Chris turned 30-something yesterday. He kept telling me that he didn't care how old he was, that it didn't really matter, that he wasn't one of those people who was touchy about that kind of stuff. But he still wouldn't tell me how old he was turning. By my calculations it was 34.

"Tell me... what difference do you think there is between the ages 32, 33, and 34?" he said. "Seriously, I mean, is there a big difference, do you think?"

I said that they were all pretty old and that I wasn't really old enough to even start thinking about if there was a difference between them. Haha. I mean, I said it like it was a joke, but it was also true. So we got into a long conversation... this conversation lasted for HOURS AND HOURS, but that's just the way conversations with Chris are. We covered everything from the timeless nature of the Universe to the real meaning of true love and how to find it to the AIDS crisis to the meaning of religion, current US politics, how much we both like Tony Blair, the Jews (for some reason people on the East Coast like discussing Jewish people a lot), abortion, The Rules, how it would suck to be eaten by a lion, the weather, Tennessee, how annoying people can be when you travel with them, Freud, the beach, the stress of the modern workplace, leukemia, ground water flow lines, how artesian wells work, the Carboniferous, cake, what we're going to do tomorrow and man's ever-present and approaching mortality.

At one point he looked up out the window into the misty night and he said, "Do you ever think about... the Universe?" and I was thinking about how in the last couple of weeks I'd been thinking that I really wanted a guy who said things like that. Because of course I think about the Universe! All the time! Chris is such a contradiction! Of course this time he was thinking about the Universe because if you consider the depths of cosmological time, the human lifetime is but a blink, and therefore the 10 year age difference between him and his girlfriend isn't really that much.

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I had a wild and feverish dream. In the dream I was sitting at a kitchen table looking through a list of classified ads.

"Ha!" I exclaimed. "I am qualified for all of these jobs! Don't these people know that the only thing you need in order to do what they're talking about is have a basic set of computer skills? Apparently not-- look how much they're offering!! These skills must be in short supply if they're offering that much for these jobs." I continued looking through the jobs. Every job reaffirmed the fact that the skills that I had were exactly the ones that they were looking for. My unknown companion nodded obligingly over his or her orange juice, busy reading a different part of the paper.

I woke up with my body and face drenched in sweat and the blankets twisted around my legs like ropes.


So the moral of the story is...

If this is an example of what my dreams are like when I have a FEVER over 100 degrees.... I wonder what my real job search is going to be like?

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Inside the world of my book, a ragtag group of unlikely companion is being chased by legions of Trollocs, coursing through wilderness on horseback, staying just ahead of their pursuers. Their protrectress is growing more weak with each time she must call upon her magic to keep the army of approaching darkness at bay. The lads, previously untested in battle, are still smarting from their close encounter with death, the wild beating of their hearts as yet unquieted, the sweat on their brows in the midst of the cold winter's day unnoticed. Not enough time has passed for them to process what has happened.

Inside the real world, yes, where most of us live, I am sick. This is some kind of karmic retribution for the entry I wrote earlier, because I forgot to mention that nobody, NOBODY likes being sick in the summertime. GRAAGGGH! Now I have a slight fever but I took some medicine... all day it seemed like the medicine hadn't been working, but I think just that I had gotten a bit worse during the day and the medicine had staved that off until it ran out a bit ago. So during the day I just thought the medicine was doing NOTHING. But maybe that's not true.

Now I'm trying to eat some dinner but I've lost all sense of taste. I was wondering what the hell was missing from my meal as I spooned it into my mouth and then I had my answer. No taste. Tomato soup: no taste. Baked beans: no taste. I downed a cup of my very tart cranberry juice. Nothing, just the barest glimmer of taste around the edges when I licked my lips. My friend at work had it the worst though, she had a bad cold and when it left her, she couldn't smell, and worse, she couldn't taste but three things. I can't remember what they were, but any three things would get tiresome after a short while, because sickness distorts all smells and tastes, and EVERYTHING she ate smelled like one of those three things. It's been months and she went to see a specialist about it, but he told her only time would give her her senses back. In the meantime, nothing she eats tastes good. It's a wonder she eats at all.

Now back to my dislike for taking any kind of medicine, perhaps I'd better explain. This dislike extends to many other things: drinking coffee, alcohol, smoking cigarettes, etc. I kind of thought that I was alone with my strange reasons, until one day I was talking to Justin about it. I admitted to him this aversion to all of these items, and when he asked I explained that it was because if I were ever kidnapped or my plane crashed or whatever and I suddenly found myself in the middle of the wilderness (I usually think the jungle... maybe the Amazon... it did happen once in Animorphs), then I was going to need every advantage I could get to survive. If I usually used pain meds to get over my pain, the pain I was about to feel would be ten times worse. If I was addicted to anything- coffee, cigarettes, anything--- I would have to get over that addiction, which would bias me just that much towards not surviving. I wasn't going to take those kinds of odds.

"Or," said Justin, "If you went back in time."

Justin doesn't do any of the above things (except drink alcohol, the reason for this discussed below). Not because he thinks he might at any moment be dropped in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, no... but because what if suddenly he were transported back into time, to a time that didn't have a Starbucks on every corner or readily available Advil for his every pain? WHAT WOULD you DO??!?! You'd be struggling with all of the changes associated with another time period PLUS you'd have a ripping headache from your caffeine addiction!! You'd never survive. Alcohol, as you might have surmised, is usually available in other eras, that is perhaps the reason it gets the go-ahead, though I don't know. It's easier not to be addicted to alcohol than cigarettes or coffee, though you can become socially addicted fairly easily to all three.

Now whenever I talk about stubbornly not taking medicine I bring up the Amazon, and Justin rightfully appends "or back in time".

........ because you never know.

...............are you ready?

Well looks like my modern CRUTCH, that is, DayQuil, has taken a little bit of effect. Guess it's time to get back to the world of my book, where their problems are obviously way simpler than mine.

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So I'm having sweet peas for dinner. Big bowl of sweet peas. I was just not going to have dinner because I randomly had an onion bagel around 6, but it was 8:30 and I was hungry and I have all these random cans of sweet peas and when am I ever going to eat them amirite?
Haha, I joined this facebook group called, "8th Graders need to back off 9th grade guys especially other people's BF's" haha. Cause man, those hoochie-mama 8th graders totally need to step off. The group description says, "This is a serious issue."

Some college guy had this to say:

"Eighth grade? More like 'geighth' grade, amirite?"
and everyone was like, "yah, lol, usorite!"

Tomorrow the Mercury Messenger spacecraft begins its second flyby of the planet Venus along its winding path towards Mercury. You always have to go a really windy way to Mercury because it's one of the most difficult planets to go into orbit around. This is because it's so close to the Sun... since gravity is speeding you up constantly as you shoot toward the sun, by the time you get to Mercury you are going seriously fast. Complicating things is the fact that Mercury itself is so small and it doesn't have a lot of gravity to help stop you. It's really hard not to just shoot right past Mercury and go straight into the fiery inferno. In fact, that's all we've pretty much done so far when it comes to Mercury. Because of this, we've only actually seen half the planet so far. We have no idea what the other half looks like (only the barest of shadows seen by Earth-bound telescopes!) So in a couple of months, we'll have another look at Mercury.
This flyby of Venus is special because unlike the last time this same spacecraft flew by Venus, this time we'll be turning all the instruments on, just to test them out for the first Mercury encounter (we also have to fly by Mercury several times to slow ourselves down before we enter orbit). Unfortunately, since the instruments on Messenger are primed for looking at the small, rocky body of Mercury (aka it sees mostly in the visible), all we'll be able to see of Venus are its thick, 70km high-altitude hazes. BORING! Well, not for atmospheric scientists. But we aren't atmospheric scientists, are we? There may still be a few small wavelength windows where we might get to see something of the surface, but not much. Today they had a press conference in preparation for the launch. My advisor wanted somebody to go watch it because he's on the mission so he should watch it but it's really boring. He came in and asked us innocently if anyone was planning to go watch. Nobody moved. I didn't even take of my headphones. Caleb finally got up because he was seriously bored doing what he was doing and he'd been trying to get out of it all day.

"Oh, come on, guys! Look at you!" said my advisor. "Our mission is FLYING past another PLANET tomorrow!!!"

"And I'll go and watch it," I said, "TOMORROW!"

He just laughed and ducked his head out of the lab. Caleb came back less than five minutes later. "I couldn't stay," he said, "I told Peter (the guy who pipes in the NASA tv), I told him I had to leave."

But it's pretty cool we're flying past another planet tomorrow, huhn? If you have NASA tv (which you obviously do) or maybe it'll be on the internet, you should tune in.

In the spirit of this exciting event, here is a picture of the module that took the astronaut that I MET the Sunday before last to the MOON:



And here's when I burned my finger on the hot fudge:


Side view:


And a tree that looks like a heart!!!

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