my man won't walk again
in conflict with express instructions given by the brain
why can't the message be sent?
I guess my man's fallen out with my head -- TMBG

I just got my hands on a copy of "Mink Car" by They Might Be Giants. I know, I know--I'm a year late. It's their most joyfully poppy album to date, but I'm still really amazed how they can sing about such sobering things within a perfectly skewed viewpoint, all wrapped up in silly optimism. It's really a great album. (Thanks, Juan, for continually singing its praises...well, not singing, but speaking with the lilt of excitement in your voice.) I have a new respect for bangs and cyclopi, now.

In totally unrelated news--it feels really good to get my life back in order. I've put off balancing the checkbook for two months, hoping that everything would work out in the end. It did, but it's even better to actually know what's in the bank...even if it's not that much =).

Now it's time to wade through all of my school papers. What do you do with all this stuff? Will I really need a freshman report about the dangers of failed contraceptives or a sophmore paper about the politics of Great Britain? I could make my own paper by recycling this stuff, but I'm not sure that computer paper becomes a pulp...it seems to have too much surface polish--besides, it would all be grey from all the toner. Hmm, idea rejected.

It still hasn't hit me that I'm totally done with my bachelors degree. Maybe in a few days...

I'm so excited! I get to start reading whatever I want! I have a bunch of stuff waiting:

Monkeys - Susan Minot
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace
Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
Short stories - Nethaniel Hawthorne
The Cost of Disipleship - Deitrich Bonhoeffer
Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis (again...didn't get it all the first time)
Less Than Zero - Bret Easton Ellis

All of the above are half-read already. This doesn't include the books I want to start. =)

I've got a lot of goodwill to go around. Email me with something going on in your life and I'll extend that goodwill to you. =)

Done! Done with the huge, ugly James Joyce paper. It took forever and it wasn't worth it. It will take me a year to even be able to think about picking up one of his books.

Thankfully, I'm now able to listen to my normal rotation of music. Yes, thank you for your prayers and thoughts - I'm able to move past Madonna.

***
Me: Hi, my name is Keith and I'm a popaholic.
The group (almost in unison): Hi, Keith.
Me: It's been ten hours since I last listened to 'Don't Tell Me'.
Applause.
Me: But I did listen to a little Sheryl Crow...
A few gasps and groans...
Me:...and I know that she's not officially pop, but I'm feelin' kinda defeated.
Demure girl with sweet smile: Don't worry, every day is progress.
Applause

***
Now I just have to read up on modern, electronic Marxism for my last 8 pager of the class...my last paper of my Bachelors...sniff sniff. It's due tomorrow night at 11:59pm (web class). I want to have it done by 5pm, so I can go pahr-tay w/ Braden and Nicole.

Shameful...

Two things that I've already told Juan:

1) If there was ever a day to start smoking for relaxation, it would have been today. Oh my. I don't want to read another word of either of those two stories that I had to revise for my Grad Writers Workshop. My goodness. My my.

Oh yeah, don't worry. I can't start smoking. I have the most amazing asthma attacks when I get too much of a whiff of smoke. So, like, my first one would be my last.

2) Madonna has saved my final's week. I really cannot listen to anything this week that challenges me, not even Beth Orton, Cat Power, or Radiohead. No, I've been (and here's where the whole "shameless" part comes in - I'm admitting this) only able to listen to Madonna's Greatest Hits Volume 2. And by "able", I mean anything else makes my eyes cross. It's just that MGHV2 is so smooth, so poppy, so Avant-Madonna-Garde, so

blatently commercial.

Oh well. Since we're on the subject and I have no shame, I'll let everyone know that the song I keep playing over and over is "What it feels like for a girl". I have no idea what people think as they hear me singing loudly "Do you know what it feels like for a girl? In this world?" as I drive by.

Who cares. She has a good contralto voice that is easy for my baritone to mimic. Hey, I get to keep up my voice and release a little stress at the same time. Mindfloss, total mindfloss.

I know that I am forever saying, "If only I can get through tomorrow, everything will be allright after that." Well, it's actually true this time. I spent too long on revising one of my stories and I'll only have seven or eight hours tomorrow to revise the second one. That might be enough - it didn't need as much work - but that will be rushing it. Ugh.

After that, though, I'll have quite a lot of time because I'm only writing up analytical reports - those can be churned out at will. Good fiction, somehow, can't.

Sorry I'm not more interesting...I've been stuck in my room working for way too long. =)

Three small letters can change your life.

So, I registered a domain name for my friend Megan and myself. Mostly so we have a receptacle for our web projects and because I needed a place to park a self-promotional site while I'm trying to get into grad school and the like, but also because we were throwing around the idea of starting a design company some day.

Well, after trying over and over again to register www.cakepolice.com with a local hosting place that I plan to use (and failing because of their crappy credit card authorization), I ended up emailing them in frustration. The support guy asked for me to email the info and he'd take care of everything manually. I sent the stuff and I've got the domain.

Oh wait, no, I've actually got: www.cakepolice.org - which isn't bad on the outset, especially because I like the whole aspect of Megan and I being some sort of secret organization, but it'll really suck if we do make it into a business someday. All because I didn't watch what I was typing. I don't know, I'm still in the old school of internet domains where .com means commericial and .net has something to do with network services and .org, well, is reserved for people who do things for mankind without thought of payment.

Of course, I still remember Braden and I sitting around a computer in 1990, dialing up to UCF's internet server at 14.4k and using the web for the first time. We marvelled at the scientific documents you could find, a menu for a pizza restaurant in Fresno, and how many cokes were left in a Stanford vending machine. The best thing of all - the web would never be used for commercial purposes, only educational and organizational.

You can stop laughing at us now. Please.

Besides the few hours spent at church today, I've been writing and editing one of my stories...all day. My brain is so fried. I don't want to use any more words.

I do, however, want to watch "Home Movies". =)