Midday work - or lack thereof.

Decisions, decisions - go to the workshop tomorrow about internships or make a little extra cash doing volleyball refereeing in that time?

Should probably go to the internship workshop. Actually, need to get on those sorts of things. Summer employment and all of that. Mrg. I still don't have anywhere to live for next year, and that's an aggravation I probably should figure out how to correct. Did a long refereeing shift. Then went off to see if people were still playing games. Couldn't get in the building, so assumed they had all gone home, and thus returned. Day productivity - finished paper, refereed games, finished other paperwork today, ate heartily and well, talked with people on-line. I think I pass to the next level. Tomorrow, aside from the workshop, schedule clear (class teacher at conference) - means great potential to get the rest of my shit done. Then, having a little time off this weekend would be faboo. (greyweirdo, any decisions made about anything, including THE BOX?!)

...I feel like I'm sliding back into the rut I had last semester. That's mostly because I haven't gotten out of the house much - although probably more than I have at this point in last semester. Keeping the mind sharp by doing the crosswords on my calendar - occasionally able to solve one, and even more occasionally able to solve one right.

But there's more, too, on my list of things than that. The top segment is NSFW - it involves a bird being flown all over the place, along with a bad dub job and lots of fighting. If this hasn't scared you off properly yet, then I suppose nothing will. Here it is. Actually, the second bit's probably just slightly less NSFW and involves a prank played on Apollo 12 astronauts. The caption is, Houston, we have a boner. You can probably guess the rest. Speaking further on that subject, do you know what federally-funded abstinence-only sex education programs are teaching? Amazing what they'll pass off as sex ed these days.

Safe for work, but perhaps no less disturbing is the idea of a collar for soldiers containing scents. What are the scents for? To trigger instinctive reactions in soldiers, possibly bypassing their rational centers. (More information here)

Next-to-Last bit. Instant bacon.

Last bit - as reminded by myself earlier, writings about possible role in life.

( An inspirer, rather than a doer? )

To counteract that line of thought, I'm listing Five Great Things I've Done In My Lifetime Thus Far (possible subtitle: Small as They May Be)

1 - January 1, 2004, Rose Bowl, Pasadena, California - National Television in Rose parade, but even better, Star Spangled Banner, arranged and conducted by John Williams.
2 - I've gotten into the University of Michigan - twice.
3 - Peoples I've met - have met manga-ka (Ken Akamatsu, Hideyuki Kurata), flamboyant directors (Shinichiro Watanabe), voice personalities (Crispin Freeman, Monica Rial, Tiffany Grant, Steve Blum, Chiwa Saito, Brett Weaver, Chris Patton and more... the list goes on for a while if you check my ACEN autograph books), webcomic artists (Fred Gallagher, Caroline Curtis, Sprite Monkey, D.C. Simpson, and more), and a boatload of interesting con-goers, fans, and personalities that make up the people I hang out with.
4 - Having as big a social circle as I do - I could just as easily be a recluse, not wanting to talk to anyone over any medium or way and just staying depressed. That I've got people to talk to is not bad for a nonpopular nerd.
5 - I suppose I can count that I've made it this far without dying. That one becomes more impressive, of course, as "this far" starts adding up in years.

That's kind of bad... it took me some thought to come up with five things I'd consider to be great. I couldn't rely on things like significant others and/or kids and careers and other things that are supposedly the metric of greatness in society. No wonder I get depressive sometimes and wonder whether the payoff will be good enough. Must get status symbols, quickly! Or at least something that affirms me. Quickly, now, material culture, here's your opening, strike, strike! Make me feel shallowly better by promising me a better life through your products!

...I think I need to go talk to Llewellyn again. Or Ozymandias and Millicent, at the very least. They're usually good for advice.

Right, then.

Happy birthday, loweko. Hopefully you got a nice new shiny Big Red Button and the license to use it.

Another possible tip for those thinking about trying to achieve enlightenment: Stop thinking about it. Otherwise, the feedback loop gets nasty.

We might also note several things of import happening in a relatively short amount of time. The one the government wants you to pay attention to is this: A new tape, with a voice purporting to be Osama bin Laden, has been found. With characteristic bravado, the Administration claimed al-Qaeda's leader was on the run. What this obscures and hides are the following: A grab for search engine data, to see whether or not search engines index porn (which one would suspect does happen by the robots) and how often it shows up. Well, depending on what you put in to the engine, you get different results. Duh. This is another one of those invasions of privacy under the guise of protecting the vulnerable... and Google is one of the few engines that told them to go fuck themselves. (There's University of Michigan graduates for you!) With that, many are still missing from the hurricane, the federal government won't reimburse the states that valiantly stepped in to cover the stupidity of the new Medicare program's errors, and the biggest middle finger of them all, soldiers are being ordered to leave behind their body armor. The stuff that the government basically made the soliders buy because they didn't have enough, they're now telling to leave behind, because it's not the government's standard-issue. Real nice, threatening a solider with not paying his life-insurance benefit if he doesn't have the preferred contractor, even if the private armor might be better technology. It's like they want people to get killed over there.

...that had better not turn out to be a true statement.

Classwork tomorrow and other assorted things like that. Need to either remember to upload to my personal site or create my personal site and drop the URL in a box by Tuesday.

And, my life has just complicated again. I really don't like it when it does these things.