Then whence cometh evil?

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”
--Epicurus

 

I don't know Greek, this comes from the internet, and I don't know how accurate the translation is. It's all over the place in about this form, however. I think some sort of modernization must have happened, as the Greeks were (nominally) polytheist, although I know by some point the strict polytheism did kind of give way into an idea of one overarching and all-powerful deity. Nonetheless, this to me, as it stands, however accurate a translation it may be, definitely stands out as a fairly accurate (if simplistic) account of the pop understanding of a God (or Gods, I suppose) today (and probably for many millennia) in the anthropomorphized, personal-God-who-pays-attention-to-human-concerns-directly sense.

Maundy, maundy, can't trust that day

Note: This is a pretty long post about my personal history with religion, one of the random spurts of introspection I am occasionally prone to.

 Today is, in the Christian world, Maundy Thursday, a commemoration of the Last Supper--or, as one of my very Catholic Facebook friends put this morning as his status, "And so it is that Thursday that changed the world." That makes tomorrow Good Friday (the commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus), Saturday Easter Vigil, and Sunday itself Easter Sunday, the resurrection.

As my "about me" states, I was raised in a barely-observant mixed Catholic-Protestant (UCC) household. I saw my father in church of any kind but rarely. My mother I guess gets more out of religion than either my father or I, and growing up she was still tied somewhat to Catholicism, even though I know the constant shenanigans that go on with the Catholic Church truly wore her out. Thus I spent about once a week from the age of five or six until the age of eleven in some sort of religious affair, be it religious ed classes at the local Catholic church, actually going to mass, or something similar. Although my mother's connection to Catholicism was rarely overbearing on me as a child, my mother's parents were quite strong Catholics, and so I guess there was some generational pressure to raise the latest kid to grow up in God. Interestingly, my father actually comes from the overtly religious family (his father is a UCC minister), and yet I rarely if ever discussed religion with my paternal grandparents (or my father myself, for that matter) growing up.

Maybe it's just because I'm still quite relatively young, but I do remember my very early thoughts about church and God and whatnot well. I went along with it as a very young kid, the same way any kid in a culturally Christian area goes along with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and similar. Religious ed and my mother made sure that I knew that Christmas and Easter were supposed to be about more than just the presents and the general surprise/excitement (which I truly loved, even more than the presents), but I never read much of the Bible at all in any context, be it religiously, for a literature class, or otherwise. I remember being four or five (maybe a bit older) and asking my mom if God really was an old man who sat in the clouds and looked down at everyone, and if so, how he did it. My mother tried to explain that that wasn't it, that God was more like a force, but I think that only slightly enraged and confused me--I have never liked being lied to, and even the realization that the common childhood conception of God wasn't accurate was upsetting and off-putting. (Besides, the budding storyteller in me kind of liked the idea of there really being a bearded guy up in the sky.)

After that I continued to go along with the God = force idea, although my mental conception could never quite change (all the Father, God, Son, Children language in Christianity does not help). I did first communion and first confession and all that when I was in second grade with the rest of the Catholic kids in town; although I was a tomboy and hated wearing dresses, I really did enjoy the pageantry of communion and the pageantry of church in general. It thrilled with the part of me that did then, and does still now, love world-building and cultures and stories. I had nothing to say for my first confession and, I believe, actively made up some lie about pulling my cat's tail. I learned the prayers for the rosary (which I can still recite) and the Nicene Creed (of which I cannot remember a thing now) and all the rest. My mother would go through spurts of trying to make me say Hail Marys or similar before bed, and when I stayed with her parents, my grandmother led me through the classic "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayers. I suppose they must have made some impression on me at the time, but as I grew older, I began to wonder what it actually felt like to be touched by a god and began to doubt that I had ever actually truly felt my forefathers' religion in my own bones.

I guess it was trying to figure this out, trying to feel this religion, that led me to allow my mother to make me an altar girl, starting when I was 9 or so. This, uncoincidentally, coincided quite closely with the death of my maternal grandmother from lung cancer in 1999, when I was 8, so I went at religion in the new millennium with gusto. In retrospect, it was a juvenile form of fake-it-till-you-make-it; if I wore the white overrobes, and learned the sections of the mass well, and touched holy water and oil and collections baskets and all the rest, the wonderful pageantry was alive and crackling in me, and I did believe then that this was Godly and spiritual and moving and all the rest. At some point in those early 2000s years, at the same time that I finally gave up Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, I tried Catholicism for real, as best as a Biblically-ignorant young girl could do, giving up things for Lent and not eating meat on Fridays during Lent and trying to feel extreme sorrow over Jesus dying by watching the Stations of the Cross and going to Good Friday mass one year. (My mother's hatred of crowds meant that we usually never went to church on actual holidays, but this was an exception.) I vividly remember doodling INRI and crosses in my sixth grade planner at Eastertime, as though the writing out of it could prove to myself that I deeply loved God and Jesus and all the rest.


I have not thought about the depth with which I went at Catholicism in my middle school years for quite some time now, but I think I understand why it has all come rushing back so clearly this past week. Several of my closest friends here in Chicago are actually very religious Catholics, something I did not realize until I already knew and liked them well. It's one thing to go to Catholic school (I know many people who have done this), but the realization that these were people who had gone to Catholic school and actually liked it and actually been made religious because of it was mindblowing to me; all the stories I knew of Catholic school from people my age came from people who had been entirely turned off of religion because of it. Here are people who go to mass every Sunday (something I had never done even as an altar girl), who feel bad if they miss mass, who go to confession fairly regularly, who give up things for Lent with real serious and abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent, who have rosaries and Bibles in their rooms, and all the rest. Here are people who seem to have managed to really take to the spirit of Catholicism far better than I, who loved the pageantry but could never get beyond it, did. At home, in high school, most of my friends were at the very least apathetic to religion, and several were pretty openly agnostic/atheist and scornful of religion. Even those who did go to church with some regularity never really spoke of religion outside of church. Maybe it's just because I never really lived with friends in high school the way I live with friends now in college, maybe it's just because Chicago is a far cry from the hinterlands of New England, but here in college I've met far more openly, seriously religious people than I ever knew even when I went to religious ed with the rest of the Catholic kiddie goobers in elementary school.


Hanging around people who read the Bible and have rosaries and go to mass and confession thus brings back all my own pre-teen attempts at Catholicism with great clarity. I remember Good Friday mass--the interminable length, the veneration of the cross, the prostration before the cross, and all the rest. I remember trying to eat fish instead of meat on Fridays for a few years; I remember spending one Good Friday off from school doing a walk for Habitat for Humanity--learning to be good and charitable. I remember even earlier events, the yearning to try communion and then the inevitable disillusion I had when it turned out that communion wafers tasted bland. Really, that disillusionment with communion is a fairly apt summary of Catholicism and I in general, of childhood in general for so many people--growing up and realizing that the body of Christ tastes a lot like a subpar cracker, realizing that there never was or could be a fat man in a red and white suit who brings presents, realizing that there never was or could be a bearded man in the clouds.


Trying to trace what led to my rejection of Catholicism is difficult. In some ways, I think coming out as a nonbeliever, even to people who are not very religious or who describe themselves as "spiritual" rather than religious, is the religious world's analogy to coming out sexually as something besides ramrod-straight. I did not know anybody, growing up, who did not believe in some sort of God or something out there, just as I knew very few openly gay people. It was not until I myself realized that I was not religious and started telling people this that I realized that some people I had always known were actually in a similar position, faking religiosity while their hearts firmly disbelieved in all the trappings of faith. When you're a young teen in white suburbia telling people that you don't believe in a conception of God that matches Christianity's, no one really believes you; every teen is rebellious, and it's really easy to dismiss it as just another teenage phase, like too-tight jeans or all-black clothes or something. Telling yourself that you don't believe in the Christian God, when you know literally no one else with similar beliefs, is just as hard; maybe it is just a phase, you think, or maybe there's something seriously wrong with you. And yet in many ways the lack of true attraction to church, the lack of emotional connection, has been there for a long time, possibly forever. Does everyone feel that way and simply fake it until they make it? Is all religion, are all religious people just going with the flow in the same way that you've always been? Are you normal, or are you weird, or are you something else?


With all these questions whirling around, it's no great surprise that, like any questioning teen, I turned to experimentation of sorts. If a God in the sky was complete crap, at least the earth was solid and real, and beautiful to boot. Paganism had been around for millennia before Christianity; I felt bad for it for being run over by Christians; there was a certain romance and exhilaration to polytheism for me, thanks to my over-reading of fantasy and Greco-Roman-era books during this period. I think the only remotely-pagan thing I ever actually did was to try to call Halloween "Samhain" and May Day "Beltane" and the like and put out food for the dead on Halloween night since the veil between the worlds is supposed to be at its thinnest then. It was still kind of fulfilling in a pageantry way, and emotionally the vague connection it gave me to the earth and other living things was inspiring in a way that Catholicism had never ever been. It wasn't real religion, however; it ultimately didn't work the way I had always been told that religion should work.


So where do you turn from neo-paganism and rebellious polytheism to active and mature agnosticism and atheism? For me it began with the religious conservative's ultimate conspiracy-theory dream (or second, in any case, only to Harry Potter): Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which I read as an eighth grader. Like with many books, there was a shiver down my spine throughout my reading of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. It was quite well-written. The mental imagery was gorgeous. The idea of my soul in animal form as my greatest lifelong companion was the realization of a dream I'd never realized I'd ever had. And there in its pages was a real person, a real human being, a writer, a published author who did not believe in the Christian God, who called the idea of it and the bureaucracy that fueled it destructive and foul and an antithesis to love itself. The world of Philip Pullman believed in the goodness and beauty of this life, not a future life, believed in actions and love and living every day to the fullest. It believed in stories as synonymous with life. I had never read or heard any philosophy like this before in my life, and this was what made my heart sing, made me feel both profoundly sad for death and yet so happy to be alive, made me feel (ironically) like I had been touched by something eternal and godlike and yet better than godlike because it was human, it was actually within my power to be and do and love.


I have never given up my love of pageantry, of details of dress and hair and rituals and songs and chants; I have never given up my idealistic love of love for everyone, even though I am in many ways the ultimate never-been-kissed, never-loved late teenage nerd girl. Not believing in a personal God, or a power above humans that actually cares at all about what humans do, or an existence beyond our existence now--believing, in essence, in the wonderful primacy and importance of this life, this here and now, this presence--has matured me, and matured in me, since I was the gawky and angsty thirteen-year-old reading His Dark Materials. To me the idea that now is as good as it gets is vestigially frightening, certainly, in the same way that I scream when I bump into someone in the dark; it's automatic to fear the end of self, of ego, of consciousness, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. The endless, lurking sense of death that haunted me last summer when I flirted with depression made me cry like I have not cried in years and froze me, mind and body, like nothing else I have ever experienced. The idea that now is as good as it gets has also, however, forced me to grow and love others with as much strength and confidence as any other human ever has, with no God standing over my shoulder to ensure that I do it. My love of pageantry has left the idea that "It is that Thursday that changed the world," however, behind. In the depths of time and the vast expanse of the universe, there does not seem to be any one day that has changed the world any more than any other day has, even without looking at the logical absurdity of men rising from the dead and using that as proof of a God who loves us and cares about what happens to us. It's the Easter season, but it's also a very lovely day in April in the northern hemisphere, a day in which I and many others are alive and healthy, a day in which the earth continues to tolerate humans, and that matters to me and to many others far more than any Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, or Easter Sunday ever could.

Rolling the dice

It had to come eventually: making decisions.

The day I was accepted into the Rome study abroad program, I knew two things immediately. The first was that I had to go and would be a fool to refuse, and so I didn't. The second was that I was very likely going to have to pull myself away from my house, since UChicago can't get its head on straight regarding undergraduate housing and study abroad. On the one hand, the college loves you to go abroad and tell everyone how great it was when you get back. On the other hand, the college loves to try to keep third- and fourth-years in the housing system, since the vast majority move off campus, since there IS no housing for everyone, try as UChicago might to say otherwise. So you would think that the college would jump at the chance to make it easy for students to both go abroad and stay comfortably in the housing system, regardless of when students choose to go abroad.

No, no, and no again.

When you return from abroad, the college guarantees you housing the same way that it guarantees housing for all who want it--but it does not let you choose. They can't let rooms sit empty for a quarter waiting for you, so you go where there is a space. As far as I can see now (unless someone drops out of school after autumn quarter next year), there will be no space for me in my house beginning winter quarter 2012. In my dorm, maybe, although that's a bit of a stretch. But more than likely not in my house.

It's conflicting because I really do love my house, in many ways. It's not just a dorm or a room to live; it's also many of my friends, two of my elder-sibling-I-never-had substitutes in my resident heads (house heads), my job for the past year in working for our resident masters (dorm heads), and a lot of happiness a thousand miles away from home. This means quite a bit to someone who grew up painfully shy and oftentimes (comfortably) alone, as only children so frequently are. It's basically my family out here, in many ways, and while relationships aren't strictly dependent on where you are, physically, in the world, there's a reason why the people you are closest with are often those who also live near you. Ease of access and frequency of contact give you both the impetus and the need to make relationships work.

It is entirely one thing to move out of housing because you're ready to move on, because you want to pay rent and cook meals for yourself and start pretending to be a real person. I could do that eventually, and I probably will by the time I'm a fourth-year. It's another thing, however, to realize that you don't really have a choice, that your choice is either a) go live and learn for seventy-some-odd days on another continent, or b) stay where you are and keep living with the people you love. How can anyone ever possibly pass up the opportunity to live for a bit in another country? And yet it is so hard, harder than I want it to be, to think of letting go of this vibrant community I've helped make for the past two years, to know that when I come back it won't be waiting for me. The price I pay for international studying is the community I've been a part of back here, domestically.

Of course I can and will visit this old home regardless of where I live next winter quarter and of course I can and will be changed, emotionally and socially, by spending seventy-some-odd days living in an apartment in Rome. In so many ways my house is changing anyway; our resident heads are finally leaving to go, beautifully and yet a bit painfully, be real people who own a house, and our RA is graduating and going to New Mexico to work. But many of the students, my compadres, the meat and bones of the housing community, from this year are staying, and it's just that much harder to swing by the lounge and play Mario Kart or watch stupid TV or bemoan homework when I live somewhere else, blocks away, instead of simply four floors above.

Tonight the randomized seniority list for room pick came out, and I got a great position. One I can't take, of course, because I am barred from participating in the spring lottery due to my not being physically on campus in the fall. (The sweet, sweet laughability of it all.) The first-years and my own yearmates besides are, as I type this, beginning the long process of scheming and trying to figure out what rooms they want to set their sights on. This is a month-long diplomatic (and sometimes just dramatic) affair that is both amusing and yet highly annoying, in that wearying way that over-eager and over-emotional drama can become. It's especially bitter this year because I feel forced out of it. At least three of my yearmates are also studying abroad and staying in housing. But because they are not going abroad fall quarter (because it didn't please them to go to Rome, for instance, or other fall programs), they will have no problems whatsoever living where they want to in the house. The one girl who is also going abroad fall will be okay because she has an arrangement with a girl going abroad winter and a girl going abroad spring, to rotate in and out of a double as each goes abroad.

It's an arrangement I would gladly have participated in, and yet it was not offered to me, something that does make me feel awful in a vague and impersonal way. I know it was simply chance, really, an instance of the other girl probably being around when this bright idea first occurred to the other two, while I simply wasn't in the room. And yet it does make me feel rather left out, not least because although I love my other fall-study-abroader in many ways, I simply feel like, in many ways, I would make a better roommate than she would; I'm far neater and quieter than she is, and the other two girls are also quite quiet and relatively neat. Mostly the entire proceeding just took me by surprise, caught me in a painful presumption that I had something with these other two girls that turned out not to be and left me to fend for myself. I'm not angry at any of them, particularly, just upset in general at being left out by what I can only hope and presume (although look at what presumption brought me!) was simply chance. If I had been in that room when that decision was made, if I had somehow seen it and made my own case, if only if only if only--well, life would be a bit easier for next year, that's all.

And yet right now, when everyone else has some sense of security and I do not (not yet, anyway), it's hard to see this as simply a complication; it feels a lot more like a serious blow, one that I keep coming back to with every end-of-the-year ritual, which will only come more and more frequently as the year rolls on towards its end. It feels personal, even though I know it likely isn't, and it puts me at the mercy of chance, moreso than other people, something inevitable in life that I still have to figure out how to take in stride. I guess that makes this all a somber and rather bitter lesson, at the moment--but a lesson nonetheless.

%&&%!--Thus, Chopin

Spring quarter has gone pretty well so far, at least up until about an hour ago when I had to start printing things off for classes. In a slim attempt to save trees, I decided to double-side the printing the old-school way (odds, put back in to print evens), since my printer does not do that in the hip modern duplex way. I eventually got it down--after many poor pieces of paper wasted messing up in various ways along the path to double-sided glory and many obscenities yelled at my printer for needing two ink cartridge changes (black and then, 20 minutes later, tricolor) and a paper-jam fix along the way.

Thus, although there are stories to tell and a UDaR update to put up at some point this week, for now I will leave the blogging world with something more peaceful and blood-pressure-reducing than wraslin' with my printer: Chopin.

Sunday procrastination + GoT trailer

First off is the first full trailer for Game of Thrones, released last week and originally EW-exclusive, which is now on YouTube and thus can be embedded. Tomorrow a new "link" in The Maester's Path should be activated, which will bring more ASoIaF fun and hopefully a new awesome clip from the series as a reward for completion.



Besides that, there's no real news for anything going on; it's just another gray winter's day here in Chitown, spent writing a lab report about the cosmic microwave background and getting ready to start reading some Benjamin and Adorno for sosc on Tuesday. About 7 hours of class left this quarter and Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me on Thursday would make this a pretty good week, and it's certainly going to be better than next week, when finals doom is finally here, but the run-up to finals is almost worse than the papers and exams themselves.

I've been reading one of my Belmont used books now that I finished the first one, A Wizard of Earthsea. This one is called Mage Heart and seems like a bizarre little cheesy romantic fantasy; so far there's been illicit hallucinogen use, mentions of demons, slightly bizarre magic, and hints of good ole female homosexuality, along with lots of talk of breasts. It's interesting enough to make it worth reading, at least for now, but I don't see anything truly original or shocking or otherwise coming out of this one.

Post-apocalyptic Borders

So the Borders here on 53rd Street is closing Monday, and last night a bunch of friends came back from a ransacking trip with plastic bags bulging with every book that had ever caught their eyes and quite a few they never in a million years would normally buy. Apparently every single book, poster, or otherwise in this closing Borders store was on sale for $1, whether it was originally a $7.99 trashy romnov or a newly-released $25 hardcover.

This morning, therefore, a few of us went out to see what remained of the heavily-picked-over spoils. We found surprisingly a lot--not much of it good, of course, since anything of inherent value had long ago been bought up, but it's a lot easier to justify buying crap romnovs and the like when doing so will only set you back a dollar each, instead of eight bucks each. I did find a very few actual legitimate purchases; one was Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, which is supposed to be pretty legitimately good even if it is a historical time-traveling Scottish highlander romance, and another was Madeleine L'Engel's A Wrinkle in Time, which I have never read but which is, of course, supposed to be a classic. Most of the rest was just barely above crap level, including some Jeff Shaara American Revolution dramatizations and the requisite "we suck compared to Europeans"-type book, this one from 2010, so that it's actually fairly recent. The worst was some fantasy I picked up almost solely for its glitzy cover and the promise of griffins, my favorite mythological creatures besides phoenixes, but apparently these griffins tend to eat humans, and in the foreward the author thanks members of an internet messaging board, with their screen names, so you know this is just the epitome of internet-age derivative fantasy.  There were lots of copies of Glenn Beck's The Overton Window, but I couldn't justify paying even a dollar for that, and apparently not many other Hyde Parkers could. 

It's really strange, and slightly sad, to be in a closing Borders, with all these empty shelves, some of which have already been dismantled. The shelves themselves were for sale in many cases, and it was mildly tempting to buy a Borders bookshelf, but without plans to move into an apartment in the next year, it really was a pointless idea. Also, even though the genre titles still hung above, most of the remaining books and just been thrown onto any old shelf, regardless of classification, meaning that the cooking shelves were full of romnovs and some inspirational pet stories were cheek-to-cheek with the remaining manga selections. I particularly enjoyed noticing that part of the romnovs-in-the-cooking-section situation was the subtitle "crockery" below some of the worst romnovs I can imagine being published; I laughed at that. The people swarming Borders with us were also slightly scary; it really was, in many ways, like we were all the survivors of some terrible apocalyptic event, desperate for the few remaining books in the world, and tons of people had their arms full of random books, clinging to them as if they were the only books left to read. I tried to limit myself only to books that I had some hope of actually reading at some point, but my companions were not all so self-restrained; one of my housemates bought 15 books, and doesn't even really know where some of them came from or why, exactly, she picked them up. Apparently a few other housemates had gone earlier in the day, and one of them bought 30 books and a poster. I haven't seen her stash yet, but I'm curious as to whether she was able to pick up any higher quality stuff than what we, going only about an hour later, found.

I love bookstores, and lately I've been going hog-wild with books; last weekend we went to Belmont/Lakeview to a used bookstore, where I picked up four other books, of marginally better readability levels, but also for more money each. The world truly is a bit bizarre when it's cheaper to buy new books at Borders than it is to buy used books at a jank-tastic used bookstore on the northside. Also, they were still taking gift cards at Borders, so I didn't even have to spend my own cash- or debit-card-money at Borders, so really, it was almost like free, in a way. It does feel kind of silly to use people's gift money to buy crappy books; knowing the people who gave me those gift cards, they probably would have better appreciated me buying two or three actually good books rather than 9 relatively stupid books. I still have $15 left on the card, however, so maybe at some point in a few months I can buy real books with that. (Or, realistically, one real book.)

Books bought last weekend at Bookman's Corner (Clark and Wellington, Belmont/Lakeview area)

Books bought at the closing Borders at 53rd and Lake Park

I saved $105.88? Best/saddest book sale ever.

Really, it's been a pretty good weekend so far--heartening, really, considering that there are only 3 class days (and all the agony of prepping for finals next weekend) left in the quarter.

Bestsellers

 

On Amazon, as of 2:45 pm CT. And it doesn't even come out until July! Not bad.

If all of this wasn't enough... (new trailer)

This past week, ASoIaF fans have gotten the following:

1) Perfumery boxes sent out to bloggers
2) A new interactive website (The Maester's Path)
3) An extended Iron Throne trailer
4) House t-shirts from HBO
5) A release date for A Dance With Dragons (!!!!!!!!!!!)

and now, the first full-length (two minutes, twenty seconds) trailer for Game of Thrones, which includes the first glimpses anyone has seen of the Wall (a seven-hundred-foot-high wall of ice, thousands of miles long, that protects the Seven Kingdoms from the world to the north) in the very first seconds, as well as extended glimpses of Littlefinger and Varys and a very brief flash of what an Other (vaguely supernatural undead skeletal creature thing) looks like.

It's Entertainment Weekly-exclusive and thus not yet on YouTube, but it's pretty much awesome, so click here and scroll down to see the first true trailer for GoT.

Pretty much an awesome day.

July 12th, 2011

It's almost like I have magic publication-date-bringing powers or something.

According to Entertainment Weekly, there is a firm publication date for A Dance With Dragons, as confirmed by fan site Westeros.org and interviews with GRRM (the author). In both the US and UK, the book will be published on July 12th. Of this year. This is unusual, as his books are often published in the UK before they are in the US, even though Martin is American, since it's easier to do publication turn-arounds more quickly in the UK since the market there is notably smaller than in the US and fewer copies are printed. However, Bantam (American publisher) and Voyager (British publisher) are not messing around.

This is interesting as, per GRRM's latest update on ADwD a few days ago, he still is not finished writing. However, if the publishers are giving ridiculously firm dates like this, they are not messing around. Apparently this is real.

Really, really happy this week. Awesome, awesome, awesome ASoIaF news all around.

Edited to add: Official confirmation from GRRM on his website can be found here. Only about four months to go :D

marzo

It's March. Wooooo? March used to be my least favorite month, as we had February and April breaks in high school (and before) and thus March was the long, ugly month without a break. Now, of course, March is the month of one whole week of spring break between winter and spring quarters, so it's not so bad. March weather is also much nicer in Chicago than it ever is in New England, chiefly because Chicago actually has a definitive spring and not just a long, hazy mud season for a few months between winter and summer. It's still pretty cold outside now, but it's sunny and there's no snow on the ground, which is the first sign that spring is making its way towards us.

It's also 9th week, which means that the quarter is sort of almost over; a lot of classes are getting ready to go into review mode starting next week. I'm done with astro labs, finally, and additional Italian practice sessions. Four more Italian and astro classes and two more sosc and art history classes and then it's reading period. There will be studying, sure, but I'm also going to go see a taping of Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me on the 10th, which should be very fun; I had a lot of fun at the taping I went to go see last April.

Everyone is extremely moody, however, which sort of takes a lot of the fun out of March. We've been cooped up together for nine weeks, and the first-years in particular are extremely moody and clique-y, reverting back to semi-high-school ways of not wanting to sit at the dining hall house table 'cause that's uncool and the like. There's also a lot of housecest running wild, between some of the last people you'd ever imagine to have sexual relations, never mind with each other, which amps up the awkwardness quotient quite a bit. One of them is my neighbor, and he and his first-year girlfriend (or whatever they are--they aren't openly in any sort of official relationship yet) have been prone to making quite a bit of obnoxious noise past midnight, whether it's actual sex or just talking loudly. I'm fine with weird relationships of all sorts, but our beds share a wall, and so does my bed and his desk, so when they listen to giggling laughing baby videos on YouTube for 15 minutes at 12:30 in the morning, it sounds like a baby is giggling right on the foot of my bed, even through my ear plugs.

Everyone being moody includes me, I guess. Certain things just start to get on your nerves after nine weeks of cold weather and encountering these same things day after day after day. You just want things to straighten out and open back up again, instead of being cramped together with unpleasant expressions on everyone's face.

New template up + HBO shirts

As is self-evident, a new template is up. As much as I enjoy winter, and as much as, per HBO and ASoIaF, "winter is coming," I wanted something a little less dark and dour. So I went for grays and browns and blacks instead of grays and whites and blacks. :)

I messed about a little with the dimensions, pixel-wise, so if anything isn't working in your browser or on your screen resolution, etc, let me know and I'll see what can be done. I can't promise miracles, since I'm no techie, but we'll see.

The final frontier currently on the update front is that I added "reactions" boxes for each post. I know I am a lazy blog-reader myself, rarely bothering to comment, but we bloggers do like occasional feedback from others (or else we wouldn't be talking like this into the internet all the time), so while comments are appreciated but not necessary, consider at least taking the opportunity to log in whatever first reaction you might have of the post, its contents, etc.

In ever-continuing HBO news, there are now house shirts up for sale at the official HBO merchandise shop for Game of Thrones. Yesterday and today apparently have been big days for the GoT campaign, what with new trailers, the opening of The Maester's Path, and now the show's first official merch release. I don't want or need $24.99 worth of a cotton t-shirt, but if you or a fan in your life are interested, there are general "Game of Thrones" shirts as well as house crest + words shirts for Houses Arryn, Baratheon, Greyjoy, Lannister, Stark, Targaryen, and Tully in both men and women's styles. Pick them up (or just gawk, as I did) here. The site also has the books available, including some sort of boxed set that looks like it will be coming out with the series's debut, but you can get those for just as cheap or cheaper at Amazon or, even better, any local bookstore with a decent selection; I got mine over the course of a few months for about 7 bucks apiece at 57th Street Books here in Hyde Park.

Now if we would only get a release date for A Dance With Dragons; the latest on Martin's blog is that he is finally wrapping stuff up with the last remaining characters to finish. He's said that many, many times over the last 5 years, but I think it may actually be real this time. If I had to guess, I would plan an ADwD announcement date for April 17th, the premiere date of the first season of Game of Thrones, or soon around there, to add to/build off the hype of the show, but Martin, as enthusiastic as he is about seeing his world come to life in the flesh and not just in his head, can be stubborn, so who knows.

Everything ASoIaF is, as the Tyrell motto says, "growing strong."

The Maester's Path: Link 1

Sorry for being so ASoIaF lately, but HBO is going wild promoting the series, which airs starting April 17th. Last week, many internet luminaries, TV bloggers, fan sites, and the like were sent a gorgeous perfumery box filled with different scents of different locales in the series, from the wilds of the Dothraki grasslands to the Stark stronghold of Winterfell in the far north. This morning, an interactive fan site for the series went live, named after the scholars and healers from the series called maesters, who are sworn to different lords to assist their households. The fan site is called The Maester's Path (click for link).

Each week through the end of March a new puzzle will appear. Solving the puzzle for that week gives you a metaphorical "link" in your maester's chain and access to a reward, which this week at least is a short clip of a very fan-beloved scene (to read which one, highlight or copy-paste into a word-document the following: Jon Snow, Eddard Stark's bastard, gives Needle (a sword) to Arya Stark, his tomboyish half-sister end spoiler); it's quite possible that each week will reveal a new quick, 30-second clip from the series. You also are supposed to try and collect 5 apprentices to join you on your journey; it's unclear when or how they'll be needed, but they may simply allow access to greater rewards, a greater final reward, or something of the sort.

This week, the key to solving the puzzle (which involves perfumes/scents like the box sent out to various bloggers) is knowing what symbols go with what locale; fan site Westeros.org had compiled a list of all the symbols in the cases bloggers were sent in case something like this came up, and if you'd like a guide, they have one up at their Maester's Path guide (once there, click the picture at the top of the page to enlarge it). Orange symbols are the Dothraki Sea, red symbols are the Free City of Pentos, green symbols are the capital city called King's Landing, blue symbols are the Stark stronghold of Winterfell, and purple symbols are the Inn at the Crossroads.

It's all very intriguing, and pretty smart marketing on HBO's behalf. Right now it seems as if the clips are sort of geared towards fans of the book series already, but it's not so complicated or spoiler-y as to be incomprehensible for people who have never read the books.

If you'd like to join me as an acolyte, feel free to click the following link: http://itsh.bo/edmQfU

Enjoy!

"You think it's honor that's keeping the peace?"

Additionally, tonight a new trailer for HBO's adaptation of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE (they're calling it Game of Thrones) came out. It encapsulates the general feel of the series, particularly the first book on which this first season is based, quite well. Eddard (Sean Bean) and his family are House Stark of the vast north; the Baratheons are the royal family, and the Lannisters (the blonde twins, boy and girl, and Peter Dinklage as their dwarf brother) are married into this royalty as the female twin, Cersei, is the queen. The exotic far-eastern-looking stuff is the home of the Dothraki, the nomadic tribe with which the last surviving members of the old royal family (the Targaryens, the extremely pale-haired siblings seen here, whose parents were overthrown about 15 years before the start of the series by a Baratheon-Stark alliance) have taken refuge and are scheming for their return, the reclaim of their throne.

Welcome to Westeros, to the Seven Kingdoms. Welcome to the threatening long winter, maybe the longest ever known. Welcome, most of all, to the start of an epic game of thrones.



"When winter does come, gods help us all if we're not ready."

The coming apocalypse

Apparently the end of the world, at least in Hyde Park, will contain zombies, and lots of them. One of the student organizations here is called the Zombie Readiness Taskforce, and right now they're putting on an event called Humans v Zombies, or something like that, until the end of the month. Basically, everyone who wants to play signs up and gets an orange bandana and a Nerf gun. A few people are assigned to be zombies, but most, at least at the beginning, are humans. Zombies wear their bandanas on their heads, while humans wear theirs as armbands. Basically, all UChicago buildings themselves are safe, as are off-campus buildings not owned by UChicago and CTA buses, but the open air is not. Zombies run around trying to tag humans; once tagged, you become a zombie. Humans have their Nerf guns, and if you shoot a zombie that zombie is temporarily paralyzed and can't tag anyone for 15 minutes.

I absolutely hate anything and everything to do with zombies, and so I'm not participating, but a few of my housemates are playing. Last I knew they were still armed humans fighting off the zombie invasion, but I think they've had a few close calls. I've never actually seen a shootout happen with my own eyes, but there are a significant minority of people wearing orange bandanas, either wrapped intricately in their hair (a lot of girls playing really seem to jazz it up) or clinging desperately to human arms. It's especially evident in the dining hall, where there are lots of people together; every house table has at least one or two people in orange. Dining halls are safe zones, of course, so there aren't any shootouts there, but there are occasionally some glances from side to side; after all, you don't want to leave and get ambushed by a bunch of zombies just outside the dining hall.

I don't know how the people playing don't go crazy; I can't even stand it when our house plays assassins in the spring. I just hate running around trying to tag or shoot or squirt or what have you, and I equally hate the idea of being caught off guard by someone. When we play assassins, individual rooms and the dining hall and classrooms are off-limits, but the rest of campus is dangerous, and if you can get someone to crawl into your bed with you, then killing them is fair game (crimes of passion, after all, are no crimes at all). Needless to say, I don't play any type of game like this, but it is pretty amusing at times to watch people getting extremely paranoid about going outside.

5 miles later....

Today was, you could say, a busy day. My first class, as always, wasn't until 11:30, but I had to teach ninth graders at 9:52 am, so I had to be up by about 8 this morning.

The ninth graders attend Dyett High School, one of the more underperforming schools in the Chicago Public School system, chronically underfunded and now well under enrollment (and thus even more deeply underfunded, since funding is based at least in part on enrollment) thanks to the exodus of students to charter schools in the past 5 or so years. What I was doing there in the first place is courtesy of Peer Health Exchange, a national nonprofit in 5 cities nationwide that trains college students to teach comprehensive health lessons to students in schools that otherwise would receive little or no health education. We teach about tobacco, alcohol, drugs, sexual decision making, HIV and AIDS, contraception, nutrition and physical activity, rape and sexual assault, abusive relationships, healthy relationships, and general decision making and communication. We don't tell students not to have sex. We don't tell them not to drink or do drugs. We just tell them all the health and legal consequences, the personal and emotional pros and cons, as well as how to have sex safely if they choose to do so, and trust them to make their own decisions.

I teach the drugs workshop. Thus this morning I was teaching 14 ninth graders about marijuana and cocaine, prescription drug abuse and ecstasy. They were pretty well-behaved, for ninth graders. Then again, they were JROTC students, for the most part, supposed to get structure and extra education. (I personally find it ridiculous that the best structure and education goes to kids being groomed for the military; you shouldn't have to be willing to die for America to receive a decent education. You also shouldn't have to go to a charter school to have a chance of learning something in school; these kids are basically those who are unable or whose families are unwilling to send them to the "real" schools in Chicago. They are, in a sense, on the lowest positions of the totem pole of kids in the area. Public schools should be by far the most efficiently funded institutions in America, and yet they are often among the first things to receive budget cuts during lean times. Most of the federal budget goes towards blowing things/people up in distant lands, after all.)

These kids aren't stupid. They know that drugs are "bad" for you, that they can land you in jail or kill you. They know how to say no to drugs, for the most part. They even understand to some extent that some drugs, like marijuana and ecstasy, are not particularly physically addictive, while others, like crack and heroin, are extremely addictive. They know that drugs can make you act "crazy." They're silly freshmen, and they look tiny even to me, someone who is barely five feet tall. Their faces, particularly those of the boys, are still babyish, not yet adult-like. They're a lot, at least in class, like the freshmen of my old high school. And yet the environment they've grown up in is about as different from suburban New England as you can get.

Charter schools have really good graduation rates. Some boast of sending over 90% of each graduating class to college. These sorts of things are really very admirable. And yet every time a new charter school opens, that's another public school like Dyett that is, in many ways, left to its own fate, another neighborhood school on the chopping blocks. That Chicago Public Schools are, in many instances, terrible is an undeniable fact. Killing them isn't exactly the way to do it, however, diverting people and money towards these semi-private schools. Something about kids being educated by corporate-run schools just seems wrong to me, someone with no love of big corporations. Something about destroying neighborhood education for city-wide education seems strange, too, especially considering the studies I've seen about gang violence. Weird as it seems, apparently having strong neighborhood gathering places that give a sense of purpose, like good schools or neighborhood clubs or whatnot, can reduce gang violence significantly. (After all, what is a gang but a group of young people who feel entirely ostracized and abandoned by normal society? How better to counter this than by giving them community love and purpose that isn't violent?)

If it were up to me, America would be a very different place with regards to education. School days would be longer, perhaps something like 8 or 9 am to 5 or 6 pm, and there would be less work outside of it but much more work done during school, in a school building, so that kids can actually focus on education, the main point of the first 18 years of your life. The only real things you would have as homework would be essays or review assignments. School years would be longer also, maybe with more frequent long weekends but without 10+ weeks of summer vacation. Education would be strong on science and technology but also reading, writing, history, and the like, all the stuff that keeps us connected to the universe but also to ourselves. There would be some kind of gym or recess or something every single day, every year, and school lunches would actually be healthy. Multiple times a week there would be some sort of community service, or gardening, or something about the community as well as the self. There would be art and music lessons multiple times a week, starting from the very earliest ages. Everyone would learn foreign languages just about every day, taught in immersion, starting from extremely early ages. Everyone would also have to learn just some plain old useful things, whether it's balancing a checkbook or learning to cook or doing things with hands--building things, changing tires, all that stuff; maybe a class of this a week. Parents would come in frequently, maybe a different parent every week, to talk about life beyond the age of 18, to get involved with their kids' education. There would be lots of school social activities outside class hours, dances and sports at night and on the weekends, to keep kids in urban areas in particular off the streets, to give everyone structure. Yes, basically all of a kid's life would be school, but school would be so much more than it is now; it would be not just learning but also building, cooking, playing sports and games, serving the community, socialization, and so much more. Everyone would have the basics of everything, from math up through calculus to science of all types to reading Shakespeare to crafting essays to American and world history to politics and civics to gym and healthy food everyday to community service to knowing how to hammer nails and change tires and fix some plumbing and cook their own food to art and music. By the time kids were high school aged, they could start to specialize in what they thought they wanted to do, everything from the creative arts to the trades to learning more about certain subjects. They'd still have to keep up with all the other subjects, though. After all, learning never stops.

America is nowhere near any of this, really. School is basically babysitting while parents work every day, with some incidental learning thrown in on the side. It's useless for most kids, turns kids off of learning anything ever, and seems to impart the idea that nothing in life really matters, besides maybe what's on TV. It doesn't allow for teaching kids how to be people, and it sure doesn't help kids grow in any way; it's just kind of indifferent to everything. A nursery school for ages 5-18.

I've walked about five miles today, back and forth to Dyett and then 5k on the ellipticals at the gym. I've learned a lot more than five miles, however; I've seen freshmen from a whole different world that's still remarkably similar to my world, journeyed to the beginning of time in astronomy, and been to WWII-era Italy in Italian. Pretty good for 6 hours or so in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois.

Songs of Ice and Fire

A Feast for Crows has been sitting on my mini-fridge (which doubles as my bedside table) since I got back from break. Over the first several weeks of the quarter, I got through the 900+ pages of fun, all except for the last twenty or so--basically, the last chapter. I think it's been almost two weeks since I read any more, but I'm loath to finish this book, since nobody really knows when (or at this point even if) the next book will come out.

A Feast for Crows is the fourth book in George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy series known as A Song of Ice and Fire (usually just abbreviated as ASoIaF--I mentioned it back in December or so here on the blog). Each book is at least 900 pages, paperback, and the third one is over 1100 pages long, paperback. The fifth book, called A Dance With Dragons, has been "about to be released" for five years now, since the fourth book was published in 2005. Martin isn't exactly the world's speediest writer, you could say.

Of course, it's hard at times to really blame him, considering the sheer scope of stuff going on. ASoIaF is written through various points of view--I think, over the course of the series, there have been at least 15 or 20 point of view characters. It chronicles an entire island continent and quite a bit of stuff going on in the far east of the world, a multitude of families, and a surprising amount of detail. Basically, ASoIaF is a story about the political posturings of an entire huge nation-continent, a bizarre world where summers and winters can last for years at a time, which was originally seven different kingdoms forcibly united a few hundred years before the story begins under a slightly vicious regime. About 15 years before the story begins, this dynasty was toppled by a regional superpower and all but two of the old dynasty's members were destroyed. The narrative picks up in the first book (A Game of Thrones) with the coming of fall after the longest summer anyone can remember and the stirrings of whole new rebellions, troubles, schemes for revenge from the downtrodden and the one final member of the old dynasty, and much more.

This is all fairly bog-standard vaguely-medieval epic fantasy fare, but although this is a foreign world with some bizarre animals in it (mammoths, aurochs, direwolves, etc), there is very little overt magic at all involved. Dragons are about as magical as it gets, and those are basically considered extinct in most of the world. It's also unabashedly adult--prostitution, rape, plunder, gory hangings, brutal colonialism, and all sorts of other imaginatively horrible ends exist, even while there's lots of consensual sex (both hetero- and homosexual) and surprisingly brave (but still realistic) deeds. What sets ASoIaF apart from most of the rest of the epic fantasy fare (including The Lord of the Rings) is the lack of a good vs. evil feel to the book. Characters are realistically ambiguous, and while there are certainly abominably gory acts and good acts both, no character is purely good or purely evil--in fact, most are quite confused themselves about what is going on. The political scheming, the posturing, the difficulty of painting any character with a broad brush all combine to make it a remarkably intriguing series thus far. It is no carefully-written Shakespeare, in the sense that every word is pored over to make is as perfect as necessary, but it is quite exquisitely plotted and obviously requires an extraordinary amount of world-building and a remarkable grasp for making characters life-like.

The four books published so far, in order, are A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows. HBO has picked up the series to make it a television series, and the first episode for that is supposed to come sometime in April. I really hope that the fact that the world of Martin is coming to TV will inspire him and his publishers to get the next installment out by the end of this year--word on the street is that he is basically in the editing stage now, finally.

Read 'em, definitely, but be warned--they are as addictive as crack once you get into them, and the wait for the next installment (when I still have 20 pages left of the last!) is already driving me crazy.

Andromeda (M31)

The closest spiral galaxy to our own is the Andromeda Galaxy, known more formally as Messier 31 or M31. Although other galaxies are closer to us, Andromeda is probably the closest galaxy that actually resembles our own Milky Way. It can be seen as a faintish smudge in the sky with the naked eye, and even in urban areas it is visible with telescopes/binoculars. When photographed with a large telescope, it is 6 times as wide as the full moon. Andromeda is about 2.54 million light years (14,931,708,447,886,365,000 miles) away from us, meaning that light takes 2.54 million years to travel from Andromeda to earth and we are seeing Andromeda as it appeared 2.54 million years ago--we are, in fact, as with all other space objects, looking back in time when we view Andromeda. This is part of the reason why astronomers and astrophysicists concern themselves with extremely distant objects (and Andromeda is very, very, very, very close to us, comparatively speaking)--the more distant in space you look, the further back in time you look, and thus you can learn more about the conditions of the earliest moments of the universe.

Andromeda (M31), from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day series

Andromeda is more than twice the size of the Milky Way, but telescopes and observatories can still capture it in all sorts of interesting ways. Below is Andromeda in infrared (the red parts--interstellar dust, mostly, sites of future star formation) and X-ray (the blue points--some binary stars in the final stages of stellar evolution) wavelengths.

apod.nasa.gov

É a promessa de vida no teu coração

("It's the promise of life in your heart.")

Going south yonder a bit for today's embedded YouTube video with Elis Regina singing "Aguas de Marco," one of the better-known bossa nova songs. This recording is probably sometime 70s or early 80s (she died in 1982). It's entirely Brazilian Portuguese, but basically, "Aguas de Marco" means "waters of March," referring to the end of summer and beginning of fall in the southern-hemisphere Brazil. The lyrics don't really tell any sort of story but are random words and images associated with the fall rains of Brazil, from "É pau, é pedra" ("it's stick, it's stone") to "São as águas de março fechando o verão É a promessa de vida no teu coração" ("they're the waters of March closing the summer; it's the promise of life in your heart"). Quite corny in English but remarkably beautiful in Portuguese, and the piano backing in this version makes me smile. Lyrics (in Portuguese, as copied from the original YouTube video) are below the video.



É pau, é pedra, é o fim do caminho
É um resto de toco, é um pouco sozinho
É um caco de vidro, é a vida, é o sol
É a noite, é a morte, é um laço, é o anzol
É peroba do campo, é o nó da madeira
Caingá, candeia, é o Matita Pereira

É madeira de vento, tombo da ribanceira
É o mistério profundo, é o queira ou não queira
É o vento ventando, é o fim da ladeira
É a viga, é o vão, festa da cumeeira
É a chuva chovendo, é conversa ribeira
Das águas de março, é o fim da canseira
É o pé, é o chão, é a marcha estradeira
Passarinho na mão, pedra de atiradeira

É uma ave no céu, é uma ave no chão
É um regato, é uma fonte, é um pedaço de pão
É o fundo do poço, é o fim do caminho
No rosto o desgosto, é um pouco sozinho

É um estrepe, é um prego, é uma conta, é um conto
É uma ponta, é um ponto, é um pingo pingando
É um peixe, é um gesto, é uma prata brilhando
É a luz da manhã, é o tijolo chegando
É a lenha, é o dia, é o fim da picada
É a garrafa de cana, o estilhaço na estrada
É o projeto da casa, é o corpo na cama
É o carro enguiçado, é a lama, é a lama

É um passo, é uma ponte, é um sapo, é uma rã
É um resto de mato, na luz da manhã
São as águas de março fechando o verão
É a promessa de vida no teu coração

É uma cobra, é um pau, é João, é José
É um espinho na mão, é um corte no pé
É um passo, é uma ponte, é um sapo, é uma rã
É um belo horizonte, é uma febre terçã
São as águas de março fechando o verão
É a promessa de vida no teu coração

"Aguas de Marco" was written by Antonio Carlos Jobim, the most famous bossa nova composer. You can read about it here and about Elis here.

Masjid Qubbat as-Sakhrah

One of my classes this quarter is Islamic Art and Architecture, 650-1100, which is a focus on the very early Islamic art and architecture (no duh). Currently I'm supposed to be writing 800 words about two different scholarly articles on the Dome of the Rock (in transliterated Arabic, according to Wikipedia, it is Masjid Qubbat as-Sakhrah--literally something like "the dome mosque of the rock") in Jerusalem. Interestingly, the Dome of the Rock isn't a mosque at all, just a ginormous octagonal domed structure built over a rock with some bizarre religious associations to Jews, Muslims, etc. The area of Jerusalem it sits on, the Haram al-Sharif, is almost empty aside from the Dome of the Rock, so of course this is a monument meant to be overwhelming, visible from afar, etc.

It was built in about 691 or 692 and seems to be the first serious, monumental piece of so-called Islamic (the "Islamic" tradition is not so unified as other traditions, since it spans centuries and all sorts of different sub-cultures) architecture. Why exactly it was built remains something of a mystery; most of the mythological explanations ascribed to it (that it was the site of a "Night Journey" to Heaven that Muhammad made, etc) were done so several centuries after the fact. The articles I've been reading and analyzing about it in the past few weeks basically suggest that it's something of a statement to the new Islamic power in the region, drawing on some Byzantine/Sasanian (Persian) tradition but also, as the second article I'm reading asserts, some pre-Islamic Arab mytho-historical aesthetics. Yeah.

Still, it is a glorious-looking building.

Very nice.

Snow globe

I'm still plenty alive--just spent the past two days in a bizarre snow globe world that is Chicago whenever it snows here. It's gray, slightly claustrophobic, and snow blows everywhere--definitely a snow globe.

Almost done with the second week of the quarter, so things are clucking along. I was so glad to leave New England and come back here, despite the lack of natural beauty; there is so little to hold me in my family house anymore. I will be back there in March briefly for spring break. I will probably also be back for the summer, although who knows.

I've been getting up at 5:30 every morning this week, thanks to Kuviasugnerk/Kangeiko, the university's winter festival that includes 6am calisthenics. It's bizarre and kind of pointless and exhausting, but my house always does it, and does well at that, winning for like 15 years in a row. The prize for best house participation is money, so it's nice to do something absurd, get a long-sleeved t-shirt out of it (if you go all 5 mornings), and get some money to use for house funds. Of course, this means almost perpetual exhaustion for a week, but I drink lots of tea and go to bed early and wait for it to be over.

I'm applying for a job with the admissions office as a tour guide and general "visit coordinator," aka admissions student shill. A pleasant shill, fear not. The pay is not great ($9/hr), but prospective students are funny and weirdly touching, the networking with admissions counselors is good, the constant public exposure is good for me, and any type of cash to help staunch the bleeding my bank account is doing is good. I figure even if I only work like 5 hours a week, that's 45 dollars a week, or roughly 450 dollars a quarter, enough to keep me from hemorrhaging money and provide extra cash for food or books or whatever. Assuming I'm hired, of course--it's insanely competitive, and I was ultimately denied last year after making it to the final round of interviews. I was a know-nothing first-year last year, though. Even one year has aged and wised me almost beyond my own recognition.

That's about it. It's past time for me to make my daily trek 5 blocks to the gym. Today it will have the added bonus of keeping me awake until about 10pm, when I'll finally be able to go to sleep. I've already been awake for long enough today to feel like my eyeballs will pop out of my head.

A presto.