There is a book by Gabriel García Márquez named "Cien años de soledad", or "A hundred years of solitude". It's a very melancholic book that I read last summer; arguably García Márquez' best book (and I've read a bunch - "Crónica de una muerte anunciada", "El otoño del Patriarca" and "Historia de mis putas tristes"), but it deals a lot with solitude; what it is, what it does to a person, how it can effect the lives of those who, for lack of a better word, suffer from this solitude. I hadn't ...

As stated in my last post, I've been feeling rather down lately. I'm doing better this morning, largely due to a song by a band called Redemption. On their last album, they've got a bombastic, epic piece called "The Fullness of Time". It's split into four parts, but the third part is the one I haven't been able to get out of my head. Its chorus, for me right now, is just so poignant- "'Just release yourself 'cuz they can't rape the willing or take what you have if there's nothing else...

So I had come home for lunch, and was just about to head back to work, when my little sister turned on the TV to one of the soapies, Days of Our Lives. I guess there're some characters on there that want to have a child and seem to be unable, so they are having their fertilized egg implanted in the uterus of another woman. It got me to thinking. Why would someone volunteer to carry the child of another? Talk about noble. But I just don't quite get surrogate mothering. Adoption . . ....

So I've been bumming around Amazon a lot as of late (I've already posted my gripes about Amazon proper, but mostly I just buy stuff from others with the site as a go-between). It all started with me looking for books by Unamuno (another post!), and then it evolved into the search for Red Dwarf books. I've been reading the first one to arrive, "Better Than Life", and thoroughly enjoying myself. (Red Dwarf and I just have so much history . . . I've been watching the show late on Saturday nig...

(Sunday afternoon) I'm sitting at my desk. I've been working on studying for my psychology test I've got to take later today. The computer sits open, the face of Homestar Runner on my desktop, the words underneath read "Seriously". My psych textbook sits open, homework strewn about, fan blowing down into my entirely too hot room. The soothing music of Rachel's wafts about my lifeless head. The sounds of birds sitting in the upper limbs of my sherwood flame maple are drifting up throug...

(thoughts on a Wednesday) I arrive home from work tired. Very tired. It's been another long day at the garden center. When I woke up, it looked like a cloudy day, but lo and behold, the sun poked his shiny face out, turned my nose red and my arms brown, and it was beautiful. What made today at work so great? It wasn't anything special. I moved some pallets of fertilizer (and seriously strained the tendons of my chest while doing it - curse those ton pallets!!!!), cleaned out the heads ...

Here's the deal. Yesterday, a group of young single adults from my church went tubing up in the hills. It was a blast, and afterwards, we decided to go to my house and watch a movie. Me and the people who were in my car were coming, and my friend Adam was also going to come. He ran home to get the movie we were going to watch, and got stuck bringing his annoying sixteen year old cousins along. No harm, no foul. These sorts of things happen. I was fine with the whole thing. We watc...

Today, at the bank, people have been constantly withdrawing money. It's tax returns; people get these deposits or checks for two, maybe three thousand dollars and bring 'em on in, cash them up. We started the day with over 50,000 dollars in hundred dollar bills in the vault. We have 2000 left in the whole bank. We've moved forty-eight thousand dollars just in hundreds today. [rant] WHAT THE HELL DO YOU NEED THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS IN CASH FOR, YOU IDIOTS?!? WHAT GOOD DOES IT D...

So . . . I'm sitting there in my Women's Studies class the other day (The Rise (and fall ) of Modern Feminism) and talking to one of the girls in the class. She's a really cool girl; one of these days I'll have to ask her out. (And me meeting really cool girls seems to be a problem lately – all the cool ones are not available, and all the available ones are not cool.) At any rate, there I was, sitting next to this girl (we'll call her Nina for our purposes here . . . mostly because th...

My face hurts. No, really, it does. I've got five little cuts, all lined up like the soldiers in front of freaking Buckingham Palace, gracing the running edge of my chin. What was the culprit? My razor. Now, I haven't cut myself with a razor since I was sixteen. I'm a good shaver, and my face can take a lot of pain. I don't take my time shaving, nor am I a very cautious shaver. But I do know the cardinal rule of shaving if you don't want to cut the crap out of yourself - you don...

Lately I've been having troubles getting my articles read. I've tried to write about a variety of subjects, everything from music , to poetry . I even (knowing the political makeup and leanings of much of the site) decided to write on politics . All to no avail. I've must be boring lately, or I must be picking lame subjects, or something else I don't know. Maybe I need to prop up my articles with salacious titles involving bodily functions, or should thinly-veil them as flames. ...

"The Apparition" kicks butt. John Arch had some nasty nice pipes. I'm tired of writing papers. I've already written twenty-three pages today for four different papers. One more to go. Have you ever noticed that if you look at pictures of a young Jim Matheos he looks a lot like a young Steve Harris. Same style hair (well heck, they still both have that hair) but back in the day, they even stood the same way in the band fotos and everything. Weird. Alberto Rionda, grand musici...

I've always wondered why teachers make rules against eating in class. It never seemed to make sense to me, all through la prepa (high school, I mean) up to and through la Uni. It seemed to always be a pointless rule . . . but that's because I've never been in a class with someone eating. Suddenly the rule makes great sense, and I know for a fact that when I'm a professor, we'll be having no eating in my classes, unless it's something I (or someone in the class) have brought for sharing p...

So I start a new job in a week and a half. It's exciting and scary all at the same time. It will be good to have a change – my current job was just getting a bit on the tedious side, and I'm pumped to get to know a new job, new coworkers, etc. But – I'm going to be a bank teller. I don't know how stringent other banks are, but this particular bank is rather firm in their dress policy. Consequently, I just finished buying a bunch of new dress slacks and shirts. (That's the exciting par...

So I'm sitting here at work, and my phone buzzes, "Message for you, sir!" (Yeah, it's from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when the guy gets shot in the chest with the arrow.) I pick it up. It's from this girl. A girl that's, sure, my friend, but it's not like I see her (or that I want to see her) as anything else. She's nice, but I'm just not into her like that. I like girls a little more . . . erudite? . . . than that. But so it says, "I'm free!" I answer, "From what?" "...