goldenmean

Ok, I'll get this out of the way before I start spewing mind-goo in the thought that it will be more likely to be read up here. Is anyone going to Death Guild tonight and coming back to the East Bay? A ride there would be nice also, but I don't mind the walk from BART as much as the necessity to leave around 11:30 to make it back to BART. Pretty please? I've been occasionally called cute, and have been known to do such things as put out, or help pay gas money, at your preference (*Restrictions may apply. Not cumulative with other promotions). *eyelash batting*

So, let's see a month or so since the last update. What to say, what to say? Well, first off, I'm older in ways that are meant to be more significant than the usual millisecond to millisecond fugiting of tempus that goes on without anyone paying any attention at all. I think maybe I'll start celebrating birthdays on arbitrarily amusing amounts of planck units of time. Maybe then I'll be able to shake the seasonal depression that seems to hit me around now. I wonder when my next mersenne prime increment of planck time will be. These are questions that the windows calculator is of absolutely no use in answering me unfortunately.

For my birthday, lots of my friends chipped in and got me things that help me make exciting beepy noises, which I have done with gusto. I'm not really sure what next step I should take on the road to actually being able to do something useful with my new gear though. I'm still very much at the "Ooooh, I like this patch. Now I will run it through a phaser and twiddle knobs in silly ways and listen to the sounds that come out!" stage. Maybe I should buy a music theory book or something. Or, you know, teach myself how to play keyboard. Though, considering I recently bought the VNV Nation concert DVD, and what little actual playing there was happening seemed to be repeatedly hitting two separate keys, this might be entirely superfluous. Hell if I know. Regardless, it's nice listening to music now and having half a clue how it came about. Thank you friends!

Oh, speaking of music, Einsturzende Neubaten was really, really, really good, which you know, you probably either already knew, or couldn't care less about. Huzzah! Also purchased my Skinny Puppy tickets for some ludicrous price that only came out to being twice as much as the listed face value of them. Feh.

Work sucks, but you knew that. I'm currently having philosophical debates with myself over why I pointed out that the time clock seemed to be making an error and not debiting time out for lunch each day. Which you know, would have meant an extra 10 hours or so of overtime every check, which no one ever would have noticed, because 1) People just don't notice things in my department and 2) I at this point have at least three different direct supervisors (not including coworkers who seem to think they're my supervisor, but are tragically, horribly wrong). This means that at any particular time no one really knows what I should be doing or what my schedule is, which generally speaking is just the way I like it. So why did I tell them? Hope of greater reward in the afterlife? I don't believe in an afterlife. Self inflected moral codes suck. I can really understand why people came up with religion. I've spent the last couple of hours just feeling like a sucker, which is really a pretty lowsy reward for Doing The Right Thing (TM).

Last Friday was payday, so I did my usual "Why the hell do I put up with this again?" lunchtime shopping trip and purchased oodles of DVD's. Came back to work to see email about someone else in the department who hasn't been here as long getting moved up to QA. Maybe that's only sideways mobility, hell if I know. From my perspective though anything else > here. I subsequently went out after work and dropped even more money on things that I still haven't decided I actually want. As far as I can tell, I exist solely as a vector to send my credit card number murmuring through digital prayer wheels in service of a deity of futile capitalism. Go me! Total haul: Schizopolis, The Tin Drum, The Safety of Objects, Wonderland, Lost in La Mancha, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, Versus, Collectors Pulp Fiction, I am Curious (Blue and Yellow), Past Perfect, First Season of Zim (anyone else notice they mis-spelled Erkin on the box?), and The Last Unicorn. I think maybe I should have bought something like "Booty Call" just to make my selection a bit more schitzoid.

This weekend was the (ex) House of 13 Doors combined birthday party, which was fun, but went on several hours longer than I really had the energy for. Maybe somewhere there are pictures of me in the horrible pink ruffle shirt that Maggie picked out for me (theme was unfortunate formal wear, in case that one made you doubletake). Maybe there are even pictures of me wearing it playing Dance Dance Revolution, but I don't remember any being taken.

Feh. Work duties call. I post this now. I'll leave you with my most recent favored dada spam.

postwar monetarism kittenish trombone rickets bitnet drudgery

Click, you disconnect from me, Click

So very little to write about. Alarm goes off too damned early. Wander to bus-stop. Nap. Take a commute of increasing length thanks to a recent office move. Become fully conscious sometime around noon. Wonder briefly what quality of work I churned out while comatose. Decide I don't really care. Proceed with day. Repeat 4 times. Sleep on weekends (where by weekend I mean Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday)

The last time they had me waking up at 6 am here I was going to sleep at 10 PM or so. This made me miserable. This time around, I'm keeping to my preferred schedule of staying up until 3 AM or thereabouts. I'm still miserable, but at least now it's mostly concentrated to the hours I'm at work and would be miserable anyway. I view my immense surliness in the morning as being a form of petty revenge.

Been spending most of my free time fiddling with the Nomic, which is amusing me to no end despite its contining lack of a name. You know you want to play. Money grows on trees there! We have three units of currency, but nothing to buy with them yet except other units of currency. We live on some non-euclidean abomination that says it's an icosahedron but behaves like a mobius strip. Fun! Prod me if you're at all interested.

Other than the nomic, I've been reading and watching movies. Pondering going clubbing, but generally being foiled due to inavailability of transportation or emotional malaise. Mostly been chomping merrily through a good majority of the Vertigo line (Books of Magic, Lucifer, Invisibles, Fables, and wrapping up my Transmet collection). I think Fables and Transmet remain my favorites. Transmet is well, Transmet (I just read the collection that had an introduction by Patrick Stewart admitting to being a fan, and I can not get the image of Captain Picard wearing red and green sunglasses with a spider tattoo on his head blasting the Borg Queen with a bowel disruptor out of my head. It haunts me). Fables is great also. Like the author just took Oingo Boingo's Cinderella Undercover and ran with it (The cartoon animals on Old McDonald's farm, Are nodding off in hotel rooms with needles in their arms, The seven dwarves, HA!, there's only four alive today and Cinderella's working for the CIA). I seem to have a soft spot for fairy tales or any sort mythology in a modern context. Open up Tom Thumb, in the name of the revolution!

As for movies, I liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Sign me up please. I think I liked the ending from the script I read for it more though. If you're curious it's available at Being Charlie Kaufmann. Unfortunately, it's almost summer, and the tide of horrible summer blockbusters is about to pour down upon us like a biblical plague. If I'm overheard to mumble "Hey, this'd probably make a good movie" in your presence, I'd like you to strap me down and make me watch the trailer for "I, Robot" again. I'll probably burst into tears and start pleading for mercy after about a second, but get all Clockwork Orange eye-clampy on me (real horror show), it's in my best interests.

I think my greatest amount of fear and apprehension is reserved for Troy though. The Illiad's really quite an atrocious story, and I just doubt that Hollywood has the gumption to do it any sort of justice. I bet they'll make little Ajax tragically smitten by Cassandra and have them live happily ever after, or have Achilles decide Astyanax is a cute little tyke and raise him as his own. I just know they'll butcher something. I can't decide whether or not I'm looking forward to being offended by it. Oh, speaking of Illiad related things, read Dan Simmons' Illium. It's great. As good as Hyperion and Hyperion Cantos even, and better than Endymion and Fall of Endymion.

I'm going to go "work" now or something.

I HAVE RISEN

Quoth the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, which is currently ensconced firmly as my favorite movie of the year. If you see and don't like this movie, well, I just don't know if I can feel anything for you but pity.

While we're on the subject of movies, I really really really hope that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doesn't suck. Pluses: I love Charlie Kaufmann (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, etc.) and the premise seems pretty Philip K Dickish, whom I also love (tangent: Charlie Kaufmann wrote a script for Dick's Through a Scanner Darkly, but it never turned into a movie. Life is unfair. Here's a link to it though). Minuses: Jim Carrey serving a role as anything other than reactor shielding makes me very anxious.

So, update. I live in the east bay again (huzzah), all of about 5 blocks away from where I lived the last time I was on this side of the water. I have a mostly tedious, almost entirely brainless job, but also occasionally get to do some perl scripting, which is nice. On idle moments, I toy with writing scripts that will almost totally replace the tedious parts of my job. Then I decide that engineering my position away would probably be a bad idea and delete them. This leaves me with a smug feeling of futility and pointlessness, which on some self-flagellating levels, I also find strangely satisfying.

They were my best bowlers. The one with the four eyes will be hard to defeat I'm flipping through my CD binder and trying to listen to old CD's that I barely put in anymore. As a result I've come to the following conclusions. 1) I need to get a new copy of Peter Murphy's Deep. Mine skips on Cuts You Up. 2) I still really like Spahn Ranch. 3) Well, I was going to bitch about how Lance Mungia needs to make a new damned movie, because really, there's only so many times I can watch Six String Samurai. Then I IMDBed him. Apparently he's doing the next Crow movie (show? whatnot?), with Edward Furlong and David Boreanaz... Ummm... Right. There are no words. The movie has credited roles for War, Pestilence, and Famine also. (Tangent: Checked on Good Omens while I was there. Damn you movie vaporware. Damn you to hell)

I think I might go to Death Guild next week. Anyone east bayish going and wouldn't mind giving me a ride back? I can get there on my own if necessary, but leaving in order to catch BART before it closes was a bit of a pain when it was on Market Street. I don't expect it to be any more fun from the Glas Kat. I miss dancing.

Ok, it's almost time for lunch.

I SLEEP NOW

Ok, who wants to take my promo copies of Nightfire for the XBox, and Simpsons Skateboarding for the PS2 off my hands? Yes, you too can play what Game Insider called "The worst game ever". As an added bonus I will even come over to your house and point out all of the mildly amusing "features" that made it into the product. What would you expect to play for such a fabulous offer? Well, if you act quickly it's absolutely free! Gosh!

Seriously though, they're just lying around in their shrink wrap, and heaven knows I never want to touch them again. Nor do I feel the need to keep them out of some sense of nostalgia or pride, because, well, quite honestly I feel neither. And I'd much rather they went to someone who might possibly enjoy them (it seems to me that it's theoretically possible to enjoy them, though I really don't see how after spending several hundred hours on each). Let me know if you want them. If interest seems high, maybe I'll make you duel for them.

Had other things to write, but Heather is here, which means I should probably be here also. Maybe I will write other stuff I meant to write tomorrow. Hah, I can barely keep a straight face while typing that.

I don't dream, I scream so much you know what I mean this electric stream, and my tears in league with the wires and energy, and my machine this is my beautiful dream

Hey look, it's 9 pm, and I'm not at work. Huzzah, and kaloo-kalay and whatnot. So clearly I've neither gotten fired nor quit. Of course if I'd quit, I wouldn't have gotten the immense privilege of working 24 hour shifts. Yee-haw. Though I don't really get to bitch, as some people were there 48 hours plus. Anyway, that schedule is done with. Now come another exciting bunch of "Hey great job and all, get the hell out"s, which will almost certainly include me. Which means I get maybe a week or two of seeing everybody I've missed while chained to work before I get to seriously stress about finding another job/school/whatnot. Joy. I remember this brief magical period back in '99 when a career seemed like a possibility. Now it seems like everyone I know is just reeling drunkenly through a collapsing pinball machine from one layoff to the next. It's grand.

So, anyway. Things other than work. I'm sure there must have been some. Went to go see Underworld last night with Heather, which was grand. Got there before the show started and saw Moof out front and followed him in. Spent a good fifteen minutes trying to find one of the clusters of other people that we knew were going to be there. Stopped looking and it took another 10 minutes to realize that I was quite literally standing right next to them. I are perceptive. Merrily hugged all the /devers who were there then attracted the attention of Simon who yanked me almost off my feet dragging me through the wall of ravers to stand with him. Ended up in a pleasant little clump with lots of people I like. Starr, Eric, Yen, Iris, Kate. All people I don't see nearly enough of anymore. Concert was great. I kind of wanted to take the singers pelvis home with me. It was at a well nigh Bowie-esque level. I'm pretty sure it defied some fundamental laws of physics. Maybe it moved in more dimensions then my eyes could perceive. Or maybe it is the key to perpetual motion. It seems clear that I must have this pelvis, if only for the advancement of science!

Oh, speaking of science, I bought more textbooks. Nothing really exciting. Nice chemistry book, and a diffy q's book. Just refreshing my memory on some of the basics which seem to have gone trickling out of my brain while I wasn't using it. Yes, I could probably find it all online, but I'm hopelessly old fashioned in a lot of ways. I just like the concept of books. I managed to resist buying the organic chemistry book that came with the little ball and stick molecule construction kit though. 200 dollars. Yeesh.

Ok, I'm dismayed at the quality of my writing, and I want to go do things so maybe I have more to write about next time I write, which will hopefully not be such a lengthy interval from now. So, in summary, new Douglas Coupland book = good, though mid tier compared to the rest of his stuff. Microserfs and Shampoo Planet still top it easily. Punch Drunk Love = as good as anything with Adam Sandler can be. Which is actually quite good it seems. Really bizarre. Didn't feel an awful lot like Boogie Nights or Magnolia (The directors older movies if you're not catching the reference).

Hrm. Actually had some vaguely non-fluffy things to write, but I'm feeling too fluffy for them right now, so I go before re-reading this and deciding it's crap and just deleting it.

Can't sleep, James Spader will eat me. Can't sleep, James Spader will eat me

So, you know that last post where I was all bouncy like about not having a crazy schedule any more? Yeah, well scratch that. I'm now working from 10 am to past midnight every day. *EVERY* day. Actually, most of the other people on the team work till three or so, but if I don't split at midnight, no bus home for me.

Though last night I didn't even bother going home, but in all honesty that's probably less because of transportation issues and more because I'm finding Earth and Beyond pleasantly distracting. However do I find the time you say? Well, the answer is quite clearly "I don't sleep". And so here I am on a Sunday. I've been conscious for about 30 hours, and I haven't left the building for about 28. It occurs to me, that this isn't healthy.

To top it all off, we're not even doing anything right now, because we don't have builds. Hence me getting a chance to update. The people next to me are building a Lego Correlian Blockade Runner. It's gigantic. I'm jealous. Then I remind myself that the last Lego product I bought (The Mindstorms set) sat around on my floor pretty much untouched for three years because I never got around to buying batteries for it. I clearly don't deserve Lego's any more.

There's actually a lot of stuff that's been going on in the past two weeks or so, since I updated. I got to escape with Heather up to the east bay for pretty much all of the last weekend. Went to Aint Dead Yet, saw all the old familiar faces (well, except for the ones who never actually showed up... </digital guilt>), crashed out on Aaron and Melissa's floor to save ourselves the ride back down the peninsula. Got to see their new cat, which looks like a cross between a miniature lion and a creamsicle.

Woke up the next day and had breakfast with the Pies and Aaron and Melissa, then wandered frantically around the east bay trying to collect people for hanging out. We all ended up at the Shattuck Cinemas along with Will and Maura to watch Spirited Away.

I liked Spirited Away a lot. I think I agree with the other Will. It's not quite my favorite Miyazaki, but damn close. Though I think my main issue with it was probably the dubbing. Ich, blech, ptooie. It was good *for dubbing*, but it was still dubbing. The informational compression between English and Japanese is just too large to ever make dubbing work well. As it is, characters seem like they're always in a hurry to get to the end of their sentence. I've also been driving myself nuts trying to place all of the kami in it. My knowledge of japanese mythology is clearly not what it used to be.

Hey, while I'm talking about movies, I think I'll mention that I went to go see Secretary with Heather, my mom, and Mitch a couple of days ago. Hence the quote at the top of the journal. I'm sure there must be some movie he's been in where he wasn't playing someone immensely creepy, but for the life of me, I just can't think of one. Pretty In Pink, creepy. Less than Zero, creepy. Two Days in the Valley, super creepy. Anyway, Secretary was actually really good. I've also decided that I basically just want to take the entire Gyllenhaal family home with me and pinch their cheeks occasionally.

Bleh. Writing about everything in detail takes too much time, and I'm too sleepy to make it very interesting, so let's see, what else have I done. Had lunches with Starr and Heather. Missed connections for lunch with Devon and Yen, dinnered with Moof, watched Aqua Teen Hunger Force with Eric and Starr (I finally got to see the Foreigner Belt episode. I have Hot Blooded stuck in my head right this moment. I'll spare you singing it), and lots of other stuff, which I will not mention because it's almost time for work (Sometime between the beginning and end of writing this it became Monday morning. Nifty, huh?)

This new project better wrap up soon, because it's making me cranky. And my morale is not high, mainly because EA is going to be getting rid of a whole batch of the part time testers now that busy season is wrapping up. The whole "Well, work really hard for us for 80 hour weeks and you'll be rewarded with immensely sub par pay, and we'll get rid of you anyway!" attitude really doesn't do it for me. Of course, the job market hasn't gotten any better in my field, and I get slightly physically ill whenever I look at Craigslist, so I'm uncertain what's going to happen next.

I'm actually contemplating school again, which I've always regarded as being completely untenable considering the circumstances in which I left, and the circumstances in which I left my student loans. Heather's blunt optimism is wearing me down though.

I wonder what I'd do if I went back to school. I suppose they'd probably want me to finish my Electrical Engineering degree, but EE hasn't been fascinating me as much due to the fact that I already pretty much grok it. Everything I'd be learning would just be refining the details, which is far less interesting in my opinion. I suppose that's what engineering is prety much all about though. I went through the UC Berkeley catalog and assembled a list of about 96 units of physics classes I'd like to take though. Not to mention passels of math, chemistry, and EE. Anyone want to pay for me to be a proffesional student?

But, that's all blue-skying at the moment, and until then it's all little sleep, lots of work, and strange interactions at the bus stop at 1 am. I've decided that the last bus out of town is where public drama goes to die. The amount of breakups, makeups, drug induced craziness, and undiluted insanity I've overheard in the past couple of weeks is reaching Springer-esque proportions. It would be nice if I could just close my ears, but drama is inherently loud, so I just read my books and try to block out the smoke of their second-hand lives creeping into my consciousness.

Oh, speaking of books, I'm almost out again. Still churning through my Quantum Mechanics text (Tangential: I really like the term conservation of probability), but as for fiction books, I think I'm down to just Norweigian Wood, and then I'm out. Whatever am I to do? I dug the Lethem a lot, so maybe I'll pick up some more of his stuff. Amnesia Moon might as well have been the sequel to Philip K Dick's Eye in the Sky, though it ended unsatisfactorily for me. Hrm. Anyway, work time. I'll spare you the blatant lie of trying to update more often. Well, the trying isn't really a lie, but I just don't have the time unfortunately...

*poof*

Hi. I'm on lunch break. It's 9:30 pm. There's something singularly unholy about this. Came in today at noon, got told that there wasn't in fact a build waiting for us, and we should just come back at 6:00 pm. Exactly the thing you want to hear after spending a good hour and a half getting to work in the first place. Fortunately Starr saw me walking and gave me a ride the last stretch of the way to work. Yay for Starr. Also yay to my team-mate Dave who gave me a ride back to Palo Alto while killing time until 6. Also, while I'm doing work related yays, yay for Danielle being lent to my project. It only took her two days to hate this game. She's clearly much quicker on the uptake than I am. Anyway, on break I was planning on going back to Dan's and doing some laundry, but instead I went shopping, because I'm just that dumb.

Went looking mainly for Salton Sea and Lethem's Gun With Occasional Music. Found Salton Sea, but alas, no GWOM. Instead picked up another book of his, Amnesia Moon, which I've dutifully added to my queue of books awaiting reading. I just remembered recently that I wanted to buy Gun With Occasional Music some six odd years ago, but never got around to it (penniless college student and all that jazz). Don't quite know what triggered the sudden urge to purchase it again. Maybe I had a dream about it.

Speaking of, I had one of those dreams this morning that's pretty much completely indistinguishable from reality, other than the fact that you're fully aware that you're dreaming (We'll ignore the fact that I sometimes stumble around reality being fully aware that I'm dreaming). I remember something occured in my dream, some conversation I wasn't meant to be privy to, that I was sure would prove incredibly enlightening if it turned out to be true back in waking life. Of course when I woke up, I couldn't remember what it was. So ends my brief career as an oneiromancer. I'm further dissapointed that this was the first dream I've had in several months that I recalled at all upon waking. Shame that it was so uninteresting.

I've been on this early electronica kick recently, mainly triggered by Club Verboten out at Burning Man, playing all the greatest Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, etc. I went out and grabbed Kraftwek's Radio-Active, which of course doesn't have quite the version of Radioactivity I'm looking for, and my mind wobbles at the futility of trying to track down one particular version of a song that probably pegs out at almost half a headhunter on my quantities of remix metric. Also been listening to lots of OMD, mainly Enola Gay over and over and over again. I have this really bad habit of DJing my CD's to death, just picking one song I like and playing it constantly. It's not that I don't like the other songs, I just that I like that one more, so why not just listen to it ad infinitum? I do the same thing with food. I'd imagine this makes me a pain in the ass to live with.

Let's see, break's almost over. What else has happened. Saw some movies, mainly with Heather, who is nice. Watched the Good Girl a week or two ago, which I watched mainly because Jake Gyllenhal has slightly more pulling power than Jennifer Aniston has repulsing power. Glad I saw it, as it was as horribly enjoyable as only good black comedies can be.

Also saw Possession, which I would like to stress emphatically was not my idea. Needed time to kill before Death Guild on Monday, and that happened to be conveniently playing. Ever since, I've been trying to figure out exactly what demographic it's meant to appeal to. It's not nearly as clever as it aspires to be, nor would I imagine the plot has significance to any but the staunchest advocates of Victorian era poetry, assuming that the characters aren't entirely fictional, which I'm not certain of, because I don't want to waste the seconds required to run a google search. Instead I will waste the seconds exhorting my friends not to waste the money. We left what seemed like 3 hours into the movie, but was more likely somewhere around 45 minutes. Bad, bad, bad.

Lessee, it's September 11th. Thankfully I'm not watching as much TV as I was a year ago, so I don't have to be subjected to another over-commercialized orgy of elegiac self-righteousness. Which is not to say that I don't feel for anyone affected directly by what happened. I'd like to think that I'm still a bit too empathic for that, as much as I do occasionally play up my bitterness and disaffection (Tangent: The bitterness and disaffection is almost certainly a defense mechanism. It used to be quite possible to make me collapse in torrents of tears by threatening to dump salt on a slug. There's such a thing as being *too* empathic). But what drove/drives me absolutely up the wall is the nationalistic pretense that this is somehow more horrible than the horrible things that happen in other parts of the world every single day, just because it happened to us this time. It makes me very grumpy. Quoth Oingo Boingo Every time I look around this place I see them scream but I hear no sound. And the terrible things happen down the road to someone else that I don't even know. Nothing bad ever happens to me. Nothing bad ever happens to me. Why should I care? Bah, I'm sick of ranting, and other people have already done better jobs of it than I, namely Simon and Blark off the top of my head.

Oh, and in Josh is an idiot news, I lost my wallet. Well, I know roughly where it is actually, but unfortunately, where it is is beneath the seat of a SamTrans bus. This is why continual low level sleep deprivation is a bad thing. It just makes me slow. Sudden and erratic sleep deprivation on the other hand makes me wired, in some attempt to overcompensate. Strange biochemistry. Anyway, lost maybe 10$ that was in there. Other than that it's just a chore of replacing cards. Who wants to come with me to the DMV?

Back to game now. Repeat after me, "It'll all be over tomorrow", "It'll all be over tomorrow", "It'll all be over tomorrow". If I keep this up, I might start believing it.

What I did on my summer vacation
by Joshie Michael Herreshoff (grade 4)

Played Live Action Miss Pacman (I was Inky)
Rode around on a postapocalyptic death car with Eric, Rae, Will, and Simon playing I Never (I won, or lost, or whatever the outcome of I Never is meant to be)
Went careening through the desert on the same car with around 20 (I counted) rivetheads hanging from the roof, hood, and out of the windows while our tail-gunner machine-gunned passing ravers
Witnessed Eric emerge triumphant against Kurt Harland in the ultimate battle of the electro teen idols.
Went walking through the desert in the middle of a sand-storm alone in my own universe that extended all of maybe 5 feet to the edges of my vision. Smiled and nodded at people whose world-paths happened to intersect mine before they fell out of my field of vision. Was enjoying the whole outing as a slightly maudlin metaphor for life when I almost tripped over a couple having sex, and was reminded that the universe is inherently humorous if you give it half a chance.
Drank pure science
Protected the universe from Ming the Merciless (poorly).
Had bad American coffee made by Irish people and good Irish coffee made by Americans.
Got OMD's Crush stuck in my head (Rain rain go away. I can't stand this one more day. I'll close my eyes. I'll shut my brain. I can't stand this fucking rain)
Swung!
Realized that swung doesn't look like a real word.
Went on the easiest club crawl ever. Walk a hundred feet, hear Eric say "Wow, I need to dance to this", dance, collect everyone, walk another hundred feet, hear Eric say...
Decided that the name of my band is going to be Awkward Sausage Fest
Saw innumerous pieces of really cool art/costumes/free roaming memes
Talked all kinds with my friends
Watched the sun rise with Maura
About a zillion other things

And now I'm back (from outer space, I just walked in to find you... (Err, sorry, I'm still hyper-stimulated and easily distracted)). Culture-shocked. It would be nice if it was still acceptable/expected to walk up to strangers and engage them in conversation. I'd like to be able to give someone a bracelet in exchange for food at a restaurant. I wish I could still hear about 5 different songs I wanted to dance to on the way from my room to the bathroom. But I am glad to be back. Not so glad to be at work on Labor Day, but c'est la vie. Speaking of, people are actually showing up, so I'm going poof. More later possibly.

Ok, so today is looking sucky also. Woke up this morning to transfer the sum totality of my available clothes from the washer to the dryer, but it appears that the washer broke sometime in the night. So they were just sitting around in soapy water all night. So I've been hand-wringing them and tossing them in the dryer. I approximate that it will take roughly until the heat-death of the universe for them to dry. This means I'm going to be late again. Oi.

It's a matter of some concern for me that I'm actually thinking about going into the kitchen area and pouring myself a cup of coffee. Joshie's don't parse coffee well. If my life were an SAT question, the relation would be something along the lines of Joshie:coffee::normal people:a near lethal dose of methamphetamine. But I am awfully sleepy, and Stromkern isn't quite having the consciousness inducing effect I was hoping for. Clearly I need to ponder this more.

All of which of course begs the question "Why are you so tired?". Or maybe it begs the question "Why the hell are you thinking about SATs, Josh? You're 26, get over it". Who am I to say? Anyway, other than a slight correlation between how tired I am now, and how tired I remember being taking the SAT, I really can't answer the second question. The first however, I can shed some illumination on. And will proceed to do so, right after I put a new CD in.

Hrm. You know, I like Informatik and all, but I'm finding Flesh Menagerie entirely too goofy a name for a song right now. I've got this mental image of an elementary school outing to some sort of demented petting zoo. Teacher: "Look kids, it's a lump of upper thigh!" Kids: "Ooooh, aaaaah!" Billy: "It's so cute! Can I take it home with me?!"

Anyway... So Friday, I got tossed over to another project for the weekend, which was actually a really nice change of pace. It's a much better game also. And the team is almost ridiculously laid back. Was also payday, so I wandered off with Danielle to Best Buy to pick up some movies. Grabbed deluxe versions of Royal Tenenbaums and Memento, and picked up Waking Life (which doesn't have a deluxe version yet). Managed to resist picking up Lord of the Rings, considering I know the ultra-spiffy version is coming out in November, and I'd rather have that. Besides, there's still unfortunate emotional imprinting from the last time I saw it. All of the movies have umpteen billion special features, including commentary tracks galore. I think Waking Life has about five all on its own. Mmmmm, commentary.

In some sort of twisted attempt to balance out my purchase of good, semi-brainy movies, I ended up going with Dan and a bunch of his friends to go see xXx Friday night. Dear god. I even attempted to dull the pain ahead of time by drinking, but as usual fell victim to my alcohol tolerance. Everyone else was amusingly wasted though, the lucky bastards. You know what the worst part of the movie is though? It's not the fact that it's some bastard love child between a spy flick and an extreme sports video. It's not the fact that the plot is laughable. It's not the fact that "And now it is time to party. Bitches, come!" is probably the best piece of dialogue in the movie. It's the fact that in order to get into the mood and survive it, I turned all of my higher mental functions , instead thinking "Well, at least there'll be explosions and breasts". But there were no breasts. NONE! I felt cheated! It's called triple x people, come on! Also, for having some genuinely nice clubs, filled with fascinatingly dressed people, they were completely devoid of feeling. They managed to make going to clubs containing flamethrowers and gigantic tesla coils look boring. I was baffled. I still give it a rating of 2 "Cube"'s though. Cube being my baseline for bad movies. If you're going to make a movie involving math as a plot point, at least make sure you know what the hell you're talking about. (/me wanders off grumbling about math prodigies taking several minutes to figure out that a number ending in 5 isn't prime)

Oh my. I just looked at IMDB, and noticed that there's a second cube movie. Cube 2, subtitled Hypercube. Dare I subject myself to the horror?

So, grabbed some sleep and then back to work on Saturday. Day actually went pretty fast. All 12 hours or so of it. Ended up having an impromptu party afterwards with several coworkers, partially to help counteract the fact that I wasn't going to the party I originally planned on going to on Saturday before they tossed me on this new project. There's still this strong college vibe about the EA testing department. It's very strange. Stayed up far too late, and ended up dragging myself up after maybe an hour or two of sleep back to work.

Sunday was of course immensely painful. Stumbled blearily through work. Got a ride to Dan's house with Heather, dinnered with Moof and then KOed. Or maybe I KOed partway through dinner with Moof. It seems possible. I vaguely remember people trying to convince me to teach them how to play Spacefarers of Catan, but it's all fuzzy.

Monday, we moved cubes. Down off the 4th floor and onto the 3rd floor. Pros: I'm not in the hallway directly across from the supervisors desk anymore (I think I almost wore out my alt and tab keys in that position), also it's trivially easy to go pester Danielle, Heather, and the rest of that team. Not to mention being able to make goofy faces at Starr and Devon in training as I walk past. Of course they sit with their backs to the door, so my goofy faces are all for naught. Cons: I've got to walk all the way upstairs to go pester Deni. All in all a definite improvement.

Pimped myself out more as a cable slut yesterday. Got praised highly for "Stepping up and helping out the department". I'd classify it more as "Enlightened self interest helping me escape from more tedious labor", but I'm not going to argue with their interpretation. Besides, the hardware vault is nice and air conditioned, and it's fun to kibitz with Ben.

Decided on a whim to wander up to Death Guild. Danced to a couple of songs, got some compliments on the new hair, grabbed some CD's. Ended up leaving pretty early with Starr and Eric back to Starr's house where we all had hot sex. Well, not actually, instead we all passed out almost immediately. I ended up sleeping on top of Starr's stuffed Gir doll. I hope I didn't dye him blue. I'm doing a pretty good imitation of Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka at the moment.

And now I'm at work. Got in at 8:30. I'm feeling comfortably numb. Have decided against coffee at least until lunch. Ok, people are actually showing up now, so I guess it's time to work. 'ta