Perhaps (based on emails I received from friends across the pond) I should have clarified that when I said (in my last post) that Shah Rukh Khan stole my pants (in my dream) and wore them in the rain, I meant pants in the American sense, not pants in the British sense (see definition 2b). Allow me to clarify this now, for the sake of Dream Shah Rukh’s dignity. 😀 HE STOLE MY TROUSERS, OKAY?

Relatedly, here’s an amusing dictionary of British slang.

I’m not sure what it says about my reasoning capabilities that during the earthquake on Tuesday, as my house swayed back and forth and my mind tried to make sense of what was happening, I got to “a monster-sized backhoe is picking up my house and carrying it away with me in it” before I got to “earthquake.” I thought to myself, “Don’t the backhoe people understand that I’m still in the house? Why was I not informed of this move?!”

Personally, I think all it means is that I’ve never experienced an earthquake before. It was SO disorienting. It didn’t seem as if the thing happening should be possible. I will be very happy for it never to happen again. If a tiny little earthquake like that can give you such a sense of being out of control, I don’t even want to think about what it’s like to be in a big earthquake.

In the meantime, a good distance away in NJ, my parents’ drinks were sloshing around and the windchimes started playing. A friend in NYC, who didn’t feel the earthquake, saw hundreds of people gathering on the sidewalks and assumed they must be movie extras. (I ♥ NYC ^_^.) And codename: Apocalyptica the Flimflammer, on MA’s north shore, started sending me a stream of emails. “I wonder if mom and dad felt the earthquake!” “I wonder if President Obama felt the earthquake!” “I wonder if Mark Hamill felt the earthquake!”

(The answers, BTW, are “Yes”, “No”, and “Oddly enough, there have been no reports on whether Mark Hamill felt the earthquake.”)

There’s a lot on my plate right now, so off I go…