It's September the first, it is...

(12:02:10 CDT)

It's September the first, it is...

I'm currently listening to The Dead Weather's Horehound and still blinking sleep from my eyes. I've been awake for three hours now, and I am still in that state of doldrums that normally lasts until a shower or breakfast. At this rate, I might fully come awake in time to go back to bed. Yesterday was kind of rough on the nerves. Not anything particularly specific, though there were incidents (two at least to be named shortly). I think my brain just reached an exhaustion threshold. Shame really, since I am working every night this week, going to school one of them, reading another couple centuries of pages in schoolwork, and getting my first couple of assignments turned in. Sigh. It's that "long week" thing all over again, where nights off from one set of activities, are nights on for other sets of activities, and even friendly get-togethers become another reason to not sleep as much as my body needs. I think, but I might be wrong, that this coming up Sunday is going to be one awesome day of rest for me.

There were incidents, I said. The third, and most minor, was getting Snow Leopard. Absolutely no problem and everything seems 5-by-5. Speed is up just a little bit, Exposé works better, the graphical aspects are just slight tweaked to be a bit better. Worth $20? Maybe or maybe not. I know they fixed a security flaw or two and some of my complaints with application switching seem to be solved, so I will go ahead and say "yes". Anyone looking for a generational change or anything can hold off. It is pretty much just Leopard (10.5.x) with tweaks.

The second I won't talk about much, besides to say my own delightful taunting bit me in the butt, and cost me $60 to get a textbook in a hurry so that I could do some work with it. I'm better about it now, but last night, finding out I had to spend more money felt like a slap to the face. Today, my only complaint is that I have another textbook to find room for in my ever growing stack. I'm pretty sure I'm going to sell them on Amazon. Flat charge of $30 each or something. I've got to make room. I already need one to two more bookcases, and our apartment is going to collapse if I keep this up.

The first, and most major, was kind of the most downplayed while it was going on. Becca, who has been a friend of mine since 2003, and been there during some of my worst moments and some of her worst moments, is about to leave Huntsville for the better part of a year at the least. She came over and hung out with me. I'm mentally tired enough right now that I didn't do much while she was over. I bought a copy of Bottle Rocket and we came back here and watched it. Gossiped about people and things. Relaxed on the couch. Then Sarah came home and I had to make supper before going to work and we said goodbye. Cliché as it may be, it kind of hit me after the fact that it might be 9-12 months before I see her again, and almost definitely will be that long before we hang out more than in passing. Then, on top of that, came the emotionally lesser, but still rasping moments listed as numbers "second" and "third" above, I was wiped by time I got done with everything last night and collapsed into bed.

I guess that's pretty much everything. Well, not everything. Let's see. In no particular order:

• I am looking forward to the start of Glee, though if it gets too insipidly dramatic, I am not going to stick with it.
• I am probably going to buy it on iTunes, since me and commercials no longer get along. I am not going to buy it as a season pass, though. I bought the Dirty Jobs season 4 pass and the Mythbusters season 7 (6? 8?) pass and both of them petered out well before a full season. I have no idea if Discovery is going through any troubles or anything, or if the seasons will restart in the fall after a four-five month hiatus, but right now it sounds like iTunes/Apple got about $50 dollars extra out of me because I took that chance (I know that normally you pay about $40 and after 22-26 shows a season, end up getting 1-5 shows for free).
• In proof that me and commericals cannot get along, I got actually angry at a commercial I saw today that said that high top sneakers are a girls thing, and boys just wouldn't understand. It was that manipulative. I miss the days of dumb talking animals, like frogs, just talking about their favorite beer. Sure, the commercials were dumb then, too, but they were dumb in a way that you could reach the zen of watching them by not watching them. Now, I don't know.
• Shadowrun, fourth edition, is going well. It took us two sessions (technically three, but first was a character building) to get most of the rules down, but I think we are ready for more elaborate games. Probably going to be fishing for one to two more players pretty soon.
• Read Fagin the Jew last night. While I get what Will Eisner was going for, it ended up becoming a story about how all gentiles are right bastards and how Dickens (and more importantly his illustrator) helped to continue violence against Jews. Had it been written sort of meta-textually, it might have been better, but as a graphic novel it is about two-thirds just an illustrated (and altered) Oliver Twist with some backstory to Fagin that doesn't make him that sympathetic (it's only two real corrections were to make Fagin look more germanic and to point out that no one calls Sikes "the Gentile"). Except Eisner seemed to say, at the end, that Dickens didn't really mean to, he was just using language of the time and did try and correct his mistake. Supposedly there are two versions of Oliver Twist, one pretty much says "Fagin, the Jew" and variations on it about a billion times. The other only says it about a thousand. I think I have the latter (the Nonesuch and Everyman Dickens collections are based on the later, author-approved texts). I need to find the former because right now I imagine it is like those papers in The Shining: "Fagin the Jew fagin the jew one day, grabbed a big old fagin the jew, and sat fagin the jew and had fagin the jew."

Ok, now that's everything. Have a good one folks. Fall is just right around the corner.

Si Vales, Valeo

• See other entries for September 09
• See Journal Archives (sorted by year then month)