Weblog

Today I woke up to an amazing sunrise and felt those collegiate pangs of wanting to fall asleep at that time, not wake up. Oh well. A sunrise is a rare thing for a college student, and seeing as how my earliest class next semester is at noon, I may just start greeting them from the other end. Go to bed at 6 am, wake up at 11.

Oh, I talk big, and I know it’s not going to happen. I like daylight too much. Darkness was made for trolls and programmers. I don’t live under a bridge, and if things pan out the way I plan, I won’t ever have to… unless I want to live under a bridge, which might be kind of cool. I could eat goats.

Or I could just move to Puerto Rico and be poor and not pay taxes.

I whipped it out on a philosophy final this morning. 8:00 in the bloody morning. The professor handed us a pile of Blue Books and a pile of essay questions and I took out my Aegean Shovel and went to work. Now my brain feels numb and dull and I’m trying once again to grease the wheels with the blood of the Ancients. I’ve got one more final to take this afternoon, and then I need to hoof it out to the backwaters of northern Minnesota for a spunky jazz gig of Christmas Might.

Seriously. I have nothing to say now but dumb blather. Plum Lather. Al just got a muffin. He was thinking, “I want a muffin,” and then she popped in and tossed him a muffin.” I should probably be studying or sleeping or buying Christmas present right now.

That’s the problem with being in college… it’s all you do. College. You go to class, you study, you go home, you study, you fall asleep. The days creep on and on at their petty pace as you receive immunizations to the world at large. You fold inward and inward until you are a tiny spot, a microcosm amongst yourself. You are surprised when hailings from the outside world fall upon you like the tinkling bells of the season. Where the heck did the season come from? you wonder. It was just November the other day, just October, just September, just last May and you were sitting on a rocky beach with a bunch of Woochers and a fire and a bottle of wine.

Just the other day you had an 8:00 final and instead of studying the night before you hung out with friends on the shores of Lake Superior. Just the other day you took your philosophy final. Just the other day you were greased with the blood of the Ancients. Where do they go as we spin around and around in this swirl of galaxies and orbitals and epicycles and tides and brains?

Where do the days go?

Puerto Rico?

I’m doing (as usual) everything in my power to avoid studying for big hairy finals. Let’s continue the tradition by dragging Den Beste and advertising into the mix!

Telemarketers have been going crazy the last two weeks in Duluth, as though they’re scrambling these last few days before Christmas to make sure everyone’s Holiday Stress Quotient is at maximum. A few days ago a stuttering fool tried to give me his schpiel, and when I sat and listened without affirmation, he paused.

“Hello?”

I hung up.

Some jerk woke me up at 9:00 Saturday morning, asking that I stir my roommate to receive his call. I denied the request. Another time they asked for a person that hasn’t lived in this apartment for three years. Every one of them wanted to pawn off his credit card on us.

A note to advertisers: I HATE POP-UP WINDOWS. I HATE BANNER ADS. I HATE ANIMATIONS. I HATE FLASH MOVIES. I HATE THE COLOR YELLOW. I HATE SOUND. I HATE SPAM. I HATE FULL-SCREEN ADS. I HATE PRODUCT PLACEMENTS. I HATE THE TELEPHONE. I HATE CREDIT CARDS. I HATE BILLBOARDS. I HATE PRODUCT JINGLES. I HATE IRRITATING VOICES THAT JABBER BACK AND FORTH.

And even for how much hate boils within, I WILL NOT PUNCH THE GOD DAMN MONKEY.

A brief upate before I collapse from exhaustion and drown in 3mm of water in the shower.

My social calendar for finals week has more stuff going on than I’ve done all year. It’s really weird how this happens, as though everyone’s sitting around studying all year and suddenly someone perks up and says, “Crap! We’re supposed to be college students! Let’s go party or something!”

Rehearsal with the combo, eight Lukes a-smashing, seven snowboard carvings, six hours of sleep, five foggy parties, four drunken brawls… three web designs, two Old Chi hangs, and a jazz gig at some crazy bar.

Yesterday I jammed my toe on the staircase and broke my pinky toe. Now it’s all black and purple and I can’t wear shoes. I’m just happy it’s still attached. For how hard I hit that thing it should have popped right off and sailed behind the couch.

By popular request I’ve finally created a desktop wallpaper gallery. Go nuts and make your computer beautiful.

Ok. So. Now there are random disclaimers at the top of this page. I had to rename the index.html file to index.shtml for this to work. It also took me an hour and a half of being stupid with scripts.

Seriously. I’d say we should train monkeys to write code for web pages if it weren’t for the fact that we already have.

A wonderful weekend of cabins and pines and people and snow and lakes and morning light and pictographs and icicles and random blues and bouldering and table-traversing and fruit and thai and chaos toast and spaghetti-snorting.

“Where did it go?”

“I lost it.”

“Do you feel it in your throat?”

“No. I think it went up in my brain.”

“…”

“Oh wait. There it is.”

Steven Den Beste has plunked this at the top of his blog:

20021205: I just wanted to let everyone know that I do read Instapundit and you don’t need to mail me links that Glenn has posted. Thanks.

I had to laugh at the thought of someone linking to Instapundit. It’s like telling a grizzled jazz saxophonist that maybe he should check out this guy called John Coltrane. When a day in the life of Instapundit has fifteen posts he apologizes for his light blogging. This guy knows his ii-V7-I’s in every key and has a bag o’ tricks to match all of ’em.