would really like my walls to stop bulging like in "House on Haunted Hill".

Some might pass over the fact that my walls breath in and out rhythmically. I'm sure that some people would even like for inanimate objects to have spirits. I know my landlord refers to our house as a living thing, but it gets creepy after a while.

Creepier than the breathing itself is the fact that when my walls sleep, they occaisionally suffer from sleap apnea. They will go silent for a minute or two and then suddenly will burst into coughing snores.

Rather than fight the myterious nature of my living office, I've decided to embrace it. There are some problems. First, I don't have a name for the walls in question. Should I address them as a singular unit? Would that offend them if they actually thought of themselves as separate identities? After all, we really should never refer to American Indians as a total group. There is a significant difference between Seminoles and Sioux. On the other hand, if I name each wall separately, then the walls might think it rather comical, much as if your friends didn't talk to you but spoke to your limbs as each distinct beings. [Bob, could you pass me the salt? Oh, sorry. It is closer to Al. Al, if you don't mind passing the salt to Bob...]

More importantly though, I need to know if anyone has a Breathe-Right strip that is about 6 ft long? That would be great.