This brand of pain tastes so sweet to me.

Well, it's looking like I got too busy and won't be able to hit the goal I'd set for myself; to match my posts for 2007 by the end of January. I made a decent show of it though, considering I've made over half. The past two nights had all the intention of writing something, even had a mental outline of some things I wanted to talk about. This was all after doing my reading for the day, so really what happened was me catching up on emails and then spacing out pretty hardcore for the following hour or so.

I was sort of hoping that tonight would find me enjoying a couple martinis, but I procrastinated too long on things I had to do today. That, and my martini buddy, I assume, was understandably hesitant to go out in the subzero temps (made even more butt cold by the 25-30 mile per hour sustained winds) even for one of my tasty homemade drinky treats.

There's something I've noticed about reading all the short fiction I've been blazing through lately; since the days are spent in roughly the same manner, it feels like the semester just started yesterday. I mean, there hasn't been really very many significant events that have made marking time easy for me. However, the head full of stories gives me this ghost impression like I've watched tons of movies and television, or that I've had the sudden resurgence of memory from past lives that belie more activity than has actually taken place. I can't help but wonder if my two years of grad school will all be like this, and then I'll just wake up one day and realize that I have to make a choice between the next step up with a doctorate, or scrounging for a job. On the other hand, I'm starting to suspect that my timing couldn't be better, considering I'll have only one full school year in this Master's program sandwiched between a semester and a summer. That should give me a bit of time in there to stretch my rubber brain. Maybe even get some traveling in. I have been a bit obsessed lately with the idea of a motorcycle; I could see a nice summer road trip on two wheels with a tent and sleeping bag strapped to the back as I disappear until I feel like being found again.

I think maybe I'm just tired and I'm rambling on my keyboard in lieu of someone here in the flesh to puke out my stream of consciousness to.

Poor, poor keyboard.

Holy buttcakes!

Ah, a three day weekend is drawing to a close, and I'm sighing the sigh that only comes after a good constructive day. I read probably a little over half of what I've been assigned for this next week, and I even had a chance to mess with my linux machine and make some customizations. Sure, sure, super linux geeks would laugh at the fact that I'm giddy over setting up a Samba printer share, but I'm a big fan of small victories.

I now have this strange urge to sign off and keep reading, but at this point, I think everything I read would just end up leaking out my ear. I think I should treat myself to a bloody mary and a movie, then pass the hell out. Yeah...

Death Valley Ballerina

Ok, my brain is officially 'sploding after this first week of classes. It's okay though, I'll get used to it. I've actually enjoyed all the reading that I'm getting to do now; for once the bulk of my reading is fiction rather than tons and tons of textbook chapters. I can't complain, but I guess I sometimes do anyway.

Speaking of reading, I just came across a book that I haven't read for years, The Alchemist. As with many books I've lost over the years, I loaned it to someone and never got it back. I actually remember who it was in this case, but we lost touch and by the time I remembered it was too late. In this case, the circumstances were also unique in that the book wasn't actually owned by me. I borrowed it from my friend Jo, and luckily she just never asked for it to be returned. Well, I guess if you ever read this Jo, I'm busted and you have dibs on this copy.

Yesterday I was catching up on tons of old email and finally watched a YouTube video that a friend sent to me. I'm a huge Tool fan, and am quite proud of the fact that I've turned him into one as well - all it took was dragging him to a concert. Anyway, he sent this link about how someone took one of their songs and deduced a Fibonacci sequence from it. Eh, maybe so, but it's worth it at least for the song itself and the Hubble images used.



After watching that, I had to follow a related link that highlighted some of Maynard James Keenan's (vocalist for Tool) witticisms. If you're not familiar with his brand of humor, I'm sure this will fall short on you. Watch it if you want, or don't.



Now I'm off to do more of my reading for class, then I've made plans to watch Paris, je t'aime with a friend. I can hardly wait. Now go, find something to do. Unless it's you planning on taking my new book from me, Jo. In that case, you go do something else.

Wrooooong! Do it again!

A friend of mine sent a shorter version of this out to our email list today, and I nearly shat myself in fear. I think it was a mixture of the message itself and the fact that people actually cheered for it.



No no no no no no no, wrong! Bad Republican! As mentioned later in the video, this is definitely a violation of the separation of church and state. I was raised and have friends that still are Christian, but I'm sorry, in no way should the law of the land be modified in any way shape or form to be representative of some imaginary invisible person's whims, no matter how strongly you believe in him/her. No way. I don't care what religion it is, it's wrong. I mean, my imaginary friend wants me and everyone else to wear mismatching socks, drink tuna fish and pomegranate smoothies, and listen to The Aquabats every day, but I assume that this would go over poorly with the general populace.

You see, I'm doing this thing now where I'm trying fairly hard lately to let people be the way they want to be without having to suffer my unsolicited commentaries - and that goes especially double when it comes to religion. I even had a friend tell me that she considered me an evangelical Atheist*. That wasn't what inspired me to turn this new leaf, but I have a decent memory and that has stuck with me. The way I try to see most things anymore is that you can believe and do whatever you want as long as it doesn't affect me. Changing the Constitution definitely does that. Please oh please oh please don't let people be naive enough to allow something like this to happen, because I think the result will be very, very ugly. And yes, I do realize that before I posted this Romney already won Michigan, where this occurred. As they say, it's not over until the fat lady sings, or Huckabee drops from the race. And no, I don't endorse Romney either.

*I found it interesting that the built in spell-checker gives me a big red underline when I don't capitalize Christian, yet atheist is fine. I realize that the root of the word is Christ, which is a proper noun. In the spirit of equality, I capitalized both anyway.

The storm is brewing.

To take advantage of this first paragraph, I regret to inform that there are absolutely no pictures of the party I mentioned in my last post. That's ok though, because all they would've shown is drunk people talking and playing Apples to Apples. In fact, we played that game all night. It seemed like we played a round until someone got six cards, dispersed for conversation and to refill drinks, and then came back to play yet another round. By the time we quit, we suspected that we had used all the adjective cards. Of course, we realized this after berating random individuals for not putting the old cards back on the bottom of the stack. I'm sure the alcohol was responsible for our sluggish epiphany - and there was plenty of that to be had. There were gin and tonics, a bottle of rum, bloody marys, Dewars on the rocks, a bottle of some sort of Phillipino rum that smelled like Saki and received reactions varying from passive to outright disgust, and plenty of beer. It was fairly low key and no, there was no need for pictures.

Now back to the present; this is day two of my tour as a grad student, and I'm already starting to feel as if I've infiltrated the ranks of some secret club. It wouldn't be so bad if I actually had earned an undergrad degree in English, or even taken an English class for that matter. No, I had to start in computer science (which doesn't mean computer geeks don't read, it just means that they're not stereotypically a crowd that gets into literary discussions) and then end up in German. Thankfully, the beginning of the semester so far is going to be chock full of reading reading reading. I can handle that. In fact, no offense against any of my German classes or teachers, but it looks like even though I'm going to be busy all the time, this is going to be worlds easier than translating nearly everything I read or write. It's going to be the last half of the semester that's going to get a little hairy, I think, because that's when most of the writing is going to be done. I also learned that us grad students from one of my classes are going to be making a wikipedia literature review. I'll be sure to link that when it comes to fruition.

And speaking of translation, I did actually sign up to audit the translation course that I took as independent study last semester. I was invited to take it if I had time to see how it is in an actual classroom setting. It will be good to keep the German somewhat fresh in my head, considering I still have some books in German that I haven't read yet and would like to be able to tackle them without feeling like I need to relearn the language. Auditing will be nice, because I'm already suspecting that I won't be able to make one of the two weekly times, so I can still get the refresher without stressing about making up work that I miss.

As a closer, the reason I might be missing my class is because of my GA responsibilities. I have a meeting later this week to get more details and iron out a schedule, but the links my professor gave me reveal that I'll be assisting with the Final Thursday Press and Final Thursday Reading Series. I have to say, I am pretty psyched to be a part of this, because I've always meant to attend and never did. Now I have reason, and who knows, maybe I'll even take the opportunity to get in front of the mic and convince some friends of mine that should to do the same.

I need to stop typing now, because things keep coming to my mind, but time is working against me and I have places to be. Time is something I'm finding that is going to be a rare commodity very soon. I need to fully enjoy this week while I can.

Notify next of kin.

I'm a few minutes away from being picked up to head to a remote acreage a couple hours south of here. It belongs to a couple friends of ours, and it's about to house a postponed New Years/solstice party comprised of a handful of some of my oldest friends. Considering it's an acreage, we will be sufficiently far enough away from civilization, which means that this could end up being a weekend from which legendary tales spring. I understand that there will also be some excellent scenery shots on the way, so I decided to bring my camera. I wasn't going to at first, mainly because it seems that everyone gets rather annoyed when they get their pictures taken in full party mode. I can't say that I blame them. So that said, I doubt I'll have any pictures to document the occasion, but you never know.

I also had to pass this oddity along. I have quite a bit of music and an iPod, so obviously iTunes seems to be the appropriate application to use. Well, I got a sexy new computer a few weeks ago with some funds that had originally been budgeted for other priorities that never came about, so I used them to treat myself. Oh man, it's got an AMD dual core 64 bit processor, a 400GB hard drive, and 3GB of RAM. It's unbelievable how fast this thing is, and believe me, I've been pushing it trying to test its limits. I haven't found them yet.

Oh, sorry, back to what I was saying. So I took the 120GB SATA drive with all my music on it out of my old desktop and dropped it into the new hotness, then changed my iTunes settings accordingly to import all the music into its library. Because of this new level of performance available to me, I've started using the visual setting that scrolls and displays the album covers along with your song listings. As I listen, I'll import an album cover here and there, finding that sometimes iTunes isn't all that accurate. I happened to try to retrieve the album cover for Megadeth's Hidden Treasures, and I got this.



I did a search on this album, and all I found was what appears to be Heavy Eric's website, which I've honestly been a bit too afraid to really dive into. This is just the latest in a long string of borderline surreal things that have popped up these past couple weeks.

I kinda hope it keeps up, because I think I'd be really bored otherwise.

One big holiday.

I'm one of those people that hates to see Xmas crap get rolled out onto the shelves right after Thanksgiving. It's not that I go looking for it, but over the years it basically jumps out at you whether you're prepared or not. To me, it feels as if we can barely get one holiday out of the way before the marketing strategies shift and we're getting ads for the next holiday's hot items. But now I see that some genius has decided to push the Easter holiday a bit further ahead in the year, and I have to say that I'm just as concerned, but for an entirely different reason. It's not even mid-January yet and I see that the Cadbury Creme Egg is already on the shelves.

Now when it comes to little candy eggs as opposed to lights and carols, I can say without a doubt that the eggs are something I'd much rather endure. In fact, I'm helplessly drawn to them whenever I see them. I'm going to have to muster a superhuman level of control these next couple months, or I could just throw my hands up and just start making the giant, homemade version.

I wish I could find the YouTube video of the old commercial with the two kids at the end; one of them is a chicken and yells, "Thank you, Easter Bunny. BAWK BAWK!" Uh, yeah...

*sniff sniff*

I just saw this movie, I think it was almost three weeks ago now, and although the movie itself was great, the soundtrack has just been haunting me. I like a lot of music, and if given the choice, I'll usually pop in some metal. My collection has plenty of classical in it, which I enjoy thoroughly, but this one has just taken me into its jaws since I bought it and is shaking me around like a favorite dog toy.


The movie is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and I can't get it out of my head. My favorite song by far is track #9, Meeting Laura. It's just haunting, as is the scene in the movie where it appears. I found a relatively lengthy trailer for it on YouTube, and was surprised to see that it was directed by Tom Tykwer, the same guy who did Lola rennt.



Go rent it, see it. Then find the soundtrack. Trust me.

Cultural difference?

I was sitting with some of my friends earlier tonight and we decided that there was no other alternative than chinese delivery. A few short minutes later, we were chowing on spicy broccoli, egg rolls, and crab rangoons. A couple hours later we remembered that the fortune cookies still lay on the kitchen table, unmolested. Well, after molesting them, we read our fortunes out loud. My fortune was disturbing, as I don't think it really counts as a fortune, but rather as a testament to chauvinism - or at the very least an invitation to getting punched in the eye. Please, gaze on my fortune and then try to convince me that anyone who would call a wife a 'possesion' isn't a raging redneck.



Classy. At least I now know how to say 'student' in Chinese. And I have lucky numbers for the next lottery ticket I buy. Oh, I get it; when you win the lotto, then you'll have enough money to own a wife. Well now it all makes sense...

Sleep, please release me.

Gonna sign off on the partying to post this video I just rediscovered. I like it anyway.



Oh yeah, happy new year.