blurg

Another long, too-busy-to-journal weekend. The short version: Went to party Friday night. Stayed till midnight. Slept. Went to mom's, did laundry. Went to party Saturday night. Stayed till 3am. Slept. Went to mom's, vegged, went to thrift shop, bought clothes. In between bits of the above, managed to finish the transcript of last week's Buffy episode. Ugh. It's a lot harder to get motivated to finish the transcript when the episode blows. At least it's behind me now.

There's lots of else to say about the upcoming tour (boils down to: eek) and how much I hate my job (ooh, that's new and different) but instead right now I'm gonna rant about, uh, politics. Sort of.

See, I watched last week's episode of "24" tonight. And I was thinking how I would probably not want to vote for Senator Palmer for president, if he were a real person and really running. And then I thought about why that was, and it made me feel sad.

The thing is, you have to assume that this guy has been in politics for a while. He's a senator and he's running for president; it's not like he just decided a year or two ago to try politics. So, he should know how it works. And yet he continually displays a level of shock at the corruption he encounters, which I find hard to buy.

Am I just cynical? Is it wrong of me to not be shocked when, for example, we find out that the reporter chick was bought off by the shadowy bad guys? Or is it actually that the Palmer character is portrayed unrealistically, that he shouldn't be surprised? I mean, disgusted and resigned yes, but surprised, no.

I dunno. I'm not articulating it very well. I just feel like, Palmer is a character who ought to know the ins and outs of the system quite well. As a black man in American politics you'd think he would have been very careful to figure out the way it works, the intricate system of back-scratching, back-stabbing, and blackmailing that Washington is. He doesn't necessarily have to be a part of it, but he should at least seem to be aware of and familiar with it.

(Or else Washington isn't actually like that, and I've just been deceived by watching too much "West Wing." But I don't think so.)

I knew it all along.

Which Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy character are you?

dreams

Night before last I dreamt that I was at Worldcon. I was watching a movie but the auditorium was too crowded and I got annoyed. (A particular coworker whom I find annoying in RL was there, sitting next to me.) So I decided to go kill some time until the Masquerade started. I was en route to the hotel, looking for a bathroom, when I passed by the dealers' room and realized that it was the last day of the con and I hadn't visited the dealers' room once. I thought it was about 3pm and the room closed at 6pm, so I went in. The dealers' room was crappy, though, more like a Barnes & Noble. Ick! A woman was trying to shoo me out saying it was closing, and I was like, "I thought it closed at 6," and she was like, "we close at 6:30 and it's 6:35 now." I was like, eek! the masquerade is going to start!

So I left and got into the elevator to return to my hotel room, wondering where Laura and Ariana might be. As in all my dreams that involve elevators, the elevator ride took a serious detour, basically became a city bus or subway car for a bit. Eventually I got to my hotel room and spent some time trying to figure out the TV remote before I finally got the TV on and started watching the masquerade. (There was another bit to this dream that I'm leaving out because it's severely TMI.)

I wonder if this is a variation on the "last day of classes" dream theme that I've done so much research into -- "last day of Worldcon and I haven't done everything I wanted to do"? Heh.

Last night, I dreamt that I had gotten Bini a new kind of cat food, which was supposed to be super-good for some reason, and I was trying to decide whether to give it to him. He was meowing to go outside and making a nuisance of himself, so I decided to try to distract him with the food. I poured some of it into his bowl with his regular food and tried to mix them together. But the new food was bright blue. And Bini wasn't interested. Geez, that dream was practically an episode from real life. :)

Angst! Yay Angst!

Ever since, uh, approximately "Doublemeat Palace" (four Buffy episodes ago), I've been trying to write a dark angsty Spike piece. But it kept coming out fluffy and shippy, which is SO not what I was going for!

But I think I finally got it. This probably needs some cleaning up before I can call it an actual fic and post it anywhere (other than lj), but here it is anyway, because I just finished it and want it down, dammit!

Working Title: "Spike's Revenge" (okay, it's lame, I'm working on it!). Vital Stats: NC-17, spoilers for "As You Were" (2/26/02 ep), dark, nasty, not beta'd. And of course it's about Spike and Buffy, 'cause what isn't?
( click to read, if you dare )

the definition of pointless

The server that hosts our bug-tracking database is down. Literally *everything* that I need to do at work today involves the bug database. Translation: I can't do any work.

I know I generally spend more of the day goofing off than working anyway, but at least I like to know that there's some work I should and could be doing. And since I'm going on vacation next week, I was kinda hoping to be productive this week. I guess it's not Meant To Be. Welcome to Monday.

So, just killed some time having an interesting discussion with a couple of co-workers about the biological purpose of sleep. Co-worker A claims that the only reason humans sleep is that we can't function properly during nighttime, because it's too dark for us to see. So we shut down for convenience's sake, and wake up again when it's light enough for us to get stuff done. If we lived on a planet where it was daylight all the time, says he, we wouldn't need to sleep.

But wait, say I and Co-worker B, humans (and other creatures) NEED sleep to rest and revitalize our bodies. Are you saying that on this theoretical always-light planet the creatures wouldn't need rest at all? At which point, of course, Co-worker A starts fudging and says that maybe they would stop and rest, like the equivalent of an afternoon siesta, but it wouldn't be sleep as we know it. Whatever.

Seems to me the big flaw in his reasoning is that, if we have evolved to adapt to our surroundings, and if there weren't another reason to need sleep, we would have evolved the ability to see in the dark. I think I'll go point that out to him.