Linkstew

So yes, it really is 7 am, and no, I haven't slept yet, and yes, I just worked 15 hours straight (I ate dinner while working), and yes, I just got home. The project is live, but it's only maybe 90% ready -- but we always constantly tweak things for a week or two after putting them live anyway. No, you don't have a clue what project I'm talking about, and no, I'm not in the mood to talk about it any more right now. I really want to sleep in a nice warm soft bed.

It's interesting that the more tired I get, the mroe cold gets to me. This morning, as I walked home in the chilly dawn air, I was shivering and my teeth were chattering and my body was shaking in all kinds of crazy ways. But now I'm inside, and the thought of bed just sounds so appealing...

Hopefully I don't have a repeat of the dream I had last night, because it was very disgusting. And count your blessings that I'm not going to tell you about all the slimy details of that dream that are now burned into my head.

I had my first classes today, and one of them was Anthro 160, "Forms of Folklore." And after just one lecture, I'm really looking forward to it. I feel an itching at the back of my brain telling me that this is something that I'm going to enjoy, and I haven't seen anything to disprove that yet.

I've heard three things about this class: Good professor, interesting material, bad bad evil term project. And yes, the project is a little insidious, but it doesn't seem that bad...

The project? Collect (at least) 40 pieces of folklore from friends and family and whoever you can find, and gather information about where the informant learned that lore, and what the informant (and others) thinks it means, and so on. Each item is a separate entity, and is supposed to be prepared individually. Analysis of one piece is not supposed to cross-reference the analysis of another piece. Basically, the project is collect 40 pieces of folklore, and then write 40 short reports about all that folklore. And for seven of those pieces, find a printed parallel of that piece of folklore, and examine the parallels and differences. And yes, there's a shear bulk of work to do there, but I think it will be interesting.

If I could get my ducks in a row and didn't have a project to finish for work, Fray Day would be the perfect place for me to start this project. But that's probably not going to happen. My folklore archive isn't due until December 7th, though, so I've got all kinds of time... so I say now.

For the curious, one of the most integral characteristics of folklore is apparently multiple realization. That is, different versions of the story are known all over the place. If someone says "The way I heard it...", you're dealing with folklore.

And in case you can't tell, I'm feeling very drawn in already, and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. I'm vaguely thinking about what a blog version of a folklore archive would be like, but I guess I should wait and see how my folklore archive itself turns out. Well, it would be kind of like In Passing, only more focused and with more detail and analysis and categorization.

So I just caught up with Fox Sunday on my TiVo, and it must have been one of the strangest evenings of television that I've ever seen. Notably, Futurama and Malcolm in the Middle just kind of left me staring with my mouth hanging open. What I more want to talk about is Malcolm, so let me just say about Futurama that the lead in to introduce the time skipping was totally bizarre, and the time skipping itself packed a really long story into a mere 20 minutes, and the skipping over of so many details of the story just left me feeling

skip

explored two possible ways in which an evening out bowling could have progressed for Reese and Malcolm in parallel. On one path, Malcolm's mom takes the boys to the bowling alley, but stays at the bowling alley, endlessly embarrasses Malcolm, but in the end Malcolm gets the girl. Down the other path, Malcolm's dad takes the boys, everyone except Reese has a great evening, but in the end, as Malcolm is about to get the girl, things go awry. Trying to summarize this entire episode into two sentences does it no justice -- suffice it to say that I immensely enjoyed the episode, and if you ever happen to see an ad announcing this episode, you should make every effort to see it.

I love thinking about parallel realities. Thinking about all the possible what could have beens and what could bes gets me lost in my imagination. Where would I be now if I'd gone to BC instead of Berkeley? What would be different if I'd chosen the Units instead of Foothill for housing my freshman year? How would I be doing in school if I hadn't started working? Who would I be if I'd been born a girl instead of a boy? How would I have developed if I'd said yes instead of no to that girl who asked "Do you like me?" in sixth grade? Et cetera.

That's why I really liked the premise of Sliders (originally another Fox show), though unfortunately it's execution was a little lacking. It's also why Marvel's new comic Exiles, which is based on exploring alternate X-Men universes, got me reading comics again. And why I enjoyed reading the X-Men's Age of Apocalypse back in the day, and quit reading comics right after AoA ended and I realized how much the standard story sucked. And it's also why I like the stories of Jorge Luis Borges so much. For example, in "The Garden of Forking Paths," which can be found in the collection Labyrinths (which I highly recommend), Borges spends a fair amount of time explaining the idea years before it was popularized by TV, etc.

Too bad dreaming about what could have been and what might be doesn't get me anywhere in reality. Pity, that.

I had several bad-ish dreams last night, and they were all variations upon the same bad theme. I kept dreaming that my PowerBook screen had cracked somehow. I should have known it was a dream, though, because the cracks that I dreamt weren't LCD cracks, but were glass cracks, like you sometimes get in Palms. Sure, Palms get LCD cracks, too, but a glass crack is what I've most recently seen, and Palms still kind of function with glass cracks, whereas you're hosed with an LCD crack.