"Blib, blub, blog 'im."

-Ryan McKay, circa 2001.

Well, here I sit in the Technician office. Sunday office hours seem kind of silly, because no one ever comes for appointments, except when time sheets are almost due. While I vastly prefer being in the office with the sounds of general merriment and newspapermaking floating up the halls, it's also kind of nice to be here alone. It lets me focus completely on wasting time on the Internet. 

The irony, of course, is that I live alone, and can easily waste time on the Internet whenever I want, but usually (recently, anyway) I play Super Mario Galaxy instead.  

My first semester in grad school is almost over, which is pretty damn stunning. Time seems to pass faster and faster the older I get. My dad used to preach to me about that -- something about how when you're five, a year is a fifth of your life, but when you're fifty, it's only one-fiftieth. I was pretty sure he said that because he was crazy and bitter about being old, but now I see the ol' man was dropping some wisdom. 

I meant to talk about grad school when I started that paragraph. Damn you, blogs, and your complete lack of necessitated revisions!!! But I guess talking about school would be pretty boring. So I'll spare my two readers (hi, Mom and Dad!) and move on. (Just kidding, I don't think my mom and dad know about this site. And if they did, they'd probably really want to read about grad school and not so much about Super Mario Galaxy.)

Thanksgiving break has come to an end. I'll be honest, this was a pretty disappointing one. Female trouble reminding me of my perpetual singledom, Thanksgiving lunch at a restaurant, finding a dog I *really* wanted to adopt at the SPCA only to find out that my lease doesn't allow pets (a surprise to me as my neighbor has one), and my first NCSU game as a student being a 37-0 loss to Maryland.

But the annoying-ass age-old rhetorical question about the glass and its various states of emptiness and fullness reminds me that there is something good about basically all of those things I just listed. Female trouble: well, I'm still single -- the girls I've seen this semester haven't worked out for me, but that just means I'm that much more eligible for all the hot ladies lining up outside my door (good lord that's a stretch, but I'm going for bright sides here.) Thanksgiving lunch: it was a *good-ass* lunch. And it was cool to be with my mom after spending the last 2 Thanksgivings away (once at my dad's, once at Steph's house... shudder.) Dog disappointment: the girl working as an "adoption counselor" that I talked to was incredibly cute. No, I didn't get her number. I was with my mom, and plus I'm un-smooth. But still, that lifted my spirits a bit. NCSU loss: at least I got to go with Brian (a friend from the Technician) and his brother to tailgate beforehand, and met up with Anne (Brian's fiance and my friend from Shakespeare class) at the game. Cool people. New friends are always good. 

I also got to see "No Country for Old Men" twice over break. I know that's kind of weird, but when I see a movie that I think is *really* good, I generally try to go see it again as soon as possible while I still remember everything about the story, so I can look for little details. It was definitely worth 2 viewings, and gave me a lot to think about. Everyone should go see it. I will warn you that it's very dark and offers an extremely pessimistic thesis about the human condition. What I took away from it was a sense that evil, while pretty rarely found in individuals, is still prevalent in the world, and a single good person really can't do jack shit to change that. Bad people seem to be more powerful than good people, if only  because their motives are difficult to understand and their actions unpredictable. And often good has to work in response to evil, which pretty much blows. It's not like bad people do bad things because they see good stuff happening.

It left me with a fairly profound sense of pessimism about the future of humanity, but the bright side of that was the fact that there are a hell of a lot of good people out there that I know of, that care deeply about other people and the future of the planet and kids and animals. I really think the problem has to do with organization versus apathy. I hope this moment doesn't come too late, but we all need some large purpose to rally around and make some pretty huge changes. I sound like a third-rate socialist tract-writer, so I will stop now. By the way, none of that was really in the movie, it's just kind of what it got me thinking about. So I didn't spoil anything for you.

I have so much shit due for my classes next week, so you will probably hear more from me as I attempt to procrastinate over the coming two weeks. Then, whenever Christmas break gets here, I'm heading up to Asheville to be with my dad and stepmom and also to quit smoking (again). Given that I wake up a couple of times a night on average needing a cigarette, it's sure to be a hair-raising experience, and I'll probably make sleep-deprived, irritable observations on this blog at that time as well.

I guess I'll end with a little anecdote. The other night (last week, I guess) I was walking from the Tech. office to the Dan Allen deck where I park. I approached the "gum wall" (a wall where everyone sticks the gum that they've been chewing) with near-hypochondriac trepidation. For some reason, that wall just looks like a gigantic slab of concrete disease to me. There was a young family with a girl about six or seven walking the opposite direction, towards me, and we passed the wall at the same time. I overheard the little girl say to her mom about the wall, "You know, Mom, in a way, it's kind of beautiful."

For some reason, I was really touched by that. Not only was it awesome that the girl looked at the wall, processed it, formed an opinion, and shared it with her mom, but the fact that she saw beauty in it was almost stunning to me. Because then I started thinking about it in that context -- how the hell could this be considered beautiful? -- and then realized that the thousand wads of chewed-up gum had been placed there by a thousand different people, all thinking different thoughts, carrying out different tasks, going through their various lives. That's probably the corniest thing I've ever written, but in the end, I agreed -- in a way, it was kind of beautiful.

To counteract how corny that was, I'll end this with the craziest painting I've ever seen, in the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.