A Lost Day
I woke up this morning feeling really tired, and groggy, and not quite ready for the day, and remembering the day a couple of weeks ago when I biked into work when I felt blah, and actually felt rather ill and miserable when I got in, I considered either driving in, or even just calling in sick.
Well, I think I'm just tired, due to not enough sleep last weekend, and not enough sleep and generally not much good sleep this week. Thank goodness we have a long weekend coming up! So I did manage to bike in, and felt pretty good when I arrived. It's cooled down considerably - the temperature when I woke up was 52 - and that makes for a better ride.
However, I still felt kind of wiped for most of the day, and left promptly at 5 pm. I was really feeling zoned and lethargic. And unfortunately work this week has involved a lot of odds-and-ends projects and very little programming, so it's hard to stay focused.
These days Charlie mostly does sales work for Epic, which I think pays very well, but is not exactly what he'd like to do. I think he misses programming, and I think he would really like to be a college teacher. But he's the only person on my team at work who's been there longer than I have (he hit five years this past summer).
Charlie's one of the few people who I feel comfortable really opening up to. We don't always see eye-to-eye, and we don't have many common interests, but he's always got a sympathetic ear.
The new issue of Thieves and Kings came out this week, which was - as always - a joyous occasion. I think I've got a good feel for Mark Oakley's writing style, his understated approach to magic and the wackiness of some of his characters. Maybe it's time for him to shake things up a bit, and advance the plot some more. But it's still a charming comic. It's also impressive in that it actually has (mostly) stuck to its bimonthly schedule for several years now, and there are two paperback collections out, so it's easy to get into and stay motivated to keep up with. Assuming you enjoy slightly cynical high fantasy, that is.
Finally, DC is doing their big crossover event called DC One Million. The premise of this is that each comic published this month is issue #1,000,000, and the bulk of the story takes place a million months after the first appearance of Superman (which is around the 871st century). Some of the plot is interesting, and there's promise of some interesting stuff to come, but overall it's way too loosely plotted, some of the stories and art are really cheesy, and there's way too much attention paid to all the future versions of modern heroes. (What, no one in the DC universe has had an original idea in 850 centuries? Geez!)
Oh, and I really, really loathe the characterization of Batman in the 1990s, his unrelentingly grim and supremely confident attitude. Bo-ring.
Not surprisingly, the best tie-in to this storyline is the Starman issue, written by regular series author James Robinson. It features original Starman Ted Knight talking to his descendent.
Well, I'm a sucker for time travel and alternate history stories in comics. Sad, but true.
The first was a really cool dream. You remember the scene in Star Wars where R2-D2 and Chewbacca are playing chess with the holographic pieces? I imagined I was playing something like that. It was a standard 8x8 chess board made of wood, but the pieces were all lead miniatures. The smallest ones could fit perhaps sixteen to a single square, while the largest were maybe four to a square.
And they were all fully-animated, and "grew" out of the board during the game.
Basically, all the squares on the board grew pieces for the owner of that square. The four middle squares grew pieces the fastest, and two back rows on each side grew them at a medium speed, and all the other squares grew them slowly. And the pieces you got were essentially random. I had some dwarves, archers, and some large hulking things. My opponent had a couple of wizards and some goblin-like creatures. There were many others, but those are the ones I remember.
To move the pieces you tap a piece and then tap where you want it to go. If it encounters an enemy, then it would fight it. I recall a vivid scene of the animated lead of two figures in combat getting all mixed up. And archers would fire arrows as necessary. I'm sure all of this was somewhat influenced by the Myth: The Fallen Lords computer game (a cool concept, but a very flawed actual game), but the vividness of playing with physical pieces of this sort in front of me was really neat.
The second dream was more abbreviated. I was in a movie theatre, and sitting in front of me were a young, thin, shortish blonde woman with glasses and a flower-print dress, and her three-year-old son. She apparently decided she was interested in me and I felt similarly about her (although of course I woke up before we got to kiss; darn!). She seemed rather extroverted and witty, too, with a particular quality that I can't really codify.
Although superficially that description fits my first girlfriend, in fact this woman was not really anything at all like her beyond those broad characteristics. I've been thinking about it, and I can't connect her to anyone I know or can remember offhand. So if she represents someone specific, I'm darned if I can think who it is.
Probably she just symbolizes my interest in being in a relationship again. But it's unusual that I have dreams like this that are so memorable. How does my mind come up with this stuff?
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