John Zeitler

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.

I’ve often referred to the force, whatever it may be, that created this universe as “The Great Engineer”. It’s no accident. The definition of engineering is bringing order forth from chaos; where once there stood naught but rubble and ruin, a great work has been made, eternal and enduring. Composed equally of rules and rods, structure and structures, functions and forms, the universe in which we live is the pinnacle of development– the culmination of an infinitely long development cycle, which itself is still ongoing. Creation is not finished– it’s still in the alpha phases.

I envy The Great Engineer. I can’t handle changes to my plans nearly as well, even if it’s just something as simple as “the bus driver didn’t change his route designation number”. Forget about having to deal with the free will of an infinite number of sentient beings, all it takes is one idiot to wreck my night.

On Tuesday, I discovered that there’s a small hot-dog shop near my bus stop on the way home. Given that they’re specifically a hot-dog restaurant, I figured it was highly likely they’d have veggie dogs, and the scent of hot dogs from street vendors near PNC Park was starting to really overwhelm me. Naturally I didn’t have any cash on me at the time, and no time to stop and get some. So I made an effort to be prepared this evening.

As can be expected, events conspired such that, after missing my early bus to downtown, I arrived at the shop minutes after they closed.

Pittsburgh may be the most livable city in the United States, but I personally suspect the people who made that assessment visited around lunchtime and didn’t stick around.

You would think that, being as avid a gamer as I am, I would have long ago developed a healthy callus on my left thumb.

As evidenced by last night’s run with Super Street Fighter IV, that’s kind of not the case. Ow.

That’s totally a word now, by the way. It’s derived from the root word “aesthetics”, meaning “a pleasing form or sensation”, and the prefix “hypo”, meaning “reduced or below what is required”. Its plain-English definition is “John wasted the entire evening dealing with stupid %$#@ that he had, until four hours ago, been under the impression had been resolved in 2007“.

I hereby renounce anything good I ever had to say, and pre-emptively renounce anything positive I might say, about the US Postal Service.