Since it's been literally two years or so, I decided to do an "Update on life in general and random thoughts, you can read and care if you want to" type of post. In my head I also call this an "Anan-style" blog post, though instead of a song lyric I started with a Steven Wright joke.
Can't say I'm sorry school is over. That is, I already miss some people, and will miss some more as the summer progresses, but currently I'm enjoying not having any deadlines hanging over my head, and having only one young person who is likely to burst into my room at any given moment and try to drag me off on some inane-but-fun adventure. Also the food is better here.
Now, what would make my mostly-contentment just about perfect would be if I could find a regular job. My dad has a 9-4 job weekdays for an indefinite period of time, which limits my options to getting a job in town or getting evenings, weekends, and/or overnights. I think I'd rather like an overnight job--10 PM to 6 AM seem to be my most natural hours to be awake anyway. Otherwise a job in town would be nice, something I could walk to. I've applied at most of the at-all-likely places in town already this past week, and will hit a few more on Monday. I also plan to make up a poster advertising my willingness to do... pretty much anything that will make me money, in the style of an old broadsheet: "Children cared for WITH THE UTMOST TENDERNESS! Yard work done... WITH ALMOST MAGICAL RESULTS! Subjects tutored by one of the most learned minds OF THE ENTIRE MIDWEST!" Something like this.
Over the past few days I watched the entire long version (only 312 minutes) of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. Bergman is someone that people like my mom suffer through in film school, and people like me grin and enjoy every minute of. (Usually in film school one watches his The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries, neither of which I have seen.) At any rate, this was a momentously incredible movie, of the kind that is not really describable but which leaves one with the general summary impression of: "Wow. Woooooow." One thing I appreciated was that it was about a family of theatre people (granted, set in 1907 Sweden, but theatre people apparently don't change that much). Another thing I appreciated was how bloody bizarre it got. Also, over the course of 312 minutes, the only time I ever got close to being impatient or bored with a scene was right at the end of the whole thing, which is pretty remarkable. (Granted I did not watch the whole thing in one sitting, but it wasn't necessarily meant to be watched that way.)
Thanks to Mr. Gee, I've started listening to Tom Waits, who you really just have to experience to understand.
My reading lately has consisted of Son of the Mob; a book of all the recorded words and dications of Joan of Arc; a book arguing seriously that Atlantis existed (which was greatly entertaining); The Thackery T. Lambshead Book of Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (in which a bunch of fantasy writers play around with disease, also hugely entertaining); and the latest book by R. Scott Bakker, one of the most bizarre modern writers of epic fantasy.
The short summary of my last three paragraphs is that my cultural diet lately has consisted largely of the arcane, outlandish, fantastic, weird, and bizarre. Needless to say, it makes me happy.
