coming and going

The SOOTTAD is in town. Yay.

She's packing up some stuff today and then we're driving her car out to Chicago tomorrow morning.

Things are feeling a little crazy and hectic right now. Her flight got in late last night, and we're trying to squeeze some quality time between packing and her trying to get some work done. But we did get to sleep in this morning (I'm really glad I hadn't planned on going into work today) and we're going to catch Episode III tonight. We're still thinking we'll get on the road early tomorrow, but I haven't even packed yet. Did I mentioned crazy and hectic?

Hopefully, once we get to Chicago, we'll have some time to chill out -- I'm planning on staying over the long weekend and then flying back early next week.

Regardless, it's good to be, and feel, together again.

Judicial nominees -- we lose

"Stakes still high after Senate makes deal"

MoveOn was claiming a victory in the judicial nominee showdown in the Senate today. But it didn't look much like a victory from where I was sitting. A victory would have been Frist putting the "nuclear option" to a vote, and having it fail, because enough Republican senators had the backbone to stand up for the right thing.

I keep hearing that "we saved the right to filibuster," but did we really? And exactly how useful was that if the Republicans still got what they wanted -- their nominees put on the bench? Seems to me they just bullied the minority and got their way. And now that they know that they can get away with it, what's to stop them from doing it again?

We won, but we lost.

It's like a teacher who gets the bully to stop beating up the other kids for their lunch money by making them give the bully their lunch money. Great, so you didn't get beat up, but you're still not going to have anything to eat.

The radical court nominees are still going to get confirmed. And if push comes to shove the next time around, say for a nominee to the Supreme Court, what's to stop them from voting to make the changes then?

We are so fucked.

Attack of the...

Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

A few weeks ago, I noticed a small bulge in the asphalt of the driveway. I didn't think anything of it and promptly forgot about it. Some time later I noticed it again, except that it looked like it had risen several inches and was almost a foot across in diameter.

Eventually I got around to peeling some of the cracking asphalt away to reveal... GIANT MUSHROOMS attacking from below.

Scary stuff.

waxing philosophic

the Skills and Dynamics curriculum, despite being a touchy-feely subject, has proven to be pretty challenging. Today it was really "storming," with some of the discussion really putting my sympathetic nervous system into overdrive -- starting innocently enough on the topic of diversity and finding ourselves (or maybe just me, at least) deep in the mire of conflicting belief systems and world views. That's diversity for you, I guess.

But I didn't really want to talk about class. It was just the starting point for a conversation which fed into some web surfing that sparked a semi-random thought process which brings me back here. Thinking. And wanting to write some of it down.

There's an undercurrent of national politics that I've been trying to hide from since November, but I'm feeling like I'm being slowly dragged back into it again, awareness creeping in around the corners. You can't avoid hearing about radical activist legislators trying to brute-force their judicial nominees; I take a peek at the Downing Street Memo after seeing a reference on WWdN. There's always more if you really want to look for it. I don't, but I poke into the Huffington Post anyway; I read something about Warren Beatty versus the Governator, find myself drawn to the headline: "Darwin's theory evolves into culture war." Memories of the PBS series that had one show dedicated to discussing the relationship between religion and the theory of evolution.

And I think to myself: I may not believe in the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent (and let's not forget jealous and demanding) Judeo-Christian God (or His apparently intolerant and megalomaniacal contemporary American counterpart), but I do feel like you can see something of the divine in all the things in the world around us, in the simplest processes of basic life.

We may be able to build machines that can manipulate individual atoms, but even if we could configure the carbon and hydrogen atoms perfectly, the amino acids, all the necessary pieces parts, we still couldn't truly create life -- create the systems that make a leaf grow with all it's beautifully complex structures or even simply make a cell divide. You can call it God and I can just leave it as the mystery of Nature and we can call it even.

I'd be cool with that. Just sayin'.

Ok, bedtime.

check in

Gonna try to keep this short due to both time pressures and fears that Blogger is just going to eat the post again.

Feeling... like something just wasn't right today, but couldn't put my finger on it. Maybe I was just tired, but it didn't really feel like, well, being tired. (Even if I was a little tired.) More out of sync, or something off kilter, like on a metaphysical level or something.

I've noticed that I'm not feeling quite as emotionally raw as I did a few weeks ago, but I'm pretty sure it's still there, just barely skinned over, ever so slightly outside of my perception.

Little things seem to take me down. I'm feeling hypersensitive. Feeling overly needy and then isolating myself because I don't want to bleed my neediness all over my friends and acquaintances.

Thank god the SOOTTAD will be back in town in less than a week.

Unproductive

Not the dreaded ZPD (zero-productivity day), but this morning was the first time at the new job where I've felt listless and wholly unproductive. Managed to get back into the swing of things, relatively speaking, by early afternoon, but it wasn't one of my better days.

I'm going to chalk this one up to missing the SOOTTAD (didn't get a chance to talk to her last night, and didn't get any email from her until after lunch), insufficient sleep, and not taking my vitamins.

Disc makes it better, sometimes

Disc is my therapy.

I've been trying to write about this for a couple of weeks but life has not only been getting in the way, it's been body-slamming me to the mat and leaving me for dead. I tried to take some time to write over the weekend but Blogger ate my post multiple times so I finally gave up, hours and sleep lost. But here I go again -- hopefully it doesn't prove to be yet another exercise that I'm going to regret I didn't spend studying or trying to get some more sleep.

Things have been pretty rough the last few weeks, but I think I'm finally acclimating to things. Either that or it's just a calm between storms. The race is done, as are this past week's quizzes in physiology and anatomy and papers for school. And work. Which is, well, work. Going to have to get mentally prepared for going into the office tomorrow, but things still seem to be operating within normal-ish parameters.

I don't want to get too sidetracked, so I'll just say that work was weird on a couple of levels. There's the usual stuff I suspect about reentering the working world after a five month layoff, but it's also the first time I'm working as an independent contractor and some stuff specific to this job in particular that makes it not really like contracting which just makes the whole thing much more complicated in my head than it should be, and much more complicated than something that I'd be able to write about here.

And I wanted to talk about disc.

So things have been a bit rough the past few weeks, not just because I've suddenly found myself busier than I can ever really remember, but also because of the whole thing with the SOOTTAD moving to Chicago (still sucks, BTW), and well, yeah, actually I think it does have a lot to do with being busy. But let me get to the disc stuff, before this thing gets too long and Blogger eats my post again.

Anyway, as I was saying: I've been using disc as therapy. It hadn't been a conscious thing until a few weeks ago when I was having a particularly bad week. It was the first Monday after the SOOTTAD, and the




FUCK!

blogger just ate my post. Again. This has to be the fifth or sixth time now.

I swear I've been trying to write this fucking post for the better part of 3 weeks.

I could have been studying. Or sleeping.

FUCK.

Ok, I give up. The nutshell: this is about my Monday night BUDA games in JP.

Disc has been been good for me. It's been helping a lot. It makes me feel better.

Life has been sucking. I've been busy. I've been stressed about school. I've been stressed about starting a new job. I've been tired. I've been overtired. I've missed the SOOTTAD terribly.

I've felt depressed, it made me feel better. I had heartburn. It made me feel better. I was exhausted. I still felt exhausted, but it gave me some indications that I WAS exhausted and should try to get more rest. I was depressed and really looking forward to disc and my game got cut short and my emotions went beserk and I felt really stupid about it. It seemed a lot like addiction. I question my overreliance and dependency on any external THING that I use to make things better. THE END.

Fucking Blogger.

Ass Warming

Car equipped with ass-warmers (heated seats): GOOD.

Needing to engage ass-warmers in May: BAD.

Stupid weather.

Big Lake

Just finished the Big Lake half-marathon in Alton, New Hamster, by Lake Winnipesauke.

Run observations:

• After being in the low 60s and at least partly sunny for most of the past week, on race day it's in the low 40s, rainy and windy. F'ing wet and cold. At the end of the race, I couldn't untie my shoelace to remove the timing chip because my fingers had gone completely numb.

• I found it amusing to see the stream of runners (slowly working up the first of the big inclines) passing the "SPEED LIMIT 50" sign. I realize that this is probably only amusing to me.

• The race sponsors a "Big Lake Battle" where there's a competition between the Water stations for the group that is the most spirited. Rain kept most of the fiddlers, banjo and acoustic guitar players playing out of the back of their trucks, which sadly made them hard to hear until you were just passing them.
  Most memorable: scary clown woman juggling to the macarena (and earlier, that weird techno version of Cotton-Eye Joe).
  Most enjoyable: barbershop quartet, around mile 8, singing in the light rain on a quiet stretch of road.

• Speaking of music, for practically the entire race, I had the "horns" from the Ben Folds' song Army going through my head:
  

  Baaaaaahhhh---- ba ba bah-baaah---- ba ba bah-baaah---- bah-ba BAH
  Ba ba baaaaahhhh---- bah-bah ba ba ba bah-- ba da bah-bah ba ba ba-da-dah
  (in concert, the entire crowd will sing the two parts)

  The whole race. Much less annoying than you might expect.
  Actually, kinda cool. Certainly, better than the macarena.
  Although I did try to do the macarena as I passed the scary clown woman.

• Thankful that I bought new shoes before this race. There were a few nasty downhills that would have totally wrecked my knees, I think.

• Despite the hilly course, and the crappy weather, and being stressed with school and the new job, I still finished with a better time than the Boston race. (although I was getting sick at the time.) Chip time: 1:40:33

Ok, now I have to go and write a stupid paper for class.

Bleeding Heart

Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

busy, tired

hopefully i'll finally have some time to write within the next week or so.

but right now, sleep is the first priority.

i hope there's time for it soon.

sleep, that is.