I'm getting sick - I think I must've picked up a cold germ in Vancouver!
Long talk with G this morning - he's bummed, things <1>
aren't working out and he'll probably be driving back to Virginia in a few
days. When I asked how he was doing he said he'd "...had better lives", a
rather Buddhist comment which made us both laugh. As we both groused about
work, in my mind's ear I heard lines from the ruby
song <2> I got last
year on a promotional cassette called "Work", which I thought contained
songs about work - now I realize that's a new Sony sub-label. Anyway,
he responded with enthusiasm when I suggested that he's suffering from a
mid-life crisis, and needs to find something to get passionate about - I
tried describing what I recalled from Xiled's journal
entry
about his Cornell commencement speech, about how to "get a life" (it's in
the sixth footnote). D, meanwhile, has gotten used to G's absence; and
doesn't sound like she wants him to return.
Two interesting programs I watched on my Vancouver hotel room's
television - with serendipitous luck I caught the very "Star
Trek: TNG" program I wanted to see again. Somewhere recently in an article
I read, the author mentioned it in the context of if he had access to a
holodeck <3>, he'd
never come out - this episode featured a painfully shy engineering officer
who populated his imaginary, pastoral world with exaggerations of the
series' main characters: Geordi, Riker and Picard were musketeers, Wesley
was a spoiled fop eating great hunks of pie, and Deanna Troi (the
best) wore flowing, off-the-shoulder robes and declared: "I am the
Goddess of Empathy!" (Very funny if you're familiar with them.) The
other show was British comedy from a guy named Russ Abott - would like to
see more of him. This was a BBC production called "Russ' Diner": various
slapstick sketches, the most relevant of which had him done up in an
enormous padded RCMP uniform playing a Mountie named "Toronto Tom".
I read today that BMW has purchased Rolls-Royce (which has also
been the Bentley manufacturer, since -- ?) They beat out
Volkswagon, whose bid was inadequate. (Why wasn't Daimler-Benz
interested?) Kind of a strange consolidation - along with the
aborted merger of Lockheed-Martin and Northrop-Grumman, reminds
me of the future in the film "Rollerball" where the eventual
mergings (both governmental and commercial) had ended
in just six organizations, with names like Power, Entertainment,
Transportation, and Food.
The daily changing of these bandages on my feet has exhausted
my band-aid reserves - I found an ancient one in my travel kit
with the red thread, bearing the once-familiar legend "Tear Off
Either End Pull String Down" - those seldom functioned
correctly, and true to form it didn't work with the last one,
either. This was a Johnson & Johnson Sheer Strip, still my
standard, but they come in square cardboard boxes now,
instead of the nicer rounded tin container with hinged lid.
I retained my last metal one when they switched to cardboard,
and now transfer new band-aids into their traditional home,
discarding the new box.
My hair is turning gray - this is especially evident among my pubes. Once
again I'm flirting with the notion of shaving my head.