There is little in this world as comforting as the sudden knowledge that how the soul of Idi Amin, who lives in a dorm room on the far end of campus (not Au's campus, mind. Just... A campus), wants to give you a new computer in exchange for the broken shards of your current laptop, which you broke... skydiving? (Here things get vague, because that was earlier in the dream) And you know he wants it to take over all creation or something but he'll do something terrible to you if you don't give in, and maybe you can give him a pdf of the core D&D books and maybe he'll leave you alone? You know, that?

That was just a dream.

... Right?

I was at work, putting books into boxes to be returned to where they came from. And then, my boss Charlie showed up (which was odd, as it was clearly past the time she'd have left), and reminded me of five more things I ought to do. I thought to myself that this seemed oddly dreamlike, but hey, this happens. So, I ended up leaving work at eleven, which turned into eleven-forty, because the buses just run like that sometimes. And I couldn't get hold of Sara, and I knew she was worried, but there was nothing I could do but wait for the bus. So I found myself waiting at some sort of outside bar, drinking a White Russian and trying to figure out whether I was justified in leaving without paying if the bartender left me waiting for five minutes.  I called Sara again, to get her opinion on the matter, and she wanted to know why I was getting home so late, and I honestly couldn't explain why this particular work-day had been twelve hours long.

And then I woke up, fifteen minutes ago, to find out that I'd somehow dreamed the whole unnecessarily-twelve-hour-workday in the twenty minutes since I'd turned off my alarm.

Great. My subconscious thinks it's Jonathan Swift. A very trite Jonathan Swift.

Except for the White Russian bit. Alcohol doesn't happen very often in my life.

We're engaged.

Friday, we went to see The Tale of Despereaux. Spoilers and all that, for Despereaux in all forms.

Until Friday night, I'd always held a relativly simple rule regarding books that are adapted into films: read the book first. Jackass. Now, it seems that rule needs some... tweaking.

This is not a criticism of the flick—at least, not directly. The Tale of Despereaux is, I would say, a fine enough movie, flawed in ways both bizzare and unneeded, but not fatally so. I didn't feel moved by it, but not every kid's movie has to have a Dori-and-Marlin "You think you can do these things, but you can't, Nemo..." gutpunch to it. The movie was good. It was more than satisfactory for both children and for adults who aren't expecting the second coming of Stitch.

One thing that The Tale of Desperaux is decidedly not, however, is The Tale of Despereaux.

This is a complicated point, so I'd understand if you wanted to reread it. All cleared up? Good. Onwards.

The Tale of Despereaux, being the tale of a small mouse, a princess, a spool of thread, and some soup, is a Newberry-winning novel by Kate DeCamillo. You may have seen it in the stores: a mouse on the cover, a loop of red thread around his waist with a needle thrust into it, rushing off towards a future which is uncertain and probably dire, and which must be faced. This is a story for the ages and all ages. A story about heroism, yes. And about storytelling, about how the stories we tell each other matter. And about what makes people do bad things. And about how it is always the outsider, the outcast, the freak who has the chance to be great. And about how we can heal, and how there is a way (as Rahim Khan promised) to be good again, but also about being good again is never the same as having been good in the first place. How Happy Ever After is out of reach, but we can, we must strive for the best end we can atain, knowing that we may never win the princess's heart, but to strive is all we have the way we'd hoped. We can have the light, it tells us. But we may never be of it. And a thousand other things besides.

And all of these may be in the film, in bits and pieces. But never at full strength. At the same time, the film adds a bevvy of completly sepearate (and arguably ugly) messages laid on, most notablly one about being fearless. Not brave, not the bravery of the coward who knees knocking holds his ground, but the fearlessness of the madman who charges the dragon because he sees no reason not to. Desperaux is changed from a total outsider whose sin is that he fundamentally finds beauty in a world that none of the other mice know to a mere oddball who endangers the community by acting as though the world were a safe one. The paper dreamer is turned into a digital daredevil, who leaps into a danger that his literary forebear (quite sensibly) faints at the thought of facing. Faints twice, in fact. It is easier to admire the daredevil. But it is the dreamer that we must aspire to become.

Not a single character survives the adaptation: Chiaroscuro is turned from a light-loving rat who, driven back into the dark, seeks revenge as light's subsitute, into an outsider who is il at ease in the dungeion; the Princess is made darker. Even the nature of the three socities is shifted: the rats are turned from dark-dwelling Mephisto-like masters of psycological torture to a crudely civilized race of proto-Roman bloodsport worshipers whose city, far from dark, has more matches than a smoker's loungue; the mice are made cowards rather than reactionaries, and given (like the rats) far too urban, far too human a lifestyle for my liking. The human kingdom is stripped of the grit where a father might sell his daughter ofr a blanket to a man who will box her ears, and turned into a happy-fairytale land where divine writ can change the weather and where soup is supremely elevated to a position normally reserved for the divine. Perhaps because it's in the title of the book, which makes me wonder what happened to the spool of thread, which started out deserving its eponymous role.

Anyway.

Despite the preceding sentence, the two paragraphs before that, and all the other words that might lead you to think otherwise, the movie itself is fine. Had I not read the book, I would only have had problems with the fact that outlawing soup keeps the rain from falling for no good reason besides quirky metaphysics, and that Desperaux glides with his ears twice in a wholly futile manner, a trick that seems pointedly pointless. But these can be allowed, in the same way that I can allow for the silly vegetable soup sous-chef, who is somewhat jarring but still can be allowed in a movie not on a book where such a creature clearly has no business.

If you were to write out a basic plot summery for both book and movie, you'd see many differences, but also a fair number of similarities; compared to, say, the Ironman movie vs. the earliest Ironman comic books, they're practically one and the same. And yet...

Both works feature a trial of Despereaux for the crime of consorting with the Princess (among other acts). The facts are apparent in both hearings; the verdicts and sentences are identical. But the procedings are somewhat difficult. In the film, Desperaux is offered the chance to explain his actions. He responds that the book he read was intersting, and the princess he spoke with was beautiful. And this is the wrong thing to say.
In the book, what he is asked, what he is offered, is the chance to admit fault. An atonement which will not save his body, but will (we are told) save his soul. Admit your fault, and it will be easier. He responds that he has no fault to confess. And this is the wrong thing to say.

These two exchanges are similar. But they are not the same. And in between the two, I think, lies the world.

So, if you want to see a mouse in theatres this New Years, do yourself a favor: hold off on the book. Wait for it. Because you owe it to yourself to read it, you truly do. But once you've seen gold, silver seems all the more tarnished.

Is this pretentious? Two thousand words on a kid's cartoon which basically say "see it if you want; it's okay"? I guess, probably.

I'm employed! Tomorrow, I go in to my first day as Assistant Manager at the Hudson News in Dulles Airport.

Hooray!

That is all.

An Employed Lit major! I know!

Every news story discussing Henry Paulson's $700,000,000,000 economic bail-out should, at least once, print out the whole number, with zeros, before going back to calling it seven hundred billion. Because we're too used to hearing "a billion dollars" thrown around, from Dr. Evil's monetary demands to the amount that Bill Gates is spending fighting malaria to the theatrical take of three motion pictures (soon to be four). But, you know, seven hundered billion dollars here and $700,000,000,000 there, and soon we're talking real money.

And we need those zeroes. Without them, 7*10¹¹ looks ... ordinary.

I also find it highly suspicious that we need it just after the Zimbabwe dollar's devaluation. Maybe Paulson meant he wanted seven hundred thousand million of those.

A pretty good weekend. The first Mage: The Ascension game of the year, a bit of hanging out with friends, plenty of Sara time. (At the moment, we're Netflixing The Gilmore Girls, and streaming Red Dwarf) Yesterday, Sara, Becky and I went to the Montgomery Mall for shoes and sundries. And while Sara was trying on some pants in Torrid, Becky and I went into the Borders Express.

Oh, I thought to myself, looking at the sizable displays of dragon-coated hardcovers. Brisingr is out.

Becky, it turns out, owns a copy of both Eragon and Eldest, and had gotten halfway through the first one before giving up in disgust. I'd done somewhat better (for a certain value of "better), reading all of Eragon while in Montana. And while we waited for Sara, we discussed the manifold failings of the novel. Some of them were, perhaps, somewhat silly: Becky pointing out, for example, that Brisingr breaks the E____ pattern established by the first novels. Other failings were something more egregious. I commented that Eragon himself, the titular character, was dull and not someone that you really feel compelled to name a novel after. Becky claimed to have lost track of the number of side characters that the book introduced. I remembered the werecat, and muttered dark threats. Neither of us, clearly, showed any intrest in investigating the Inheritance books any further.

Before you say anything: Yes, Christopher Paolini was 15 when he had the first book published. Yes, hitting the New York Times bestseller's at 19 is a feat. But from the perspective of a reader, this does no more than excuse the transparant lack of craftmanship to the novel. And an excuse is no patch.

So we have a novel with a simple dichotomy between good and evil, without the mythicized, otherworldly Evil that a Tolkin or an Alexander would provide; Galbatorix is an entirely mortal but unseen Emperor who inspired neither dread nor anger nor any reactgion at all other than some degree over his ridiculous name. We have a hero who is boringly overcompetent. We have enough random fantasy monsters to populate a D&D campaigin (including the aforementioned werecat), and four different magic systems, two elements which I personally found obnoxious. And at the end, we have a true thud of a battle which evokes neither a cinematic view of near defeat turning to desperate triumph, nor the chaos of a battle where you can see no farther into the distance than the next sword being raised up against you, where victory or defeat is meaningless compared to the need to survive a few breaths more. (I'm reminded of a moment from To Green Angel Tower, at the Lake of Glass, where Simon, attempting to catch his breath, looks around and wonders who is winning).

And above all, we have the utter lack of any novel theme, or novel view of a theme. There's Destiny and Justice and Freedom and some implied True Love or something, but it all develops into nothing we haven't seen befoe, except perhaps the argument (voiced in argument to Eragon) that killing men who surender or flee is no worse than killing an armed man in a "fair fight" that he has no possible chance of winning. Maybe that's an innovation; it certainly isn't an idea I've explicitly heard, although the idea of tying your metaphic hand behind your back to give the enemy a "chance" is vaugly analogous.

So, total crap. Which makes it all the more depressing that this weekend tens of thousands of people (not all of them kids) are going to be putting down thirty bucks for the latest in this literary trudge through medicrity.

When they could reach for something much better.

OK. I'm certainly not about to suggest that the target audience of Eragon should be reading A Song of Ice and Fire; I'm still vauguly uncomfortable with the knowlege that my 13-year-old sister has finished the first books that George R. R. Martin has written, a discomfort which stems only in part from the fact that she finished them before I could. Because Westeros is not Happy Fun Sunshine Land; Martin writes about hideious betrayal and hopeless honor and fatal love and sex, sex, sex—violent, incestuous, certainly "unwholesome"—which may not really make him the best choice for the pre-teen sect, or even for most of the teenagers.

But that's the nature of the story he's telling: a story where there is no Evil Empire, no Dark Lord. It's fantasy, yes, filled with the shadows of maegi and wights, abuzz with the flame of dragons and the light of unknown gods. But the core of the story, in truth, could have existed in Europe five hundered years ago: a war for a kingdom which is tearing that kingdom to splinters. And Martin shines in this. Because there is no such thing as safety here, no character shields other than the assumption that a story is not yet finished.

There's a moment in the third book of the series, A Storm of Swords, which is both a narrative pivot and an emotional cannon to the gut. If you read it, you will be shaken. There are dozens of moments that will probably evoke thrill or anger or (in a rare instance) some jot of desperate joy. But Martin has written what may the the closest thing to certain I've ever read. And this kind of "certain" is pretty rare. There's nothing of that in Eragon, a novel where the certainties are the survival of the main character and the probable death of a mentor or two and revelations about his parentage and some angst at the start of the novel which has nothing to do with anything.

So, why should you be reading A Song of Ice and Fire? Why shouldn't you give Eragon a try? Because the only emotion that George R. R. Martin fails to provoke is disintrest. And the only thing interestng about Paolini is wondering how he became a success in the first place.

Food now, I think.

I'm still filling out job applications...

Even though I am a hard worker, it somehow seems dishonest to say that I have a good work ethic. The truth is, I do. But only when I'm actually working. Looking for work, evidnetly, not so much.

Also, it's like a million degrees. That might be part of it.

Sorry it's been a while since I've put something up. I've been busy!

Very busy. Between the working and the flying home and Radcliffe dying retiring and the long search for a house, a search which ended Monday in the same location that it had almost ended in a bloody month sooner, before I first balked on not seeing the place and then decided that being about a half hour closer to all my friends (one friend in particular) was worth the extra $X a month in rent. It still might have been worth it. Given I'm only here for four months, and in January (hopefully), Sara and I will have our own place (or maybe split our own place with a friend), it still might be worth it in the future. But given it didn't happen, I'm now in my own room, in Rockville, MD.

It's...

It's not a bad roo, don't get me wrong. It's a bit warm now, and it was too cold earlier, and it's hard to read what the kitchen stove is telling me about the knobs, and... well, it's basic. It's great, really. I just need to get settled. And maybe a dresser or shelves or something.

The problem... Well, there's a couple things. For starters, Radcliffe is inoporable, leaving about twenty five hundred songs inacessible. At the same time, I've lost the cord for my shuffle, so even the (ten hours of) podcasts on my new laptop (currently nameless) are... tethered. And the temp agency is still letting me know about work next week and...

I don't know. I'm just sort of rootless at the moment. What have I accomplished today? Not too much. Certainly not the things I'd intended to do. And yesterday was kind of similar, although at least then I got to see Sara.

On the bright side, my alarm is set reasonably early in the morning tomorrow, and I've got a text file full of things I need to do. Tomorrow is a better day. Let's hope I can seize it.

I need to write more. Because writing this was decidedly unsatisfactory.

Yes, I know I'm not very good at keeping this thing updated. Life is pretty busy, but enjoyable here, though, so I don't really have the time. And the internet sucks.

Which is a problem. Because I'm looking for housing, and it's really hard to do it if you need to reload the page every few minutes.

Still, I've seen a few prospects. Some rooms that aren't... well, I'm not really sure what my price range is, because my job plans at the moment are "Temp, and look for jobs". But I'm saving a good amount of money here, and I think I'll be able to earn enough to pay, say, $800 in rent without starving.

The problem is, of course, that I don't know how to phrase a request for the relatively few rooms I've found which are less than a thousand dollars a month. "Hi. I'm quiet and don't smoke or drink, and I can probably make rent and maybe give you bread, but I'm not sure I can commit to a year-long lease." That's what I've got so far. And it's true, and honest, and as compelling as a novel about termites. And I'm not seeing that many rooms that I know I can afford.

I ought to look for a roommate, I guess. But everyone I know has already figured out their housing situation.

Argh. I'm just stressed, and worried about it all. Because I do not want to go live at home in the fall. Because I love my family. But I need a job which will lead to other jobs. I need to be with my friends. I need to stay in the same MTA as the girl I love.

And to do these things, I need a roof over my head. And an Internet which will let me find one..

Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me would make me feel better. If it would just bloody download...
Seriously. Much better connection in Beijing.

Today, the weather is beautiful.

This was a bit surprising, I must say; the past week and a half, the weather has been utterly wretched: cold and wet and cloudy, and the Employee Dining Room flooded. Yesterday, I was persisting in jokes at work about how buisness was bound to pick up once the weather improved.

In July.

But then, at about six in the morning, Sara nudged me to wakefullness* and pointed to the window. Through the crack in the window frame, we could see a miraculous stripe of blue. The sun had risen without a shroud. Montana's fabled Big Sky was no longer a mess of clouds.

It was the most beautiful day I could remember

*Strictly speaking, I probably was already awake, or at least easily roused. Sara's not the kind to wake a person whose sleep is needed.

Two Sundays ago was graduation. And it was... well, a ceremony. And I got a little case for business cards I don't have and a folder that they're going to turn into a diploma eventually and a renewed, swiftly buried belief that the four year stretch I'd just ended were by no means the equal of my potential, that graduating in four years with only one sub-B grade was nothing compared to the all-As, With Honors In Literature tour d'force that it could have been.

But I'm not talking about that.

Anyway, it was nice. My whole family was there: Basil came down from Drew, Calvin from University of Vermont, Mom came down with Zoe, and Dad and Connie. And it was good to see everyone, good to see some small level of reconciliation between my mom and stepmom.

And then, it was over; everyone packed into cars and vanished (annoyingly, leaving me still holding onto the program and pseudodiploma, both of which I'd want but would prefer to have elsewhere), Sara and I went to buy hiking boots and then to Guapos with our friend Rachel, and then we went back into the room and started throwing the last thousand things into duffel bags and rolling bags and trash bags.

At some point, it became all-too-clear that I was going to have to put off finishing Wizard and Glass for a few months. This is the second time I've had this problem.

We ended up passing out at midnight, then waking up at quarter-to-five, hauling all our stuff down and out into a Washington rainstorm, and getting onto a Super Shuttle which got us to BWI long before the Canada Air terminal was even open.

The rest of the trip over wasn't really anything that intersting: the flight from Baltimore to Toronto was on this little fifty-four seater where even carryon luggage got checked, and we had a little trouble making sure our bags were following us to Calgary. But otherwise, we were fine. Even the minor confusion about whether we were actually getting picked up in Calgary was resolved in a couple phone calls in the Toronto Airport.

So, it wasn't all that long before (at long last) we found ourselves in Calgary, headed towards the bagage. An oldish man from Arkasas held a St. Mary sign, and we headed towards him. His name was Bob; he was our ride.

We weren't the best of charges, I'm afraid. Our only defense is that we were exhausted after the flight and the lacking of sleep. And so we watched the scenery, which was...

I'm a writer. I should be able to do this. But it's hard to really capture just how far you could see, the way that tiny black lines on the horison turned into wind power stations hundredws of feet tall. The way that you could see the windbreaks that occasionally cropped up and think that they were not only agriculturally immportant, but psychologically necessary, to establish something besides the road and the house and the places where the tiling of the soil produced slightly different hues of crop. The way you could see a rainstorm ten, twenty, fifty miles away.

And then, as the miles wore on, and on: the mountains came into view.

Montana. Whoever named it was not exactly the most subtle of people; I can imagine him naming the Sahara "Sand". I don't have too much time, but lte me just say that I'm looking at a mountain and I'm increasingly aware that we don't really make them like this back East. We've got some pretty nice hills, I guess. But what we've got here? The real McCoy.

St. Mary itself is pretty nice. There's a good mix of people here. I haven't gotten close to any of them yet, but its coming along; Sara keeps talking about trying to get some sort of RPG together, which would be awesome. But even if that doesn't work, I think I'll be fine socially. I may just need to drink a bit more is all.

And the work... Well, it was kinda boring for the first couple weeks. Mostly opening boxes and taking inventory and such, which isn't bad, but isn't really the thing I take joy in. But on Monday, I finally got to work at the Curly Bear, the cafe that I was hired to work at.

And I remembered how much I love customers.

No sarcasm: I really am enjoying it: asking people where they came from, making sure that I have orders right (Medium rare, no cheese), smiling at the kids. The tipping is kind of short, and there's been more than a few slow hours (an amount that'll go down as the season picks up) which are boring as hell, but otherwise, I'm enjoying work.

Will I go stir crazy? Maybe. But I'm cautiously optimistic.

I'll say more in later posts; I will make them, I promise. But right now, I've got a beautiful girl sitting a few feet away, reading Cold Mountain. And she doesn't know it, but she needs to be kissed.

Things Sara is apparently being paid to do: keep me off kilter, confuse me, "pretend to be my girlfriend"

They're getting their moneys worth. The question then becomes why I buy dinner for her if I'm already funding it.

Does it mean anything when, in a card she'd given you congratulating you for graduating, the professor who gave your literature thesis a C tells you that you might enjoy studying psychology?

One day until graduating. One night more of packing. Monday, I will be not with the crazi

It's been May Day all day today?!?

The one day I don't look at a calendar...

A year ago, I was going to graduate American University with University Honors in Literature.

Six months ago, I was going to graduate American University with University Honors in Literature.

Heck, three months ago, I was going to graduate American University with University Honors in Literature.

Today? Today I gave Professor Noble my thesis. Thirty five pages of thesis. Ignoring a couple incomplete works of fiction, it's the longest thing I've ever put my name on.

And it's terrible.

Don't argue, I know it is. The argument behind it lacks complexity, the amount of interaction with criticism is entirely insufficient, and when I tried to deal in the paper with a question Professor Loesberg asked me on Lit Day, I got through two pages before I realized that what I was saying had remarkably little to do with Kant, the actual point of the thesis. If Professor Noble hadn't told me last week that I had a weak-but-passing thesis, I'd be worried that I wouldn't graduate, that I'd have to fix the thesis over the summer or the fall, or redo the entire ordeal next spring—and at a sizable financial cost in any event.

That's not true, actually: I am still half-convinced that despite what I remember Noble saying, I'm still not passing, that the ultimately minor fixes I made between the rough draft and final reflect negatively on a paper which needed at least ten pages more actual, substantive argument.

The problem is this: I'm burned out. It isn't that I don't care about the paper: despite any appearances to the contrary, I know the paper is weak, and I tried to get it right. But I couldn't: I read Dickens criticism and Kant criticism, I tried to find the more complex argument that I know is out there. But my brain refuses to work on a thesis which half the brain is sick to the death of. The spirit was willing; the mind, however, has been plumb tuckered out for the past week.

A big part of it was the fact that I changed my thesis back in January. And that's part of it, don't get me wrong; but it feels like an excuse. And I have a beautiful girlfriend and a great social life, things which are fantastic but take time themselves. But I can't blame my thesis on those, either: I'm hardly the only person to have them, and it's not like they take up so much time that I couldn't have gotten it work done as well. I don't even have a job; why wouldn't

I should be smarter than this. I should be better than this.

I'm in the Honor's program. I'm smart. I earned my credits. I just needed fifty pages to get honor's credit for the thesis, to get University Honors in Literature. And I had thirty-five pages. Seven-tenth of what I'd needed. Fifteen more pages would have been a lot of writing. It would have required..., well, actually having a point to the bloody thesis.

And then I point out that I did what was required of me. The best I could do. I got through, earned my BA in four years with a good GPA. Nothing outstanding, but I don't have to be outstanding. Plenty of people take longer, and do worse. Getting through should be enough. Being average should be enough.

It's all true. I know it is

But I don't believe it. And I'm not sure I'd want to, even if I could.

I turned it in, apologizing to Professor Noble, and Professor Leonard (who wouldn't have much to do with my paper if it wasn't supposed to be an Honor's thesis, but I was just apologizing anyway), and then went down the stairs of Battelle. The building I'd been avoiding for the past month, because I couldn't deal with all the professors I owed things to. It was over. My eyes had a trace of tears, my stomach was churning, my shoes were soaked with rain. But, for better or worse, I was done.

I'll feel better with a nice long sleep, and a good run on the eliptical.
And maybe a novel in the sun, or a

The thing about presenting a paper at Lit Day is that you make it all look easy.

Over the past few months, every student has gone from some degree of scratch, reading texts and critics and commentary and philosophy and history, and slowly building up an intellectual construct in their head that is The Paper. And all that gets lost in the mess under the bed when you finally start talking about what the construct looks like.

This means two things. First, everyone else is a towering genius, presenting an incredibly fleshed out work of staggering genius. "Jesse Custer is a Promethain figure!" "Banned books are censored for the very reasons students should read them!" "Metafiction is Awesome!" Fine. Ben's argument was a lot more interesting than that.

Second: you don't feel brilliant. You sit there with the notes you dashed out last night about Kantian themes in Dickens and feel like a sham. Because hey, any idiot can point out that Estella and Pip are both seen as the means to an end by Havisham and Magwitch, which directly causes them to lack a sense of agency, a sense of agency Pip only regains by having his own status as an end acknowledge by Herbert Pocket and Wemmick.

That's obvious.

The mess under the bed does not exist for everyone but you. Everything has become second nature in your work, while everything other people have done is as foreign as Zanzibar. It's a weird sort of dichotomy where you can look at your thoughts and say "Yeah, I guess that's all right. But look at what that guy said! I wish I could think things like that."

And at the same time? He's thinking the same thing about you.

Also: after, there was a Lit Day Barbecue at Anna Finn's house.

And I've come to the conclusion that... well, there may be something energizing about hanging out with other people of your major. Something which, for Lit Majors, doesn't really happen prior to senior year, since everyone loves a lit class. But Senior Year, all the lit majors take two classes. Two classes which invite, nay, require, out-of-class festivities. And something seems to happen at them.

It might just be that I don't go to enough parties (something I'll readily admit); especially parties with people I know reasonably well; especially parties that don't have Super Smash Brothers Brawl. But at the lit social gatherings I've been to...

Well, there's a common language among lit majors. We know books. We've read too much criticism. We don't have job prospects. We have mixed feelings about MFA programs. We're snobs about books we don't like, but have more "guilty pleasures" than we can keep track of. There are constants which invite discussion. And so discussion ensues. Some of it what one would expect. Others... well, more specific.

Instance: I had a conversation about The Name of the Rose, and about how Umberto Eco apparently meant the first hundred pages as a test to find out what readers had the endurance to get to the really good parts, and whether that was a valid choice for a writer.

I don't know if it's just me. Does this happen to history majors? If I were the fly on the wall at a party for SIS seniors, would I hear scintillating comments about the breakdown of Westphalian sovereignty? Or is it just that I've been to too few parties, and that people have been having enlightening conversations all around me that I'd just fail to hear?

I don't know. But I'm out of here in a few short weeks. Once I'm gone, I'm going to need to find out.

Because somehow, against all the odds, I find myself leaving college the one thing I'd never thought I'd become: a people person.

Also a sangria person, apparently. That is some nice drunkenness.

The Discovery Channel is made of joy.
This commercial is The Discovery Channel concentrated.
■ This commercial is joy concentrate:

I don't know. It's in part because, hey, Mythbusters. But also because... Well, The World is Just Awesome.

Never forget. Never.

Hat tip dimethirwen

Having done two ten-minute talks about my thesis today—once at Lit Day, where all Lit Capstones are presented, and one at the 2008 Honors Capstone Conference, where Honors students present their work—plus a slightly longer one at the CAS Student Research Conference in Katzen a few weeks ago, I've come to the conclusion that I'd really be much better off if I could just go with the ten minute presentation, which is apparently pretty good, rather than the forty-odd page paper, which is... currently less than stellar.

But... well, it's never that easy, is it?

Fortunately, I've got... well, some time. Not buckets of it, perhaps, but...

As I may have mentioned before, I'm a bit of an NPR Most Emailed Stories junkie. So: I was listening to a story about video game music, specifically with regards to the hit orchestral tour, Video Games Live.

And now I want a copy of Carmina Burana. Because they played a clip of it, before they played a clip of Myst III that it inspired. And... damn.

I also kind of want to play the games they talked about. But that's neither here nor there.

I'm writing this, in part, because I can't concentrate on the reading packet by my left elbow. And because... well, I keep meaning to write this. I keep meaning to write a bunch of things, stories and papers and essays, and I just can't summon the time for the ones that I want or the concentration for the ones that academia needs.

Well, I can't get the concentration right now. And so I'm making the time.

A month until graduation. A month; Sunday the Eleventh, to be exact. 2:PM. It's startling and terrifying, in part because of all the stuff I need to do in order to assure it goes off without a hitch, and in part because... well, what happens next?

The more less more scary part first. In part because I'll know how it works out sooner.

My Thesis. It... I honestly don't know if it'll be where it needs to be when it needs to be there. As it stands... well, it's long and I think detailed but it need more secondary criticism and more Kant throughout the whole thing and I'm almost sick to death of the whole thing. The upshot is that there is almost no way that it won't be long enough to be the Honor's length of 50 pages.

The downshot is that it's going to need a lot of not only writing, but reading—reading critics—in order to get a grade that lets me actually graduate.

And then there's the other stuff, two papers I need to write and one that I'll need to revise and a story that needs revision for the creative writing course. It's not going to be a pleasant couple weeks, I'm thinking

So, I think it's understandable that I've spent a pitifully small amount of time on the next step.

I mean, I applied for positions at a handful of publishing houses. I didn't hear back from any of them. But hey, I'm not entirely surprised; the "Work" portion of my resume is troubling.

Which is just one more reason for me to be so thankful for Sara.

A couple summers ago, you see, Sara worked retail at Yellowstone. And, according to her, it was a great time. So, she started looking into going west this summer as well. And, seeing that I hadn't figured out what I was doing next month, why didn't I try to join her in Montana?

Why didn't I?

A few months doing minimum wage labor full time, exploring the wilderness with the woman you love, and trying to find some more long-term source of income when you actually have the mental energy to do it? It makes perfect sense.

I'm still apprehensive. But then, I'm always apprehensive; here, the apprehension is mostly because it's not a career right out of college, an expectation which plenty of graduates don't fulfill. And because it's a new experience; despite my own wishes to the contrary, I'm not good at new experiences.

On the other hand, I have always wanted to... well, to see a part of the US west of Ohio.

So, in a month, if all goes well, I graduate. And then, again if all goes well, I should be headed to Glacier National Park. And I'll be there until late August.

And after that?

I don't know. After I graduate, nothing looks certain. There's nothing to do but feel your way out, one stepping stone at a time. And I'm trusting that there will always be another rock to jump to.

And if I miss? If despite my best efforts, I stumble in the leap I should be stretching for right now?

I've only been able to find one, uncomforting answer to give myself:
"Don't."

You can do it, buddy! We're gonna make it!
Hold tight, Fred.