personal

How Presidential

It was Presidents’ Day here, so I spent the day mostly reading, mostly comics.

I’ve also recently been going through some old photographs — mostly so I can do pointless things like this — and trying not to wallow in nostalgia. I discovered, with some surprise, that my old boss at Penn State recently retired. Aside from an exchange of Christmas cards that first year after I moved back to New York, we haven’t kept in touch, nor have I been back to University Park in all that time. (I don’t regret the move, even if I’m still not convinced New York is my preferred long-term solution, but I’d be lying if I said there weren’t some things I missed about Pennsylvania.

Anyway, I’m not really wallowing in nostalgia, just feeling twinges of it. And it really is pure nostalgia: a fond longing for what was, but not a desire to return there now.

Though somehow, I did seem to wear a lot more hats there than here. And you know what they say about hats.

Some kind of Sunday

A pretty average Sunday. An enjoyable episode of Fringe, a disappointing crossword puzzle, and a fun bit of writing:

“Step away from the teleporter,” says Dupree — or maybe it’s his clone. Has that even happened yet? I glance at my watch, but of course it’s stopped — not just stopped; a large crack splits the face of it, the numbers beneath not just frozen but obscured by broken glass and chipped paint — and there’s no reason to think it would even be accurate if the hands were still moving. I can’t tell you the amount of trouble I’ve caused for myself lately by putting my trust in clocks. I look back at Dupree for some kind of telltale sign — his clone has…had…will have a thicker beard, doesn’t he? Or maybe a prosthetic leg? — but between the thick haze that settles in my brain every time we go through this dumb routine, and way he’s shouting and waving that gun at me, it’s hard to concentrate on much of anything but the most immediate concerns.

It’s only an hour later, when I’m tied to the chair in his cabin, that I realize, hell, what does it matter if he’s a clone or not? Dupree’s always hated my guts whichever version of him I’ve run into. I should just be glad this time he managed not to shoot me.

I should maybe back up. You find yourself saying that a lot when you’re a time traveler, especially when it’s of the accidental variety and you’re slingshotted back and forth without any real sense of control. You find yourself saying things like, “I should maybe back up,” and “Haven’t we had this conversation before?” and “Jesus, Dupree, for god’s sake this time around don’t shoot me in the goddamn head.” And yet you still find yourself repeating things, explaining yourself, and instructing Dupree’s clone on how best to pull shrapnel from your brain.

This is clearly an earlier Dupree. I should have known by the way he smells. Before I got here, he was living alone, in this badly heated shack in the woods, his own private Siberia, and he almost never bathed. It’s tempting to call him a mad scientist and just be done with it, but that implies some kind of basic understanding of the science he was toying with. Mad tinkerer is probably more accurate. He barely understood the principles he was building upon, much less the practical applications of his inventions. Take the “teleporter,” for instance. Before I got here, it just sat in a heap of other junk out back. It wasn’t until I stepped inside it — which, from the odors still wafting from the Dupree sitting across from me, I’d say is still months away — that he learned it was really a time machine.

A piece of crap time machine, if you ask me, but a time machine nonetheless.

I’m doing a little better cold-wise, but I still haven’t quite got it beat yet.

Somehow this was a Saturday

Still fighting the cold, which is at its worst when I try to do something silly like sleep. I had to get up early this morning, to drive my father over to the local car mechanic, and there was a point, maybe around three or four in the morning, when I thought, hell, sleep isn’t working, maybe I should just stay up. I’m glad I didn’t, because as is I needed a nap in the late afternoon.

We went out this for dinner to celebrate my mother’s birthday, and then I came home and watched Drive, which was quite good.

I also watched this past Sunday’s Walking Dead episode, which I think I’ve been building up the courage to watch. The episode right before it, the big event right before the season’s most recent brief hiatus, was…well, pretty damn intense. It’s a good show, despite some problems, but it’s not always the most fun zombie apocalypse going.

Day off

I’m still kind of fighting a cold, so it’s probably just as well that I stayed home from work today. Granted, when I originally asked for the day off, I thought I’d be using it to do something more exciting than self-cleaning the oven and reading Tintin comics. Okay, not much more exciting, but the day was mostly just sitting around. Which, okay again, is a lot of what work involves — albeit with a lot more meetings — but at least here I got to sleep in a little later.