yeeeah killing time so's i don't fall asleep

triads

books i just bought:
-Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
-Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
-How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer

groceries i just bought:
-fresh hummous
-hummous mix in boxes
-six pack of Pete's Wicked Wanderlust Cream Beer

books i just finished:
-Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
-Snow Leopard by Peter Mathiessen
-Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

firsts this week:
-pub crawl on St. Patty's day
-buzzed by red-tailed hawk in cemetary on the way home from work yesterday morning in the middle of the city!
-got paid to watch a troupe from Mexico perform various ethnic (and awesomely rhythmic) regional dances.

books i'm halfway through:
-King Lear
-Bread and Wine by Plough Press
-A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi

cool grown up accomplishments:
-clean, orderly room with visible floor for over a week now
-set up serious appointment to inspect/possibly buy a truck to live out of for a year
-planning schedule for summer w/multiple engagements BEFORE the first day of spring

excellent new tunes on miPod:
-Wayfaring Stranger by 16 horsepower
-Sunday Bloody Sunday covered by Pillar
-It's Too Late by The Streets

my wicked awesome drinking vessels
-handmade Paul Christensen awesomely-massive pottery drinking mug
-pink nalgene with flower and pink lid
-stolen cafeteria cup with "I was stolen by a sinner" written on it in black magic marker by the indescribably profound Ben Howard

ladies i thought were really cool but turned out to be elsewhere enamored:
-girl i never asked out, and it was way too late
-girl i finally made up my mind to ask out only to discover that i had made my mind up...too late
-girl i was just about to ask out, but discovered i was: just too late

films recently watched:
-Pulp Fiction
-Hero
-Blackhawk Down

excellent articles:
-living with constant wireless interaction: "Continuous Partial Attention"
-Zakaria on Iraq: "Apalling but not Hopeless"
-William Jennings Bryan: when a promising leftist Christian populist social movement was nipped in the bud in favor of the urbane secularists, setting the ground for today's culture wars...possibly.

great conversations this week:
-Elinor Ostrom-ish analysis of potential incentive programs for EMS workers and difficulties posed by current Computer Aided Dispatch system with new (my new) supervisor; also perverse corporate shareholder-driven cost-cutting incentives in the absence of market-driven quality control due to the nature of EMS work and public contracts in the urban/suburban economic divide
-Surprise reacquaintance with old Paramedic friend Geoff Boone from Houghton Volunteer Fire Department days, over patients at the ECMC of a random.
-Inanely cheerful banter and rediscovery of The Streets with friend who only last week was sailing (metaphorically) through rough waters under iron skies.

quotes:
-Voltaire:

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

-Stephen Levy:

"A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger's wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you're always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner. The anxiety is contagious: anyone who winds up talking to a person infected with CPA feels like he or she is accepting an Oscar, and at any moment the music might stop the speech."

-The Streets:

"We first met through a shared view/she loved me and i did too."

notes to self:

-there is an infinite supply of irresistably great deals on tantalizingly clever books, cds, and dvds, which are capable, if not carefully monitored, of making swiss cheese of drastically finite budgetary resources.

-ask out the next encountered "fly bird" without the customary four or eighty weeks of introspection, uncertainty, tentative get-to-know-you-first thing. absolutely no mandatory 40-day waiting periods, homeschool inexperience be darned!

-eat cheese! and hummous! listen to crazy apocalyptic gothic folk music while chatting aimlessly with friends! listen to backlogged NPR podcasts while doing nothing really productive! and do it more often! life is bueno!

places i would still rather be right now
-Tanzania with my brother
-Tanzania with my sister-in-law
-Tanzania with my darling neices

pictures that keep me happy in my exile

-neices playing in the Indian Ocean

-yeah, it really does get that green and beautiful and warm, and good people actually sit outside for the fun of it and don't get frostbite. and birds sing too.

-just look at those crazy people!

enjoy!