"Dear Diary, I wish you were a taco."

With the appropriate thanks to lucidam for sending me the material for a much-needed segue back into journalling, I attempt a return.

So, hi.

It's now been over four months since last I posted an entry. Four months! This has been hands down my longest hiatus from LJ since I started this journal. And anyone who has been where I've been knows that the longer you wait, the harder it is to get started again. For the past few weeks, I've been starting to read people's entries again, and then more recently I've been trying to actually sit down and make a post, and now it looks like I'm actually doing it. There was one occasion, a little bit ago, where I actually got as far as starting to type up the entry, although I abandoned it before posting. This time, though, I've got a good feeling, and I think this one's going to be the one to make it through. (Of course, if I were running things, I'd be about two milliseconds away from completing the post, and then the universe would abruptly end. But this is why I'm not running things.)

So what have I been doing these past several months of non-journalling? Not nearly as much as you might think. For those keeping score, when last I left off in October I had started working again, and I was still fighting with some gnarly überfunk, which I thought I might be working my way out of. Well, it turns out I was pretty mistaken about that. I slipped further and further and basically ended up spending a few months avoiding as much human contact as I could and sitting around being depressed. Somewhere in there I quit that job I got. Once that happened, it was scads and scads of nothing all day but television. And when I say nothing, I really mean as little as possible. I even stopped with my online activites for a while, including checking e-mail and reading LJ, something I'm not sure I've ever abandoned before, even in times of great crisis. Bad times.

At some point, it started to get better. I poked around on LJ once in a while. Eventually I got around to staring at my e-mail inbox and wondering how I was going to deal with all the backlog. I started to feel less and less like I was imminently going to collapse, dry up, and disappear. Then, wonder of wonders, the household television broke down. I like to think that that was the final catalyst I needed. So, since then, I've been slogging through e-mail backlogs, cleaning stuff up, trying to even write a few personal e-mails, and gearing up to make a return to LJ. So today marks a nice turning point for me. I've more or less caught up on that huge e-mail backlog I had (excepting that I haven't sent out much in the way of personal replies yet), and I'm returning to LJ again, hopefully to reset a trend.

So that's pretty much it. I didn't have too much to say, I don't think, at least on a personal level. I've been away too long and done too little for it really to be any other way. And so...some filler!


You are one of the Undying, the immortal beings
that would stand beside the gods, had they not
been bound to the material world by people.

What level of divine power do you have?
brought to you by Quizilla

I don't usually do the quiz meme thing, or if I do, I don't usually post the results, but for some reason I really dug this picture. :)

I had two random thoughts today, which I'll share.

Neil Gaiman blogged about (among other things) his alleged resemblance to Alan Rickman. The gist of it is that people tell him that they think he looks like Alan Rickman. He (Gaiman) didn't think so, and didn't undersand why people thought this. Then while doing a TV interview, he saw Alan Rickman on a TV screen, except it wasn't Alan Rickman, it was Neil Gaiman. He then goes on to say that TV changes the way you look, enough so, even, that he's met people he failed to recognized even though he knew them from TV. So the thought was this: Assuming that we take Gaiman's observation at face value (as it were), and that TV changes the way you look enough so that people fail to recognize you and/or mistake you for other people, I got to wondering what kind of change this would be. Could it be a one-way kind of change, as in information is lost and different-looking people start to look similar? Or is it more like a change that happens similarly for everyone, and so because Rickman and Gaiman look alike on TV they must also look alike in person? I then reflected that I'd never seen Rickman in person nor Gaiman on television, so I had no means of comparison there. Then I started looking at pictures of them both, and sure enough, I began to get confused as to which was which. But then, as I later discovered, you look at enough pictures of Alan Rickman, and everyone starts to look like Alan Rickman. It was odd in this Being John Malkovich kind of way.

The other random thought was that I started to wonder what it means when you say you "know" something. The example I came up with was this: Do you know all fifty states? I sat down and tried to list all of them. I got 46 before I gave up. ( Hiding the ones I missed, if you want to try )

And yet I am sure that if you gave me a list of a thousand words and told me to pick out the ones that were states, I could do it. So I do know the states, but I don't. I was just trying to work out whether we had any words for that.

Well, okay, enough of that. I'd like to work on a new PSA, though: Sometimes...safe sex isn't.

And, in closing, I feel I must share this amazing piece of history. This may well be old news for many of you, but I believe it will be amusing for all. I'm pleased to have been exposed to a copy online. Without further ado, I give you all Old Glory Robot Insurance.

And for those too bandwidth-inhibited/lazy/disinterested to check that movie out...well, what can I say. Make your own fun. "Honk, honk!"