We had arranged to meet Oscar and Carley in Ballard today to treat them to lunch. So we headed downtown to catch the bus to Ballard.

While waiting for the bus, we saw a woman handing out Jack Chick tracts....without irony. This was the first time I had seen somebody who thought the tracts were a Good Message actually passing them out. She handed me and John two, and my thought was, "Wow, FREE Chick tracts! These go for a buck each at Comic-con." Ours were particularly nutty as one of them was all about The Beast and the end of days, and the other a standard Chick tract about a guy who rejects god and goes pitching over the edge of a cliff into a lake of fire and brimstone. Halfway through, I said to John, "Let's make a bet. Does he say Jesus's name, get saved, and die OR does he reject Jesus, die, and get chucked into the lake of brimstone?" These pamphlets can go either way, but usually if you are in a Chick tract, you are doomed ANYWAY. Even the folks that accept Jesus usually die within a few days of accepting him. Except Suzy, the most annoying child on the planet, who always is there to lecture other little kids about Mohammed or evolution or the Evil Pope. (Jack Chick hates Catholics. And Jews. And Mormons. And Hindus. And Muslims. And...well, everybody.)

On our way into Ballard, we saw the SECOND motorcycle accident since we've been here. Or the immediate aftermath, since there were emergency workers on the scene holding the guy down, probably so he wouldn't move and injure his spine. I've kinda got that image burned in my brain: the overturned motorcycle (shiny red), the emergency workers kneeling, the guy lying there. This guy wasn't seeming to move at all, like the guy from the first accident we saw, but they were holding him down, so I'm assuming the non-moving (hopefully) was because he'd already been warned what could happen.

We got into Ballard a little bit early, although it turned out that Oscar and Carley had some truck issues, so it didn't matter too much. After eating, John bid us farewell--he had to go work on animations--and I helped Oscar, Carley, and Robert with the packing of Carley's place. We mostly got everything in the car or on the truck, and then they headed north and I headed back to downtown to catch a bus home.

Last night, when I went to bed, I didn't feel one hundred percent. Indeed, I felt a little off. Headachy, with the sort of headache that feels like tiny prickles inside your skull. And then I had a flareup of my shoulder issue. My left arm and my shoulder just ached and ached and ached all night. Even though I know what causes this, it still drives my hypochondriac self crazy, because A) left arm and shoulder aches are the classic "everybody knows" symptom for heart attacks and B) occasionally my left arm would tingle and feel slightly numb, and I would worry that I was having a stroke like Scraps over at the Making Light forums. (BTW, if anybody has any spare change, there's a guy--Scraps--without medical insurance in the hospital, and they've set up a paypal account for him. Others have done stuff like donate old iPods so he can listen to his music in the hospital and Elisa made earring presents for his care staff. But money would be useful for him and his wife, as he is uninsured.)

Anyway, the hypochondria chewed along all until I fell asleep at long last. And here are some of the dream crops from my night of fitful sleep.

+ In my dream, this guy I'd know since childhood (although only in the dream, not in real life) showed up suddenly on my doorstep. We hung for a few days and then he proposed to me by asking me to share his newly remodelled home with him for the rest of his life. His selling point in the dream was the amazing dishwasher he'd got put in. He showed the owner's manual to me, which I remember was printed on glossy paper with vector illustrations. Apparently dream self was very swayed by this, but not so swayed that she said yes. Instead, I (dream me) went looking for John.

+ I went to MIT, only in MIT stood for Magical Institute of Technology, and your classes were held in different centuries, and you had to get special hall passes to get from class to class. I got assigned the 8th century for most of the morning, and let me tell you what a non-picnic that was. Meanwhile my best dream friends were hanging out in the 18th century. I am so going to use this for a story somehow.

The post takes the provinces of China and replaces their names with countries of the world that have the same population. The largest province has the population of Germany, for example.

And that reminded me that when we went to visit James and Weng-Chen, I asked her about her hometown. And she said, deprecatingly, that we would never have heard of it. (I think she said it was Changchun, but I could be wrong.) But then James added drily that even though that was true, her hometown, this place we would never have heard of, was in fact, a city of several million people. And my brain kinda stumbled and fell over that concept. Because the way I've been raised, as a US citizen, is to see the US as the centre of the universe. I mean, I expect that people visiting the US will have heard of New York and San Francisco and LA and Chicago and Boston and possibly Miami, Dallas, and Seattle. But San Francisco (the largest city I've lived in) has a population of only 900,000 at usual times and after the dotcom collapses, it even dipped down to somewhere in the 700K range. (San Jose, for example, is bigger.) Granted the greater Bay Area has the 47th largest metro area in the world (another fact gleaned from the pages of Strange Maps) but can you imagine a city in the US that had several million people (suburbs not included) and people not knowing about it? I suddenly realised the magnitude of my US-centric worldview, that I would expect people to know about San Francisco, but I wouldn't know about a city into whose corners you could easily tuck San Francisco.

I'm a fairly geographically aware US citizen, thanks to my dad tossing me the globe every morning and telling to find places like South Georgia Island. (And he was evil. He didn't add the Island part. Just said, "Find South Georgia.") But Weng-Chen was right--I hadn't heard of her hometown 'til she mentioned it.

It actually made me think of a scene in Justine Larbalestier's new book, How To Ditch Your Fairy, where one of the characters has transferred to a school in New Avalon. I can't remember where he came from before, but he has the usual amounts of culture shock, and eventually he blows up at our main character, pointing out that she thinks New Avalon is all that and a bag of chips, but she doesn't know any of the people he references, and they're all really famous outside of New Avalon. (Justine, for those who are unaware, comes from Australia and spends half her year in Sydney and the other half in New York. I expect she wrote that scene from her own experiences.)

When I lived in Canada, they were all completely aware of the things I knew, culturally speaking, but most of the time, I had to be seriously educated on the aspects of Canadian fame and culture that many of them took for granted. (Except Gordon Korman. I already was a Gordon Korman fan before living in Canada.)