Cold, Tired.

My health was really funky around New Year’s.

I don’t like going out New Year’s Eve – too many drunks, too much gunfire – and so I stayed in and relaxed and listened to a folk radio program and did crosswords and read.

That morning when I had woken up, though, I was chilled and shivering.

Into New Year’s Day, I couldn’t get to sleep for the life of me though I was tired, and I woke up feeling like I was all beat up, so I lazed around all day and napped on my couch and treated myself to soup at a nearby Chinese restaurant.

That night again I was tired but couldn’t sleep, and my bed was always too hot or too cold and I kept waking up (maybe from drinking too much tea at the Chinese place?; I drank the whole metal pot, I hate waste).

The next day I had to go to work on my syllabi all day and I freshened up when I got out into the sunshine-y winter day, so I biked into school, worked until late, hit the gym for a light workout (though I felt a bit lightheaded at times), then met a friend and her girlfriend for dinner at a bar (I just had a grilled cheese and some fries and kept hydrating with tonic water and regular water).

The next day, I woke up again feeling like I overdid it, but I felt better when I went outside and went to a friend’s quitting-her-job-of-fourteen-years get together, and before that I even hit up a few new bars and read a good cult book over a leisurely beer.

Again, next day, tired and sore, with the glands under my throat still swollen, and a bit of a sore throat from mild post-nasal drip.

Overall, it seems like I was just fighting something off repeatedly, but never enough to beat it.

Also, my sleep was interrupted a lot during that period; the young kid who lives above me has been very noisy of late, throwing stuff on the floor in the morning and running around and doing something that sounds like running big toy trucks back-and-forth on the floor, which prevented me from every sleeping in a few extra hours past 8 or 8:30 am (and if I did, it was only after he left around 10am, which meant I wouldn’t get up till like noon on those days).

Birthday success!

So my 35th birthday get-together (actually over a week later than my birthday) met with a decent amount of success:

- 19 people going to see a crazy art film.
- 25 people over the course of the night (since some people came to pre- and post-game drinks, though not the film).

I think it worked since it wasn't a mingling event, but rather more reception-y, since everyone at the bar could walk around and talk, and everyone had something to talk about from the film.

Nicely, the bartender at the downtown bar even bought me my last beer of the night.

Reflections on Library Systems.

Here in the city, I really like the selection of books they have in the public library system, and they have *extremely* good branch distribution, where you pretty much come across a branch library everywhere if you’re out bopping around in different neighborhoods.

Their shipping system between libraries is *way* inefficient, however.

For example, I had requested a feminist sci-fi novel (“Grass”, by Sheri [sp.?] Teppers [sp.?]) back on Dec. 12^th, and by the end of the month, it still hadn’t come in.

I checked with the staffer at my local branch library, and she checked the transaction and said that that was because the book was being held at a library on the other side of the city, and it had to go from there to the main branch and then the main branch to my local branch, and on top of that things were backed up.

“It probably won’t get to be a month, though,” she was like.

In comparison, in my state where I was born and grew up, they started up a statewide library affiliation program supported by five vans; all holdings from participating libraries are accessible through one catalog, and you can request a title from there and pretty much always get delivery within a week – and that’s from across the entire state!

First off, I think it’s wonderful, how much more libraries in my homestate are hooked in than when I was growing up; I did interlibrary loan a lot as a kid, and I always felt kind of bad that I was wasting the library’s money.

Second off, I think it’s kind of fun to just wait many weeks for a book to come in at my current library in the city; it’s fun to have a non-neurotic part of my life that I just let happen as it happens.

My mother's wisdom: Having children.

When I saw my mom over Christmas, she asked me how my one friend who runs the integrated homelessness / domestic violence shelter was doing, since she's now pregnant with her 2nd child.

I said I thought fine, but I said I could text and check, and since my mom was interested, I did.

As it turned out, the hormones that relax your ligaments in your body so you can give birth are all out of whack with her and she was having to remain in a lying position, otherwise her hips went all out of joint, and she had to see some sort of specialist doctor about that the upcoming week.

"How awful," my mom was like.  "But that's children: they make you suffer, they never thank you, and then they leave."

I texted that to my friend, and it made her laugh.

Farewell, reading material.

I'm proud of myself:

I accidentally lost 2 copies of recent Rolling Stones that I hadn't quite finished reading, and I didn't spaz out over it.

When I was heading home after barhopping with my one Polish-American mathematician friend, I went to pull out a magazine to read and realized that they weren't there...

I then realized that we had moved down seats at the martini bar so other people could sit down, and after we did that, my coat fell off the back of my chair and slid onto the back of a booth butted up close to the bar, and a woman sitting there handed it back to me.

My bet is that the magazines slid out of my coat pocket during that whole ordeal, and I didn't see them on the floor or hear them hit because of the music at the bar.

Plus, when I did realize what had probably happened, that bar was already closed, so it's not like I could go back there and ask for them.

Oh well.

Margaret Atwood (2 of 2): MaddAddam.

You know what I find interesting about "MaddAddam", the 3rd novel in Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" series?

First off, I love the series for how it plausibly extrapolates current trends, esp. in genetic engineering (e.g. Chicken Nubbins or something like that, where chickens are modified to be digestive tracts with nodes that you can cut off and easily process into nuggets).

Second off, I find it interesting how much she *didn't* anticipate, and how she then incorporated a bunch of stuff into the 3rd novel that really wasn't around or that much in public consciousness for the first two, e.g. (I think, I may be wrong here with a few):

- drones.
- smartphones and their cases.
- phones that take pictures.
- synthetic meat grown in laboratories.

Oddly, those new things that she incorporated really leapt out at me, and made me feel like her imagined world wasn't wholly consistent, since its contents shifted over time.

On that note, I just want to say for the record that I'm a strong defender of J.K. Rowling: her imagined world of Harry Potter is unbelievable, and I'm a strong fan of both her plotting and morally nuanced characters.

Criticism of her prose style is really overdone, and tells you more about the pretensions of her critics than her actual writing.

Margaret Atwood (1 of 2): News breakdown.

Somehow, until mid-Dec., I didn't realize that Margaret Atwood had her 3rd novel in her "Oryx and Crake" sci-fi series out, and had since 2013; I only found out when I was in the office at my university, and my employers were talking about genetic engineering and I mentioned "Oryx and Crake" and the sequel, and one of them mentioned the 3rd book.

That happened too with the 2nd book in the series, where I was at my academic conference years ago and I ran into someone I did my Master's with at a reception and we got on the subject of Margaret Atwood, and when I mentioned how much I liked "Oryx and Crake", she mentioned that there was a sequel out.

I think what I've realized is that the alternative newspapers I get do a good job of keeping me up with film and TV somewhat, but literature is a big big gap and thus even new releases by major authors can slip by me.