Carrier Lost

[willdevine]

My NaBloPoMo efforts for this year have gone into the crapper. The whole thing was initially lost around Election Day and the excitement contained therein. The days since then, though, have also been busy, mostly with work but also with a few (relatively uneventful) social excursions around the same time. I thought maybe I could cheat and write some entries after the fact, but an unfortunate development this weekend has made that option untenable. Maybe I'll do the blogging-every-day-for-a-month thing another month, not in November of a given year. Maybe I'll get everyone else around me to do the same. I'll call it WillBloPoMo, because everything is all about me, of course.

So, to catch up a bit, all at once:

• Election Day went well, in my not-terribly-humble opinion. I have heard it said that November 4, 2008 was "the day hope won out over fear". That's certainly a matter of opinion, but it's one that I share. I think it's great how, at his first press conference, President-Elect Obama addressed the dog for his daughters "issue" (I love how people care about this!) by saying he'd prefer to get a dog from the shelter because the dogs from the shelter are mostly "mutts like me". As a "mutt" myself, that's something I can relate to. Ethnic and racial identity is something I've always struggled with in my life. It'd be easy to say that this sort of thing shouldn't matter in this age, and I've even said those words myself, but they really do matter. At the very least, I've been fortunate that my own racial mix--Asian and Caucasian--is one that doesn't really elicit much in terms of prejudice, at least in the United States. Nevertheless, it's something that is ever-present in my life. And I admit, I'm somewhat pleased to see that this is also in the consciousness of our president-to-be.


• Work continues to be busy. The hours aren't so bad, actually, but I definitely have a solid and steady (and, at times, breakneck) pace. As such, I have little time to catch my breath during the day. I also can't attend to as many of the non-time-critical-but-they-have-to-get-done-sometime tasks during the normal workweek, which resulted in me having to go into work for three hours earlier today. It's really not that bad; it could be a lot worse than it is. Still, I definitely feel my stress level at work rising.


• I haven't been sleeping that well lately. This is partly due to work, but also partly due to my own social activities.


• I'm waaaaaaaaaay behind on my comics reading. I tried to assemble all my assorted and spread out piles of unread comics collections today. It's frakkin' huge. This clearly needs to be addressed soon.


• The aforementioned "unfortunate development this weekend" happened Saturday evening, in the midst of the monthly USS Accord meeting. Essentially, my computer--the behemoth laptop--ceased functioning. I wasn't able to boot to Windows. I probably could/should have consulted with any of my technologically-oriented friends about the problem, but I didn't want to bother any of them with this. Instead, I went to Best Buy today to get it looked at. It appears that the hard drive has died, unfortunately wiping out roughly seven years of data with little in terms of what has been backed up elsewhere. This is somewhat sad, but for the most part, I wasn't using a lot of that data anyway. This will be more of a problem if I ever feel a need to look up something from my past, and I'll unfortunately be unable to do so. In the short term, though, I expect to be offline (when not at work) for at least a few days. (I'm currently posting this from a Cornell computer lab.) Best Buy will be getting a good chunk of money from me. This is all Chuck's fault for making me trust the Nerd Herd Geek Squad!


• I am caught between wanting to do 'more' and needing a break from everything. This dichotomy--and many other dichotomies, really--define my life at the moment.