A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

A few weeks ago I was heading up to Chez Bean, which involved me bolting from my desk at 5:00:01 like I was shot out of a gun to get to Grand Central Terminal (not station, terminal. Grand Central Station is a post office. But we’ve been through this, anyway…) in time for the 5:30something with a little bit of time to spare. I know I know, I can make it in 27 minutes from my apartment to the train by folding space and time, but that’s a power I don’t like to flaunt.

So I was sitting on the 5:33 at 5:28 having kept myself in sub-light mode. Now, that’s 5:33 on a Friday evening.

The train was empty.

I thought about it a couple seconds and realized how perfectly impossible those things were. I took up my bags and tore out of the train, up the track ramp and into the great hall. I looked at the board… Yep, track thirty-thr…wait… *squint*

SHIT

I bolted to track 36, seated my not inconsiderable duff in the seat and thought myself a good think.

There was no way around it. I couldn’t see the board. The big board. The one you can see clearly from across the entirety of GCT. I couldn’t see it.

My mind flashed through the last six months of increased squinting, hunching towards the computer, complaining about the light level.

sigh.

That was a month or more ago now. Today I came out of the subway and walked past a chain vision place. Walked in and asked about exams. Yep. Just sit there, he’ll call you in a minute.

Yadda yadda.

The verdict? Astigmatism, 20/50 left, 20/25 right.

Well, it was a good run. My family has been on me like white on rice for more than 30 years about my vision. “You sit in front of that thing so much, you’re gonna go blind.”

My sisters have had glasses for decades, my father since before I was born.

So, in a week I cross that line. Fine with me. I’ll find something suitable to my abnormally huge cranium. In the meantime I got the cheapest pair of glasses I didn’t hate. They look like you took a pair of glasses off a doll and tried to fit them on my skull.

Should be interesting.

So yeah, there’s that.

Is Awesome.

That is all.

First: Could someone tell me what’s supposed to be healthy about this bizarre sludge?

That aside, I’ve accidentally found yogurt I like.

For dozens of years I’ve associated the taste of yogurt with chalk, because it tastes like fucking chalk.

Every six to nine months or so I’d give it another go because people kept saying it was good.

Well, in my bizarre blended fruit smoothie quest I happened to pick up some Stonyfield Farm French Vanilla “Cream Top” (which I presumed meant “extra fatass” or “with flavor”) and I have to say, it’s bloody good.

SO good in fact that in since this past weekend I’m most of the way through my second 2 pound container.

Whups.

#fatassisaverb.

has, I’m here to tell ya, a really solid sense of humor.

It was one of the important details for getting me on board.

More about that some other time.

My Father never really said that so much as I like to imagine. But it only took a couple times for it to become one of those droning chants in my head.

I just swapped the SATA cable over to the linux drive today. I figure I’m using it at work and running into rusty knowledge issues. Might as well. Plus, aside from video games there’s nothing really interesting I use windows for (except my new Zune. Long story.)

The first thing that I have to do though, when I boot up the other drive after a couple months is restore source and document trees from the NAS drive which, because I’ve been a fat lazy fuck, doesn’t take so much time. More on that later.

Browsing around through my old repository directories I realized again that I have just about every email I’ve sent or received since the early 90s.

That’s a lot of emails. It’s hundreds of thousands.

Not only that, I have at least 9 active email accounts at the moment. 9. There’s no excuse for that.

I have boxes full of journals, millions of lines of source code. Just crap upon crap upon crap.

It would be so easy .

I have husks of ancient computers, khaki pants I wore when I lived in Westchester, hundreds of books I’ll never look at again, if indeed I looked at them ever to begin with.

Sure, pictures are for keeping. Some journals perhaps (though even the best of them need to be winnowed harshly. But “How to draw Manga: Volume 1″? Seriously? I never cracked it.

I don’t know. It’s obvious to see where I’m going with this.

I just haven’t gotten there yet.