November 24, 2003
The Week That Rocked
Twelve days since I made a substantial post. Bleah. The longer I put it off, the more there is to write. Of course, it's not like this is some kind of chore, but it takes time. But I have no time to digress . . . ummm . . . more than I normally digress.
I finished War in Heaven . . . obviously, I kind of had to. It was really great, but not quite as good as Many Dimensions, I thought. That's purely a personal preference concerning subject matter, though. I wouldn't recommend one over the other. I was pleased to discover that the LeTourneau library has a copy of All Hallow's Eve. Seriously, I'm not making that up. I'll definitely have to look into this situation at a later date, when my reading slate is a little bit cleaner. I have moved on now to Descent into Hell, and since I'm just that slow these days (I'll elaborate in a bit) I am now truly reading three books related to Hell.
On Sunday night . . . and by Sunday night, for clarity, I mean last Sunday night (we're starting at the beginning here), I went to see Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. I and, I believe, the rest of us who were there, were quite "wowed" by the quality of this movie. It was most excellent in just about every respect. I'd go into deeper detail, but I've hashed through it so thoroughly so many times with people since that . . . I'd rather not write it all down at this point. I meant to write a complete review a week ago, but I was too busy and it didn't happen. In any case, it was good, well-acted, well-paced, generally worthwhile, etc. Go see it. It's strange. I never actually went to a movie in this town at all during my first year (barring The Two Towers in January, and that doesn't really count) and then suddenly I go to four movies in a two week span. Odd.
Monday was spent finishing War in Heaven and writing my reading summary for it. These activities were not equally proportioned at all. I finished the book approximately 50 minutes before class, and then did the summary. I finished printing out and stapling my 2nd draft at the moment when Michael walked into the computer lab to get me. I rode with him to Dr. Olson's house (we had class there, for the second time this semester). The atmosphere is mostly very conducive to the class in general. The main problem is focus and getting everyone together. We didn't start until about 45 minutes late, and ended up running 20 minutes over. Dr. Olson's dogs were . . . less than well-behaved this time around, periodically banging loudly on the door of the room they were in (which happened to be less than 10 feet away from me). Aside from this, it was a fun class. Of course, I ended up getting back to my room after 11:00. And I had genre reports to work on for Bib Lit and a speech to write for the next day.
Wilson helped me brainstorm a topic and I got to work on that. I had hoped to finish the genre reports in time to send them in to Owlet, because it's worth an extra quiz grade to do so. However, as the night wore on and the thing refused to progress with any sort of speed, it became apparent that this would not be taking place. Long story short, I stayed up all night.
The next day wasn't anywhere near as fun as my last all-nighter, not by half. Not enough caffeine, you see. I zonked in Woodring's class, and fully expected to zonk in Kubricht's. Fortunately, he was showing a video. Even more fortunately, he failed to bring the right video, realized that he'd actually thrown away the right video, and cancelled class. So I got off easy on that one. Speech, of course, was a breeze. Go in, sit through speeches, make your speech, leave. Yeah, I got picked on to do mine . . . no lucky breaks for me, yet again. Payton sure made up for that first speech where I actually got to go last. Which sucks because that was the only one where I was fully prepared to go first.
Anyway, this was a special occasion speech, and I gave a before-dinner address to the 7th Annual Gulf Coast Purity League Book Roast and Fish Fry. I, for one, was quite entertained, and I think my classmates were as well, generally. I brought along several books to "burn" and pulled them out to show everyone. I had the Harry Potter series ("I know I burned them last year, but I figured I'd just go ahead and do it again."), a couple of Dungeons and Dragons books that I bummed off someone, a Stephen King book, Dante's Inferno, Lord of Chaos (Wheel of Time, book 6 by Robert Jordan . . . the title was the main thing, and the fact that I happened to have it in my pocket), and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. That last one may sound a little odd, but while doing "research" the night before I discovered that it had met that doom at a few church book burnings in recent months, so it passed.
After that I went over to Best Buy with Scholl and Uncle Doug in my new truck, my first official use of it really, to get myself a copy of The Two Towers: Extended Edition (43 minutes of extra scenes . . . oh, yeah!). And, of course, since we were in the area we stopped by Books-a-Million to check out the scene. I was tempted to buy a few things, but I have too much to read as it is.
We returned to my room and Martinez and Wilson showed up as we watched through most of the new stuff. We broke for supper halfway through, and Moore joined us for the second half. It was all kinds of fun, and there are so many great new scenes! I won't go into it here, there's no point. If you haven't seen them yet, you get a hearty reprimand from me, and . . . you should go see them now . . . or something. By the time we finished, it was about 7:00. Everybody left, my computer screen started getting really blurry, and I decided that my bed was . . . looking . . . particularly . . . zzzzzzzzzzzzz. Yeah, I went to bed at about 7:30, so I got 13 hours of sleep. Crazy. And lucky as well, because I ended up pulling another all-nighter on Wednesday in order to finish those dang-blasted genre reports. Bleah. All kinds of bleah. I got some other stuff done in there, too.
So, Thursday wasn't any more fun that Tuesday. The only real difference was that I didn't have to give a speech, and I didn't get to skip Western Civ. I crashed at about 9:00 and slept through chapel on Friday, so I got 14 hours of sleep there . . . all in all my average for the week was better than it has been many times in the past. That's really sad.
I spent a sizable portion of Friday playing Freedom Force, a really fun computer game (the first I've played in a couple of months, too) wherein you take control of a team of up to four superheroes. The style of play is similar to Baldur's Gate . . . squad-based, real-time strategy that you can pause whenever to issue orders to your guys, with a heavy role-playing element in terms of advancing your heroes, and figuring damage, etc. It's very retro, done in 60's comics style . . . even if you've only ever watched the old Batman TV show, this game will crack you up with how dead on it is. Very well done voice acting, perfectly melodramatic and so on. The narrator is especially good. And the gameplay is just awesome . . . so many cool powers, so many cool heroes, so little time!
Friday night was the usual (Bible study), Saturday was the usual for the most part. I went to Waffle Shoppe with the crew at 1:00 in the morning, and that was fun. Randomly going out and eating pancakes with a bunch of people at all hours is the very essence of college life. And they were really good pancakes, too (at only $1.79 for 10!). Sunday afternoon was spent finishing my paper so people could hack at it. It still needs more hacks, but there was a bit of commentary forthcoming this evening. Of course the big activity was a supper of sandwiches, chips and Oreos in preparation for the full showing of The Two Towers on the big screen in Barry Auditorium. Four hours is a truly epic amount of time to spend watching a movie . . . it was loads of fun. "He was twitching because he's got mah axe buried in his nervous system!" Classic.
Jeepers! It's after 2:00! I'm not doing anything like what I did last week, no way, no how. I'm going to bed. I need to continue to catch up on sleep, I have a lot of driving to do on Wednesday. Uncle Doug and I will traveling to Lubbock to visit my family (extended, not immediate) for Thanksgiving Break. Should be fun . . . it will be interesting at the very least. Good night, y'all.
