Skankin' the Night Away

This morning, I hurt. My ears still can't hear very well. A few muscle groups are sore. And I'm pretty sure I have a few bruises from being in the pit.

Oh, it was worth it, of course. Rarely have I let myself out during this grad school thing. But last night's Mustard Plug show was exactly what I needed. One helluva show. Well, I guess it's back to the thesis... which keeps getting longer and longer, I swear...

A Message... from my Teeth!

This was found by Steph in her fortune cookie last night. For some reason, it strikes me as vaguely creepy...

Son of a Mathematician

That's what I am, so I had to calculate the odds of what happened in a 40K game among Ryan, Kurt, and myself. The object of this 3-way game was to have the last commander left standing. On 4 separate occasions, Ryan's commander found himself in the cross-hairs of a twin-linked lascannon. (For the non-gamers: this is a gun that rarely misses and usually obliterates anything it hits.) The chance that he's survive such an onslaught? Less than 16%. He did... and that doesn't include the small-arms fire directed at him.

It's kinda frustrating when you form a good plan, execute it correctly, react when parts of it inevitably fail, and make scant mistakes... yet still lose. It's one thing to look back at a battle and say, "ah, I could have done this differently." It's another when the only thing you could have done differently was to load the dice.

Roland Barthes, heart attacks, and Steeler football

ACTF was disappointing. I mean, Normal, IL, was cool and all, but sometimes I'm not in the mood to handle the talk of just how impossible it is to find work as a playwright or dramaturg.

Instead, I will talk about tonight's class, where we talked about Roland Barthes's Mythologies. Good book, fun theories. Part of it talks about wrestling, and how an audience can experience a communal catharsis from live events. (Yes, he was talking about signifiers in a scripted event, but still...) Flash over to this story. Yeah, when I saw Jerome Bettis fumble near the end of the Steelers game, and what that signify (as the last event of Bettis's career), I figure that Steeler nation had a collective, figurative heart attack. Apparently, one guy had a literal one.

How's that for a catharsis?

Ow. Ow. Ow.

New semester starts today. I bought textbooks. For only three classes, I spent $295. Not only that, but I've only bought 4 out of the 12 books necessary for the third class. In other words, I'll be spending even more.

Oh, and then I decided to find more research for my thesis. I found three really good dissertations. Luckily, one is so recent (and from Norway) that I got it online for free. The other two cost me a hair under $60, total.

So, here I am in the library computer lab, pissing off the undergrads, because it takes forever to print off a 370-page dissertation in 40-page blocks. For further enlightenment, please listen to Denis Leary's song, "Asshole."

Math = good

At work today, I was relocating the Pop/Rock collections to a new browser bin. There were to be 27 CDs per column. My boss made the off-hand comment that "27... such a perfect number." Without hesitation, I thought to myself, "Well, 27 is not a prime number, but it is 3 to the 3rd power."

This is what happens when you're raised by an accountant and a mathematician. How did I end up in the arts?