Fred M. Donner can take his obsession with geography, especially the tiny regions that he fails to map out in any meaningful or visual way, but expects the reader to be familiar with as a matter of course, and SHOVE IT WHERE THE SUN DOESN’T SHINE.

That is all.

I’m not sure how much of a big deal that I want to make out of this.

One one hand, the surrealism is off the scale. More than Brian Gasperosky coming back to Lansing and camping out at Gone Wired. More than Theio’s with wireless internet access. More than beating Myst in two days. More than using moisturizer.

On the other hand, the surrealism is the only aspect of it that even remotely touches my life. There is no other impact… hell, even if I was the naive’ person I was back then, I wouldn’t have the -time- to be anything but… well, surprised.

Aaron Conely is back in town. Apparently attending classes full-time at MSU and working at Grill 155 in the Union.

This takes me back in such a weird way.

You remember back in December, when I was buying ‘s Yule present, that I ripped the sleeve of my trench coat the day that I got it back from ? Well, the other day I popped a button off of it on the way out of the bus. That means that there’s a ripped sleeve, on the seam, and two buttons missing.

My poor armor.

A week or so before that, I’d lost my keys. The dragon-clip-thing that I’d gotten from had just fallen off of my belt loop.

A few days ago, I was sitting in Theio’s, formatting the iBook, and had everything backed up to my USB jumpdrive. I had it and the headphones (couldn’t listen to music on the laptop while it’s formatting) up on a little wooden ledge next to the booth. I got up to leave, and left the jump drive and headphones there.

I had never copied the files back from the jumpdrive to the iBook.

All of my writing – gone.
All of my saved photos – gone.
All of my electronic notes and papers since I’ve come back to school – gone.
All of my work timesheets and logs – gone.

Needless to say, I was a wee bit upset. But there is always light at the end of the tunnel. One can always decide to let these things go and move on. Re-build and pull in.

I have a replacement house key and car key on a new clip on my belt loop. It’s the same color as the dragon clip was, and my mini-MagLite is.

I have pulled as many of my school notes from outgoing emails as I can. Luckily, I am often requested to share my notes.

I have pulled the most recent novel revision that I can from the outgoing email I sent to Huggy and Emily. The first seven issues of Steven scripts can be gotten from the Yahoo!Groups site. Most of the other writing exists in its original, hand-written, hard copy form at home.

Best of all, there’s a hard drive from a dead desktop sitting at home that has all of my pre-Christmas writing on it.

Casualties:
– Little City Mafia (can be re-typed from handwritten original)
– A few chapter intros to the novel revision.
– A paper on the Nacirema for my Rituals class.
– My Islam notes.
– One free (legal) mp3 download, that I think I can get again.

Not as bad as it once was, and easily moved forward from. Now, why does this stuff come in cycles? What does it mean?

お金がないから、日本へ行くのはちょっと。。。

Edit: I just went to the Study Abroad fair. It looks like the summer trip, all in all, is going to cost me (estimating high here) about $9,000.

The sentence above says “Because I don’t have money, I’m not so sure about going to Japan…” roughly translated.

The resources are at my disposal to obtain this money for just such an educational jaunt out of the country, I just need to apply like mad.

So, this is still the plan. My hurdles have become concrete, and so this makes me (1) no longer able to ignore their existence, and (2) more able to jump them.