I am ridiculously apathetic about everything this week: I come hope, faceplant, then stay up past midnight online or reading novels. It's the sort of week when one might finish Anathem by accident. (I don't have it in the house; it's just the longest novel on the short list.) My to-do list is at a standstill. Apparently I invited something like eight people over for a game night on Friday; now I have to figure out how to feed them without burning the house down. (As much as I'd like to throw stuff in the crockpot before work and forget about it, I live in irrational but mortal terror that the crockpot will have an electrical short and turn the kitchen into a fireball.) Worst case scenario: I set something on fire, we order delivery, I pretend cheese pizza was always supposed to be dinner. I suspect I may be overreacting.

Also, my hair is still frizzy. I hate it. Not the little bit of dislike that makes you switch your shampoo, no: I want to spend major money on professional styling and enough product to fill my medicine cabinet until I have bouncy red carpet hair. Not enough to actually do it - yet - but enough to really regret further postponing a delayed hair trim. This is totally Slacker Week.

In a nearly unprecedented display of faith in humanity, I went to see fireworks with bio!J, her friend D, and D's roommate J, and crashed at D and J's afterward. (I hate changing my plans only slightly less than I hate imposing for crash space.) I am very pleased with my pictures of the fireworks, which came out very well considering I didn't have a tripod, and include some moments that are suitably Apocalypse Now. Sunday I drove home, napped, then got back out the door for the Nats-Braves game downtown and had the unusual pleasure of seeing the Nats not lose.

Yesterday I went to work and had the unique pleasure of being reminded that the annual safety video review is, in fact, annual and mandatory. For day two I intend to beg people to play hangman during choice moments of How Not To Die By Tripping Over Power Cords and Disrobing Your Coworkers After a Chemical Spill.

Locals, I appeal to your knowledge: I am supposed to make dinner plans for early next week with someone who's staying in Crystal City. What are the good restaurants in that area? Please keep in mind that it's possible neither of us will have a car, so anyone who suggests anything on the orange line will be mocked.

Sexiest electronics I have seen in at least three years. It's a netbook and a tablet! Portability, meet touch screen, meet my brain turning into some sort of cartoon landscape.

M. is on her merry way for a week of vacation, leaving me in sole custody of the apartment. I took the opportunity to take a short walk at Gravelly Point and across the Potomac, then got groceries and Cinnabon, checked the mail, threw out the trash and relocated the two full bags of recycling my roommates thoughtfully accumulated and didn't take out while I was house-sitting, ate half my Cinnabon, debated mopping the kitchen floor, and instead conked out on the couch. Before noon, even. I wound up at Maggiano's for K.'s birthday dinner, which was as fantastically expensive as I'd expected, but had some amazing desserts. Also, K. did a great job of managing family-style ordering, lactose intolerance, and vegetarianism. I sort of rolled away from the table after all that food.

Today I slept in, swept and mopped the kitchen floor, threw the kitchen and bath rugs in the washer, and attended to the all-important matter of watermelon. Mmm. Later today I am supposed to meet bio!J to hang out, and tomorrow I may be going to a Nats game. Monday is back to the grind, so I'd better make the most of the weekend. Happy Independence Day, Americans!

Via oursin: reply to this meme by yelling (or even saying gently) "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

So if people want words, hit me.

( Science, Fanfic, Wiscon, Music, Art )

Dear Pandora: I wish there was a way to tell you I hate Brandon Flowers's voice. I would be willing to try covers of Killers songs some time, if there's any on your servers.

Also I made the saddest mix ever, featuring the "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" from the Master & Commander soundtrack, and the Virginia Gentlemen a capella cover of "Mercy Street". I'd also have Tallis's "Spem in Alium" on there, but then I would be useless at work, and that's no good.

I am five years too young for Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson's death to really hit me, but the US versus Spain upset? Something froze over last weekend.

Eventually I will get out the door and get my errands done: library books, groceries, and oh, go put in OT. The awesome thing about lab work is that there's no questions about bringing your work home, but that also means you can't do your work in your PJs while culling the 3 hours 45 minutes of music that's accumulated in the NEW - LISTEN TO THIS folder. (The caps are authentic. Because seriously: nearly four hours of mostly single songs. Wow.) Plus the folders sgsguru gave me, which are awesome, but named in iTunes horror format. BRPM.m4a is only useful in WinAmp, with metadata. Incidentally, if anyone has an extension that lets XP read m4a metadata? Please cough up.

Since Pandora took Muse and Bon Jovi and gave me Kevin Rudolf, it is my new best friend. For the five minute increments I'm at my work computer.

When I am organizing my days, I feel very relaxed, despite the extra cat- and plant-feeding I am doing. Then I remember that the last time I did this, I signed a lease, packed and moved in less than three weeks, while feeding the cats and without taking time off work. So perhaps it's not surprising I am so laid-back this time I'm sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Or perhaps I'm filling it with other activities. Last weekend I had a double share of socializing Friday evening, gave blood Saturday morning, attended a Fever/Dream at Woolly Mammoth Saturday night with twistedchick, and had dinner Sunday with dad. That would also explain why I am curiously sleepless; also, I do badly with sleep when I'm not getting enough exercise. This leads to short-term attention memory deficit, why didn't I remember to load any music on my mp3 player, why am I wiped out at 4 PM, why I haven't the sense to stretch out and nap on the couch, today's movie double feature (The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home - stop looking at me like that, what did I just say about sleep deprivation?) and a curious inability to do anything constructive without external motivation.

Thanks to sgsguru's kind birthday gift, I am feeling the need to make an I Love the '70s (and '60's, and '80s, and country, and classical, and conscious hip-hop, and - okay, I just like music) mp3 mix, but I think I've finally been up long enough to fall over and sleep.

"Reunion Hill" is and isn't summer music; this is one of the cooler summers I remember, which is okay by me, but breaking out the DMB classics like "Ants Marching" when it's less than 80 F seems just wrong, however long the days may be. I'm sure August will fix this to and beyond my satisfaction, but for the moment the weather is keeping my attention.

Another reason my eye is on the weather is Friday's company picnic. If it rains this year, that will make three picnics in a row that have been rained out, and the forecast is calling for thundershowers.

I was nowhere near the metro today, and especially not the Fort Totten / Takoma section.

For equipment-naming purposes, I need vampires. I already have Spike
and Dracula. Go!

I tend to measure my enjoyment of events by material objects lost or damaged without dents in my equanimity; in that spirit, I lost my clip-ons (again), and ripped a fashionable hole in one pair of jeans on Sunday and Monday. Saturday was a lost cause; ladies, if Midol and hot water bottles aren't doing it, I strongly recommend a soak in the hottest water you can stand.

Sunday morning I went to the farmer's market (in that way you do when you are cat/plant/house-sitting, and incidentally have a car), which had a guitarist performing such classics as Johnny Cash and Greenday. Not quite back to back, but the set list could have doubled as a Songs ase Would Sing at Karaoke playlist. It blows my mind that the guitar repertoire now moves from Folsom Prison Blues to Nimrod without much pause.

( Monday I had an adventure. )

Today I was treated to my very own birthday lunch - sushi, in the form of an eel roll, and shrimp nigiri-style, with a seaweed salad and delicious gyoza - by one of my supervisors, and somehow managed to fill an entire evening after work with nothing more substantial than life with cats, plants and a stove to cook on, so here I am, busted at midnight. My supervisors will be so pleased when I stumble in, zombie-like, tomorrow morning. If anyone asks, I intend to blame the impending solstice, and make light of my feckless socializing.

Yesterday I got two truly excellent presents in the mail: the 2 GB Sansa, replacement for the 4 GB that evaporated a week before, and the little piece of paper saying I got an A in my spring semester class. Go me!

Today I am doing laundry and trying to persuade myself to use the drying cycle for errands or studying, with very limited success.

I have been waiting to use that line for literally a year. Happy birthday to me!

My birthday conveniently falls around the middle of the year, which makes it a great time for reflection and reassessment of annual goals and personal changes since the last birthday. I have made been okay-to-great in finances, but as a direct consequence still do not own a car; I have not made the strides in my personal growth and development, but I have tried to cultivate more of a social life in the areas I already have some feelers. 25 was about establishment; 26 will hopefully explore going above and beyond that.

Today is the sort of day I tried to "solve" with a GIANT CANDY BAR. Now I am screwing with my drunk roommate. She refuses to say, "liberation, not desperation" and am debating getting her to text her date before she sobers up.

The good news is, there's only two days left in the week!

Instead of giving the lows of the day, I give you today's comedy act:

How do you stop rush hour traffic?

First, make way for goslings. Fuzzy little Canadian geese no one will find charming when they look like their parents, as evinced by the drivers sporadically tapping a horn at the goose family.

Then, once the goslings have crossed, wait 45 seconds and listen for the cars honking as the goslings and parents cross back to the side of the street they came from.

( Out with roommate M. and her friend N. Friday night. )

My birthday is in less than a week. Tolkien was on to something when he decided Hobbits would have a "give presents on your birthday" social more; it's much easier to track that special-to-you one day a year instead of many special-to-one days. I was paid Friday, paid the bills, put some money aside, and lived a little rich with the rest: there's a couple of DVDs (and a knife sharpener) in the mail, and I picked a 19" widescreeen LCD off craigslist. And that's where the fun starts!

( God protects fools with car shares. )

( New monitor is money well spent. )

Since I have already finished one book this month, it must be time to put up last month's book log!

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel Delany): This is "how Marq Dyeth falls in love with Rat Korga" in the same way that Memory is "how Miles became an Imperial Auditor". Which is to say, it's where the novel goes, but it's not what the story's goal is. It's the plot-scaffold on which all the interesting parts of the novel are grown.

Korga is a "rat", a slave caste which has undergone Radical Anxiety Termination. He is also a survivor of catastophe.

Marq Dyeth is an Industrial Diplomat₁, whose family has a castle (sort of) and ties to a dead tyrant. The castle brings students, among them the extraordinary Rat Korga, who may have some of the dead Vondramach Tyrannus' character, or who maybe is having that imposed by society.

It takes Delany something like half the book to get these two in the same room, and the story is so interesting that I don't care. I am all about the worldbuilding and the relationships between people in this story. (With the one exception of Rat and Marq, because there's emo romance moping. From a 36 year old.) There's also some really interesting things Delaney is doing with how people form families, and how they evaluate each other, and cultural assumptions. Okay, I'm starting in on quotes:

( Cut for spoilers and length. I really, really enjoyed this book, in all its dense strange-to-me worldbuilding. )

Since I did not do well with Babel-17, I was very surprised to discover I was really enjoying Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and would have been happy to follow the characters around for another 400 pages.

The Millionaire Next Door (William D. Danko, Thomas J. Stanley): ( How to get rich slowly. )

I'm at a bit of a crossroads: do I pursue full time grad school, do I work and take classes toward an M.Sci or MBA, do I jump ship for something else entirely? My experiences in life have cemented in me a belief that money is not freedom, but its lack is certainly a cage. I don't think I have the interest or ambition to make Avi and Randy's "fuck-you money", but I have also have no desire to spend the next 20 years living paycheck to paycheck, freaking out about life after 65, and crashing on couches when I go on vacation because I have no other choice if I want to go on vacation. For me, The Millionaire Next Door is a reminder that I have to think about my money if I want to keep and control the way I use it, so I can achieve my goals in life.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely): In which people are consistently not rational operators, using pure logic to shape their decisions. In fact, kind of the opposite. Kept my attention in transit during vacation with descriptions of experiments demonstrating how people react to "free" versus one cent and other examples of how people's brains do not operate on pure logic.

The Knife of Never Letting Go (Patrick Ness): The blurb on the back (attributed to Frank Cottrell Boyce) says, "One of the best first sentences I've ever read and a book that lives up to it!"

I will not keep you in suspense: the first line is, "The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say."

I was completely underwhelmed. Fortunately, it got better from there.

When the book opens, Todd Hewitt is 30 days from his 13th birthday and manhood in Prentisstown, the only town on the planet, where all the settlers are men, survivors of a war that killed their women and left them hearing the Noise of every living animal, including each other. That's Todd's world - until he finds an empty hole in the Noise.

( Cut for a late-book out of context quote and length. )

This is a book about living in violent times, and it's absolutely riveting despite some really gross injuries I could have lived without reading about. I'll be reading the sequel, The Ask and the Answer, as soon as the library gets it.

My Enemy, My Ally (Diane Duane): If I had read this when I was ten*? Awesome. Unfortunately, I will be 26 in less than a week, and I am fully cognizant of Duane's writing quirks. So some of Ael's reflections on Powers and elements threw me right back into Duane's Young Wizards series, which I do not think was the intended effect. It's a perfectly reasonable story of James T. Kirk and the Enterprise on a mission of derring-do, with heavy Duane flavor. It just didn't scratch my post-reboot itch.

*I say ten because, to the best of my reconstruction, that's when dad left a library copy of Star Wars: The Last Command lying around, introducing me to media tie-in novels. Before I broke up with the Extended Universe I had read such deathless works of prose as Young Jedi Knights: Crisis at Cloud City.

Numbers: 5 total. 5 new; 3 fiction, 2 nonfiction.

Okay, it all makes sense now: Teardrops on My Guitar was written by Taylor Swift when she was seventeen. Love Story has no excuse. But the arrangement stands up in piano and cello mashup.

(It turns out I like my country a little bloodcurdling, like the Dixie Chick's Goodbye Earl and SHeDAISY's A Night to Remember.)

Also known to show up on my music playlists: Lonestar ("borrowed" from my sister several years ago), Big & Rich, LeeAnn Womack. It turns out I really like country-pop crossover.

I left my mp3 player at my desk when I broke for the door today, which is probably for the best, since I'd just load it with ridiculous quantities of guitar.

I went looking for a topically appropriate picture and found nothing. I need to go to more concerts. In the meantime, can I break for an ode to macro settings? I use mine to fake depth of field all the time when I'm taking small-scale pictures. Macro is my favorite setting on my camera. So have a pretty flowering plant of known species. If I just killed your bandwidth dead, tell me and I will stop posting 640x480 pics unless they're behind a cut.

What M. did not say is that we were getting enough free sushi to feed three people. Neither of us wants to eat ever again.

( Pictures! )

Today I learned that soy chai latte is actually pretty awesome, so now I too can blow $5 and 200 calories at Starbucks. If I can find a pastry that won't try to kill me with butter*, I might actually start hanging out at coffeehouses!

*Dramatic license. "Distress my GI tract in ways you don't want to discuss at the dinner table" is much less snappy.

Roommate M. called about half an hour ago to apologize for her attitude this morning and say she had sushi to split. Since I don't recall her having an attitude this morning - in the cinematic retelling of my life, Act 2009 Scene 02 June AM will be filmed with vaseline on the lens and maybe some rotoscoping in post-processing to emphasize my complete lack of opinion about anything but breakfast and caffeine - I am calling this a culinary win.

Meatloaf for lunch wasn't bad, but by definition was greasier than I like. Someone suggested trying ground turkey, which sounds interesting. I'm really there for the spicing; the exact meat can be tweaked with (relative) impunity. Mmm, fresh parsley.