John Zeitler

I picked up a pair of noise-cancelling headphones this evening owing to three facts. The first is that my previous pair of earbuds had broken (cord snapped right out of the left bud) one morning a few weeks ago, and I needed a replacement pair. The second is that I had a sizeable rewards voucher for Best Buy sitting on my account.

The third is that, while trying to save some money and the rewards certificate, I had bought a pair of cheap stopgap earbuds at a 7-11 downtown the morning that the originals had broken. And that, today, I discovered that they were practically worthless when sitting next to someone who had quite a bit to say about my choice of commute entertainment: an anime. It matters comparatively little which one, because I am firmly of the belief that this woman would have just as gleefully excoriated me for watching SuperBook. I was not, in her words, reading the Bible, therefore I was sinning. She actually said that.

This comes literally eight hours after I had felt, for a little while, that geekery was becoming acceptable in public after seeing a forty-year-old man quietly reading a Batman graphic novel three rows ahead of me this morning.

Oh, and for the record? It was Shakugan no Shana, and I was incredibly lucky that my stop came long before any of the clothes-changing scenes came. I would have hated to have to explain to the paramedics that my minding of my own damn business caused some nutbar lady to have an aneurysm.

I was at work until 9:45p and had to take a cab home.

We’re not talking about today. Ever.

Important lesson for the day.

Apparently I am a subconscious air-raid warden, because if there’s even the slightest elevated light level from what I’m accustomed to, I will not be able to sleep very well, if at all. That was discovered last night when I forgot to turn off the bathroom light, on the other side of my bedroom door, and it nearly kept me up all night.

So I had a nice dinner, take-out. About halfway through it I stopped and realized that they may have given me actual meat instead of the vegetarian version I’d ordered. It’s hard to tell.

This is either going to be a normal night or a very long one…

Folks, it is officially too hot to blog. I’m off to bed under an A/C vent and a fan turned on high.

I was sort of looking forward to going somewhere over the long weekend, but I found out this afternoon that there may be a need for me to stay close by in case of work heating up. Naturally there’s no way of knowing for certain beforehand, and it’s my luck that if I do decide to entangle myself by going off the grid for a while, the odds of that call coming shoot up to about 90%. So naturally things kind of look grim for the 4th.

At least I’ll make the most productive use of my time possible by trying very hard to finish up the chapter of Frangible Time that’s set to start on the 9th…

Waking up at 6a on a Saturday is not a pleasant feeling, especially if you went to bed at 1a.

Waking up three hours later to realize that, in that time, the ceiling tiles in your bathroom have absorbed sufficient water to produce a very large and noticeable puddle is an even less pleasant feeling.

More than all of that, though, once I had everything taken care of, and I’d showered and made it in to do some writing, realizing that I had left my wrist brace at home and therefore couldn’t do as much writing as I’d wanted makes me just want to give up, call this a lost day, and go home to play video games.

Work is heating up. By heating up I mean I’ll be lucky to sleep in the next week and a half. I’ve already had to cancel every single leisure or side-project activity I had planned, and it’s still not enough. So I have to put the posts on hiatus for the time being. I don’t even have enough time tonight to get Bailout together for the next two weeks. No further information is available. Deal with it, because I have to.

I have a big long spiel percolating about the Lost finale and how it’s effected an era of television sci-fi that’s unprecedented since the 70s.

It’s going to have to wait until after I get through spending 50% of my waking hours at work.

(Oh, and yes, I damn well did use the right “affect/effect” word there. To “effect” something as a verb means to spawn or to provide impetus for. If you effect a change on something, you have also affected it, and the net effect is not an affectation, but an effective act.)

Yesterday was rough, due to work and recovering from my birthday trip. However today should be… okay, just as long. I am upset that I missed two posts in the last few weeks, but I’m still committed to this whole one-a-day thing as best as I can. So, I suppose we’re just going to see more brief posts until I get back to something approaching normalcy.