I'm feeling vaguely sad, and I'm not sure why. Not wrist-slashingly sad by any means. Just uneasy... uncertain.
I just made $200 for doing not very much. After carrying it around a week a month for 2 years, I finally got a call on
the Support pager at work. And it dragged on for 2 hours. So lots of money for me! Woo!
It doesn't make up for me feeling crappy, though. I'm gonna go to bed soon.
I picked up a book of poetry on the weekend. I don't do that very often. I did it out of a bit of synchronicity. It
started with an Intel article about this film
playing at Sundance. I think I'd heard
of AlPurdy before, but in kind
of a distant, abstract sort of way. Poetry was never my thing anyway. I held onto that idea for long enough to actually
pick up one of his books in Chapters. He writes
about the places he's from, like Ameliasburg ("that burg named after some little German dumpling named Amelia"), where
my parents would take me and my sisters and me for drives in the summer, about the history, about his grandfather... He
wrote occasionally about the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I loved in highschool. He carried on a decade-long correspondance
with Charles Bukowski, the only other poet I ever really looked at,
in my last year at university.
The synchronicities added up, and I figured I should probably give old Al a try. I'm quite liking it.
I feel like an ass for missing the anime club meeting yesterday. I just forgot about it. I'd thought about it yesterday
morning, but by the time the work day was over, I guess I just wanted to go home and veg out. It wasn't until later that
night when John asked why I wasn't there that I realized I'd missed it. And that was around 10pm or so, a DNS failure at
my ISP rendering me unwired.
Oh well. For various reasons, it was an important meeting. But life goes on. Stuff.
I have been so out of it lately. I figure it's the usual winter-related lack of fresh air and sunshine. If I get my
current project done at work in time, I think I'm going to go back to Belleville for the weekend in a couple weeks. I'm
going back in February sometime regardless. I need to pcik up a
belated Christmas present that got held up at customs. (My
mother has since vowed never to order anything over the Internet again).
Yes, I picked up Sim City 4 on the weekend. It's pretty wonderful, but it's become clear that I need more RAM. SC4 is
really just an incremental improvement over SC3000. There's a more intuitive zoning brush, more useful graphs, a better
rewards system, better graphics, etc. Being able to move your Sims in is cute (my Sims were wiped from my harddrive some
time ago, but they give you generic Sims to use), but it's not really anything special. They tell you how they're doing,
and you can watch them drive to work and back. And they die off, to be replaced by their offspring. SC4 probably isn't a
must-have for Sims fans, though. You still can't really do anything with them on an individual level. Except maybe get a
giant robot to step on their house. I haven't tried that.
Oh dear. Avril Lavigne seems to be the thing at the moment. Understandably pop-weary adolescents love her. Many, many
jaded post-adolescents can't stand her. One of my favourite websites, b3ta has taken
a very strong dislike to her. It's all getting to be a
bit ridiculous.
I'm not denying that Sk8ter Boi is utter shite, or that her other song isn't a blantant bastardization of everything
Alanis Morissette ever did (I like Alanis, if only for the thought that if I just got her to say "I dunno," a bucket of
green slime might get magically dumped on her head). But I am a bit torn. Avril was born in Belleville, you see. She
grew up in Napanee, a, er, quaint little skater-infested town. Honestly, the
way the local paper had taken to her is
really pretty adorable.
So I'm torn. I kind of want to defend her, because I really don't think she's a manufactured phony. But on the other
hand, I still hate her music.