It’s OK. Don’t be horrified. That was intentionally bad.
As is this, to hilarious effect.
I give you “Frodo” - my favorite moment is at 1:42.
The finger wave.

I’m only six books away from having 1,000 books cataloged on LibraryThing.

Maybe I’ll set aside some time this long Labor Day weekend to get behind the primary rows of books on my bookshelves and catalog those that hide behind the rest. That will easily bring me up over 1,000 and then I can throw myself a truly nerdy little party. I’ll put on my “Reading is Sexy” t-shirt, drink some tea, and flip through my copy of Candida Hofer’s Libraries.

There was a fairly entertaining post about the book on the nonist some months ago, entitled “Hot Library Smut” - aw, yeah.

They don’t solve life’s problems, but I do enjoy my books.
Also, my friends. They’re quite enjoyable.

Despite the incredibly oppressive humidity yesterday (my glasses and even my iPod were steaming up when I was walking out of air-conditioned buildings and getting back into the car) I managed to have a good time with friends.

We wandered around an unnecessarily large shopping center for several hours and didn’t really purchase anything, had some lunch, walked around more, and then met up with another friend of mine for coffee/gelato and conversation (which was probably responsible for keeping our half of the café empty).

Since the night was still young, I ended up watching the newest David Lynch, “Inland Empire” with my friend - my Polish language skills came in handy a bit, though it didn’t make the movie any clearer. Apparently, it gels a bit more upon a second viewing and the pieces start to fall into place - so I’ll have to set aside another three hours for that in the future.

It was somewhat comforting that I wasn’t completely lost; but it follows very much in the Mulholland Drive vein, so I had some sense of what I was going to be getting. A sense - no idea.

I got home at about 2:30 in the morning and fell asleep about an hour later, and still I awoke at 7:20. My body is just not digging the sleep. It will hit me tomorrow, so I need to get some sleep tonight or else I’ll be crying on the train, feeling all exhausted.

After work on Monday, my friend met me at the train station where I proceeded to spend a solid hour in my car crying to her because I’ve been feeling utterly hopeless and sick of myself lately. In the olden days, they’d have called it a “nervous breakdown.” An hour of crying and being able to get it out of my head was necessary, and to hear someone who cares about me and who I care about say “here are some things we’re going to plan to do together in the coming months” was great and gave me some things to look forward to and smile about. Otherwise, there’d really be nothing.

I’m sleeping far too little and have far too many waking hours to occupy, and those hours go by so slowly. I look at the clock wanting it to be 10 or 11 so I can head to bed, but find that it’s only 8 or 9. I go to bed and can’t fall asleep until midnight or 1 a.m. then wake up before the alarm as if someone’s shaken me awake… and it’s only 5 a.m. I’m exhausted, but I can’t go back to sleep. And I lay there for another hour or two because I’d rather lay in bed and listen to the radio or a CD or read; the alternative is being totally awake and aware and miserable… two hours earlier than usual.

So my days are four or five hours longer than they need to be. And I hate it.

And I had the “You need to take some vacation time” conversation with my boss. I have 13 vacation days just sitting there, and I need to use them up before the end of the year. But I have no desire to take them. They’ll just depress me. I can’t afford (financially or conscientiously) to go anywhere or do anything, so if I take those days off to sit at home, I’ll just get bummed out because I’ll be doing exactly what I do on the weekends… sitting around, reading books, watching movies, running errands, doing chores, and trying to distract myself from my thoughts. If I had anything better to do with my time, maybe I’d look forward to vacation days or days off… but I don’t. I’m happier being at work and doing something productive because at least then I’m not focused on what’s going on inside my head.

I might just take Fridays off in September and October or something like that. It won’t be any better than my boring weekend, but since it’s a weekday, I can schedule medical appointments and my upcoming 7500 mile maintenance visit on the car. You know… fun vacation activities.

Addendum: One thing I can do with a vacation day or two is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: tear down the site and rebuild in a much simpler fashion. Three or four pages, blog-style, that’s it.

I had some Malaysian food with my brother and his girlfriend late this afternoon once I was done petsitting, and I haven’t been feeling particularly hot ever since. Noodles are relatively inoffensive, as are bamboo shoots and bean sprouts and such, so maybe it was the shrimp. I just feel “off.”

And I’m really tired. I was up at 6 today after falling asleep at 1, and I’ve been waking up that early every day for the last week. It’s really unnerving because I am not a morning person–and I HATE having this many hours in my day. It’s too much time to fill. It’s bad enough that I can’t fall asleep at night and need to find ways to fill that span of time so I can escape being alone with my brain, but now I have 3 or 4 more hours to contend with because I can’t even fall back asleep once I get up at 6.

So it could be bad shrimp, it could be crankiness, it could be “grande ennui”… because, damn, I’m bored by all of it. At least the weekend was a nice change because I could take the dog out, be in the park, play with her, and enjoy some of those simpler things for a while.

And I’m pet sitting until Sunday afternoon, so I don’t want to take the dog out until it’s not raining quite as hard. It’s also thundering and there’s been some lightning, and while I’m not scared of those in and of themselves, there’s a park and there are trees and I do not wish to die a terrible death under a charred tree and bring the dog along with me.

Earlier this week, I received my copy of a delightful book I’d ordered - a coffee table book of photos of libraries around the world. It’s called “Libraries.” The photographer is Candida Hofer and the foreword is by Umberto Eco; the book was published by Thames and Hudson, and it’s intermittently available from Amazon. I ended up ordering it from a local bookseller via Abebooks. Just because. Local business. I spent about an hour flipping through it and planning an imaginary tour of some of the world’s libraries. Well, imaginary for now, anyway. Maybe some day.

I don’t have the book with me since it’s a bit large and unwieldy to carry along for weekend reading, but I did bring along another item I ordered (though this time, from Amazon): the long-awaited DVD release of Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet.”

242 minutes long. The entire text of Hamlet, in film form. I saw it in high school, and remember the boys getting all loud and obnoxious when Ophelia (played by Kate Winslet) is hosed down while wearing something white and diaphanous. I think the rest of the tragedy that is Ophelia’s story was lost on them.

But I might also just be weird; I actually ENJOY reading and watching “Hamlet.” Maybe I’ve written too many papers about the play. Maybe I sort of relate to some of the things Hamlet himself “says”, specifically about words and the meaningless and useless insufficient nature of words (Polonius: “What do you read my lord? Hamlet: “Words, words, words…”; “…Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words”…), regardless of how many you use. But I’m not someone who’s particularly adept at actions (which, if we’re talking about Hamlet-like actions, is good) so words are sort of my “thing.” Ah, well.

In other news, Wired just posted an article entitled “Space Dust: It’s Alive and It’s… Us?” based on the following findings:

…an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.

Moby was right. There were probably precursors to that song, too. Research is required.

I tried watching some of the others, but this was just the funniest for me. The others just didn’t have that certain, well, rhythm.

As an alternative to those not amused, I offer this brilliant Hans Zimmer piece:

They set out to fix a problem with a highway font, and their solution — more than a decade in the making — may end up changing a lot more than just the view from the dashboard… Now, as the idea of branding has claimed a central role in American life, so, too, has the importance and understanding of type. Fonts are image, and image is modern America.

From Sunday’s New York Times, a piece entitled, “The Road to Clarity” about the development of a new typeface for road signs to help increase legibility and safety–complete with slideshow and detailed analysis of typographical elements as well as previous typefaces. Or as their one-line summary puts it, “how a graphic designer and a typographer and their obsession with fonts and legibility led to a painstaking effort to clean up America’s road signs, one letter at a time.”

I got unnaturally excited about this since it’s something I’ve been wondering about lately while looking at highway signs, train stations, street signs, etc. and noticing the variety of typefaces used on each. The lack of consistency irritated my OCD self, but also made me wonder what sort of development or “evolution of signage” was going on.

Timely. All the news that’s fit to print indeed. They included something I found worthy of my time anyway.

Today started off with a bang. This morning, I tripped and fell in the street crossing over to my office and scraped up my knee quite nicely. I was wearing a skirt, so the embarrassment of tripping was honestly the more painful part for me. I will take a sleep aid tonight so I don’t keep replaying those 20 seconds over and over again in my head tonight and keep myself from falling asleep.

I got into the office and cleaned it up, but the best part was walking around the rest of the day with a huge 3″ x 2″ band-aid across my knee - looking all professional-like. If I had some some roller skates, pigtails and a big lollipop, I’d be ready for my own personal “Xanadu” or 2nd grade birthday party, or I could ditch the roller skates and find some multi-colored overalls and try to bring back Rainbow Brite (her friend Patty O’Green - and I can’t believe I remembered this - sported band-aids on her knees… it’s amazing how these little things just come back to you, and how Google and some obsessive collector people can help you do a little blast from the past thing).

(for references, see IMDb… at least “Down with Love” and “”Bring It On”… )

I woke up this morning, watched “Oleanna” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” (not particularly light-hearted or fun), had some breakfast and then - and then - put on some of the funnest music I have and have been cleaning like a crazy woman while listening to songs like “Une Very Stylish Fille” by Dimitri From Paris (samples dialogue from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’” by Scissor Sisters and “D.A.N.C.E.” by Justice.

I’ve been skipping. Finding myself SKIPPING occasionally while cleaning. To the music. What in tarnation? I haven’t overdosed on antidepressants or anything.

Next thing you know, I’ll be inspired to write a cheer to catapult my team to the head of the regional competition or write a best-selling book or [insert other plot].

This can’t last… or can it?

I was driving home late tonight after a business dinner and the traffic was moving quickly since the roads are pretty empty at 11:00 on a Tuesday night.

I was listening to music, driving along and thinking about how absolutely insane the act of driving is, just in terms of what it actually is that any of us are doing when we drive a car.

We’re steering a 1.5 or 2 ton pile of metal along the road at speeds of 50, 60, 70 or 80 miles an hour, shielded by plates of extremely slow-moving liquid sand. We trust that we’ll be kept safe by sacks of air all around us, and we trust that another four containers of air, surrounded by metal and wide straps of solidified tree sap (enriched by sulfur) will keep us from sliding off the road. Our speeding piles of metal are powered by burning off gallons of decayed dinosaur juice (they’re called fossil fuels for a reason).

I must just be tired. I’ve still got some laundry to do before tomorrow.