I am completely prepared to spend a very long time with, and go completely out of my skull on photoshop.
Yeah, that's sad.



So I got a bass gig this Wednesday doing worship for this multi-church event in Winters. Thanks to scheduling errors, we only got an hour of practice for a total of... what was it? Three songs? Maybe? But I'm trying out some new stuff, hoping to get a little more complicated stuff into actual performance. Totally screwed it up today, but oh well. I'll be practicing my scales 'till Wednesday morning, most likely. Should be fun.

---

I discovered today that I actually really like getting up early in the morning. I mean, once you get past the bleating of the alarm clock, the masochistically cold showers (see my posts on hatred of showers, one and two), the lack of any sunlight, and the fact that the first pot of coffee always seems to be the worst, it's quite nice. And here's why: It's absolutely silent.
Yes, that's why I love it so. Today was the first day in over a month that it has been absolutely quiet when I woke up. No Star Wars. No fighting. Nothing. Just me, and the sweet, sweet clacking of my keyboard. Then, of course, I had to go to work, but whatever. It's a library, so the maximum volume at any given time is at least a fifth of what it is at home anyway.

I'm drinking --drinking-- blueberry pie. It tastes like the sheer essence of blue was concentrated into a Jones soda and sat on by a smurf for three days.


I've hit this sort of semi-writer's-block where I know I just had a hundred interesting things to write about, with at least ten witty and interesting things to say about them. But I forgot them all. My soul (or what small bits of it remain) has been slowly slipping into the world of PHP as I continue to work on that website I showed you a while ago. In a way it's like torture, trying to figure out why my code's not working the way I want it, or how to add some new feature, or whatever. Simultaneously, it's exceedingly fun to watch the mist rise as I realize just how badly MySpace can screw things up. It's fun, I swear.

Then again, there's also that painful feeling of regret I get when I realize that I'm coding for fun. Dangit. I want to get paid for this.

The promised story (part of)

The man without a time took his seat.
Seated next to him was a man without a face. The man without a face didn't look like much of anything, really, although he appeared to be lots of things. He appeared to be reading a magazine, and at the same time he appeared to be looking at the man without a time. At the same time still, he appeared to be winking at he woman across the aisle, who certainly wasn't without much of anything. He appeared to smile.
"Hello," said the man without a face.

It took the man without a time quite a long while to recognize that anything had indeed been said.

"Oh, hello." said the man without a time. Even in stark disregard of the time stream, awkward pauses lingered about, so as to inevitably doom humanity.

The stewardess came by, and the man without a face ordered a drink.
In an attempt to start conversation, the man without a time concentrated very hard on where a face might have been at one point, and spoke.

"Do you really think ordering wine at this time of day is really wise?" he said.

It was a blunt remark, but it was the only thing the man without a time could come up with.

It was half past midnight.

The man without a time's watch had broken some time ago, and he was utterly lost without it. His last surviving effort had been to write the year down on the back of his hand, in case he forgot, which he did a lot. It was because of this, it must be added, that he was dreadfully frightened of New Year's, and did his best not to think about the connotations of it having already passed.

"Well," replied the man without a face, "I never order champagne on airplanes, you see."
"Ah." said the man without a time, "Why not?"
"Too many bad experiences with it," the faceless man winced (although to this day, no witness could be sure), and then appeared thoughtful, "Or maybe it was too many good ones? Too many, anyway. Not good for your health."

"Experiences." thought the man without a time. He'd had an awful lot of them. He didn't remember actually experiencing any of them, however, they sort of just happened, and he stored them up in the darker recesses of his mind. That was the odd thing about not having a full comprehension of the time-space continuum; your social life got mucked up a bit in the process. At first it hadn't been too bad. Sure he showed up for meetings before they had been planned, or sat on the toilet for days on end, but that's nothing a good psychiatrist can't deal with. It was when he started casual conversations with dead people because they owed him money from last week's poker game, or started reciting eulogies in bare sections of graveyards that he really started worrying people. He vaguely remembered dying quite a few times, as well. That was really beginning to bore him.

"Ah." he said, as an afterthought.

He let his mind wander for a second, and he found himself in front of a strange cafe, and the faceless man was telling him that he might need an umbrella. Back on the plane, he continued,

"What did you order?"
"Merlot," said the man without a face, "Although at this rate it's more of a Mer-high."

The man without a time agreed, and toyed for a minute with the memories of having jumped out of the plane in a few minutes, but soon abandoned them in favor of reading a magazine.

It's a well-known economic phenomenon.

Unlike yesterday, today is Wednesday.

Yes, this is pretty much what I've reduced myself to writing. Aside from it being Wednesday, and not Tuesday (as I've previously pointed out), the time is morning. What does that mean, dear reader? That means that after I have acquired the magical coffee elixir and defeated the fearsome guardian golems which protect its holy place of rest, I cloister myself into my room for as much of the oncoming day as possible. This is not because I am attempting to be antisocial, nor is it that I fear the sunlight. Nor is it any other one of a million things that could classify me as any sort of vampire (except for, possibly, sticking a stake through my heart. I'm pretty sure that one still smarts pretty badly). Rather, my morning routine involves waking up to a rude alarm clock (one so rude he swears at me and censors himself out in order to get me out of bed), and the lovely and melodious sounds of my brothers killing each other. Depending on what hour it is, that last phrase may be either virtual or literal.

The Nintendo Wii we got for Christmas, you see, has an interesting feature, and that is that there are tiny, tiny speakers built in to each controller. These are what shout at you when it's your turn, etc. They're also what go "Whirr" incredibly loudly when you swing a lightsaber, or go "Zap" even louder when you shoot a blaster. My brothers, being the prodigies in such matters that they are, are excessively good at both, and use the full function of these speakers nearly constantly. Thanks to this, I hardly even need the alarm clock anymore, as now I have the distinctly unique pleasure of waking up to the sounds of the Galactic Rebel Alliance every morning. The brilliant thing about the Wii controllers, in case you were still wondering, is that you can't turn them down.


It is now nearly an hour later than when I started writing this post, and I'm realizing the full context of my (hopefully) brief writer's block. It's not that I expect to be able to write more when life gets more interesting again, really, it's that I expect that I won't want to write once life gets boring. Later, I shall post a story.

... And never brought to mind.

It's this time of year --or, more specifically, the beginning of the year-- that I have particular trouble working out what to say. "Well, congrats, everyone. Another year survived."? "Way to go, humankind. Keep on keeping on!"? Yeah, it just doesn't work.

Here's to realizing that no matter how often the numbers change, people don't, and that's the only thing we can't have computers deal with.


... Yet.








2008, may your feet leave slightly shallower marks in my forehead than 2007.