Just watched "The Prestige". I figured I would hate it, since I don't like magicians or watching magic shows.

After the first half I literally took it out of the player and put it in the box, that's how much I hated it.


But then I started thinking about it. And I got curious. And I put it back in the player.

Holy shit.

Total mind-fuck, ladies and gentlemen.

Watch it all the way through.

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I am amazingly free this summer.

I've got my own place, I've got my own car. I can drive it anywhere I want whenever I want. Absolutely nobody gives a crap when I get home. I can tell someone I’m going home, and if it takes ten minutes or three hours to get there, no big deal. Nobody expects me for lunch, nobody expects me for dinner, nobody tells me what I should eat or what I should buy or where I can and cannot go or when I have to get back. I have enough money to pay the rent and buy the groceries. Beyond those two my needs are few. Yes, I'm expected at work, but nobody really cares when exactly I come in or how I partition my day- all I have to do is get my work done. And even though nobody expects me to be anywhere, if I do show up then they are glad to have me. The other day I spent a ridiculous amount on fresh grapes. But nobody told me that it was too much and that I should spend my money more wisely. I bought some cookie dough, but nobody told me that I shouldn't because it's not healthy. I can decide whether I move or whether I stay put, whether I rent a moving truck or take it in my car, if I clean the bathroom or if I just let it stay dirty, anything. I can decide to take a trip to Utah. I can drink milk right out of the container. I can eat dinner at 10 o’clock. Or 3 o’clock. Or not at all. I can decide to drive to New York City at 4:30pm on a weekday. Or not. I can do anything I want! BWAHAHAHAHA!!

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I submit this song, (which can be listened to as the first song on the list to the left), as a kind of theme song for 2007, The Year of Our Triumph.

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Summertime, and the livin's easy

Yesterday morning I was in a bit of a bad mood, it is true. All of the Old Feelings... the ones from the winter... the feeling that everything I did was cosmically worthless... they were returning. Not just depressing thoughts like "in the vastness of geological time, a single lifetime is smaller than a mote of dust and just as influential"; but more just that what I was doing seemed so untied to anything important--- human existence, fraternity, kindness, service, duty, and everything else with any value in this world. Yeah. Those are hard feelings to suppress, once they grab a hold of you. I'd had a meeting with my advisor and I realized that for the next couple years I might have to argue with him about things that he isn't going to want to change his mind about. Either I was going to shut up and write what he told me to write, or I was in for a lot of arguments in order to write what I really thought was right. It broke the tide of mood that I had been sailing on since the summer came into my life.

So I did what I usually do to make myself happy, I retreated to one of the highest floors of the library, and after I did some work for Project FG I samba'd around in front of the elevator until it opened, and then I did a crazy dance while the elevator descended ten floors. I walked on confining walls instead of the sidewalk... there were these two stones and I'd been thinking about just leaping between them but I wasn't sure I could jump that far... I just went for it (and made it!). My brand new MP3 player was key- I specifically listened to happy songs, and I imagined myself to be like one of those people in the ipod commercials, only I would be the shadow person, not the boring restrained regular person. There isn't anyone on campus anymore, so I get to dance like a maniac wherever I want.

Then I went and played some more soccer. I never want to go to soccer, but whenever I get there I always have a hilarious good time, because I love that game. We played two on two, Alida and I against Patrick and Gareth, so basically America vs Europe or perhaps girls vs boys. Alida and I CREAMED Patrick and Gareth... probably to the tune of more than ten to zero, though they almost scored a goal once- it went off the "post". Eventually it was getting a bit embarrassing, because the Patrick the frenchmen's manhood seemed to be at stake, and Alida and Gareth are dating. These kinds of fun events usually aren't that helpful to the old relationship. So Alida and I called off the game because of the mild rain but we'd still played for quite a while altogether and it was quite fun.

The honest truth is that when I started feeling crappy yesterday, I didn't want to feel like that. Ok, so you say... nobody likes feeling crappy, eh? But actually, if you examine it, oftentimes when you feel really crappy you do enjoy in some respect how crappy you are feeling and how complainy you are being and you don't really want to take the necessary steps to make yourself feel happy again (whatever those might be). It's like when I'm sick and I'm in some kind of pain and I complain to my parents and they say, "Take an Advil."
Logically I know that taking an Advil will make me feel better, but in addition to my general dislike of medicine in general, don't you ever just like being just a little pathetic and miserable sometimes? Quietly (or loudly) nobly suffering through some ill, the greater forces of biology seizing control of your body...!!! Just...suffering a little bit? I always think to myself that if I take a medicine that masks the pain, that I'm putting a damper on my body and I might not hear the important signals that it's trying to send me. (See: Injuring your leg and then taking like 6 Advils and running on it anyway) But then when someone tells you, "But you are suffering absolutely needlessly, for a silly and stupid reason, and you could easily stop suffering and get back to work." you feel a little bit sheepish, and not so noble or smart at all. Then you take the Advil, and then you feel better, and then you get distracted, and you find that feeling healthy is indeed actually better than being sick, and there aren't really any crazy consequences for ignoring some bad feelings, and off you go.

It's like that classic book I just love now, that my sister recommended to me: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? They made the movie Blade Runner after it, I seem to recall. But in the world of the book everyone has a "mood organ". You just have to sit down at the mood organ and punch a code in and it will make you feel whatever mood you punch in. The main character's wife is constantly depressed, verging on suicidal. Sometimes she feels this way naturally, and sometimes she calls it up on the mood organ, something like, "utter despair" or some setting like that that you think that nobody would ever actually use. One day she's feeling glum and she sits down at the mood organ but she won't punch the number to make herself feel better. She says that she doesn't feel like dialing it. The main character says, "why don't you press 333?" (or whatever the number was) and she's like, "Yeah, yeah, I know, 333 makes you feel like dialing, and then you dial whatever you want." but she still doesn't do it, she just sits there, staying depressed and not feeling like dialing.

So a lot of times when I feel depressed I sit around and I think about how I don't even feel like dialing. I know perfectly well that there are many different things I could do that usually make me feel very happy but I just *don't* do them, because really I'm enjoying feeling lame and depressed and having a pity party for myself, and I don't actually want to change. Well yesterday it was different. Yesterday the cloudy morning gave way to a gorgeous afternoon, and in my mind I dialed 333. I convinced myself that I actually did want to feel better- that I actually didn't want to sit around being depressed and second-third-fourth-guessing my decisions. And then, like a switch had been turned in my mind, I started doing all of the things that make me happy... sluggishly at first, and then more willingly. I had a meeting with one of my favorite professors, which helped, and he and I worked through a bunch of bugs in my FORTRAN code... I learned so much from him in such a short time!
Then I did all the things that I mentioned above, and gradually I forgot about all of those dark feelings and as I was walking home today I started singing, "Summmmmertime... and the living's easy" and running my fingers along the soft tops of the bushes and thinking about how FREE I am right now.

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I get up in the evening
And I ain't got nothing to say
I come home in the morning
I go to bed feeling the same way
I ain't nothing but tired
Man I'm just tired and bored with myself.

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Dilated said yes.

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Young Johnny Everall leaned backwards over the fence, stretching back until the whole world was upside down, and all of his burrito-y insides began sliding toward his head.
It was a hot day, and the dry air played tricks on his eyes, smearing objects in the distance like a mix of nacho cheese and hot sauce. Watery, shimmering blurs... that is all there was far as the eye could see across the Old Tortilla Flats.

“Now Johnny B. Everall, you git yerself off that ol’ fence afore you tear yer aluminum foil, young burritito!”
It was his mother, her foil shining dully in the harsh noon light. She was always such a pain, worrying about useless things. Still, he slid off the fence and all that was burrito goodness inside him slithered back towards his feet. On the front of her frock she had a garish F written in black marker. That meant that she was a fajita-burrito, with notoriously spicy peppers. Johnny often asked the Great One why he had to get the only mother in town with spicy peppers, but he never got an answer. The only thing he got was hell from all the other burritos in town, especially when she called him “my little burritito”. She said that where she came from, it was a diminutive term. He sure felt diminished when she said it. Sometimes he wished someone would eat her.

Suddenly the family taco, Dog, came running up the gravel drive, weaving erratically from side to side, spilling shredded cheese all over the road.
“What’s wrong, thar, Dog?” asked Johnny, steadying the taco and gently scooping some of the cheese back into the shell. The taco didn’t answer. Instead it fell over on its side, panting and leaking beef juice all over the drive. The dry sand drank it up, leaving barely a spot. Johnny noticed that the taco’s shell was badly cracked. With each breath the crack grew larger, an evil spindly line growing along the axis of the taco. Soon it would break in half. What had happened to sweet, crunchy Dog? Who had done this?

Dog had gone out with Dad and the other Burritos this very morning on his usual rounds to collect taxes from all the other creatures on the Earth. It was part of his new position as Imperial Treasurer to go down to the Rio Grande at least quarterly to collect the taxes and offerings paid by the rest of the Earth to the country of Mexico. The last couple of years the offerings had been sparse. No one knew if it was because those beyond the Rio Grande had suffered overmuch the last season, and had nothing to give; or if indeed they had become surly, forgetting why the Burritos ruled the Land and failing to pay them the homage they so richly deserved as the Lords over All Things.

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Note: This was originally in response to this challenge. However, it was going to be WAY too long. So here it is. If you want to see what I actually submitted, you can follow the link. :P You should submit one for yourself!!

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When I was a lass, I used to be obsessed with Olde English Font from the Macintosh. So I printed out an entire alphabet with capital and lowercase letters and I carried it in my binder and during every class I would slip it under the page on which I was taking notes and I'd trace it, moving it around to make whatever words I wanted. Usually they were words like, "Olde" "English" or "Font". Just kidding. Eventually it got to the point where I could almost write in Olde English Font without tracing at all.

I was such a good student.

That reminds me, it seems high time to print myself out another alphabet.

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