This never happens to me in real life

Last night I had a rather confusing dream. A friend of mine whom I have known since my first year of university was talking with me, and almost immediately it came out that she was interested in me. We started dating, and with that came the sex. The funny thing was, that despite her apparent (though entirely theoretical) satisfaction, I could never remember actually having sex. You'd think that would be something I would remember, but I didn't even have any knowledge of anything leading up to or immediately following it. The dream promptly sunk into a sitcom-esque subplot of a former girlfriend of mine coming to visit and having to hide her from the current relationship, but that's clearly unimportant, much like all the episodes of Happy Days it was based off. What is important that now I'm feeling awfully awkward about having to go to class with the girl today, because the dream was too damn vivid. Nothing will happen, but the question still begs:

Will it be as awkward as I'm imagining it to be?

How you can tell I made my own dinner tonight

- I ate at 10:30.
- In front of the television.
- It consisted of two cobs of corn, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and two Chunks Ahoy! cookies.
- I ate the cookies first.

Treachery!

Two of my most anticipated albums of the year were Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and My Morning Jacket's Z. However, when trying to upload them to my computer, I ran into a problem that thousands of music consumers are running into: copy protection. Now up until recently, I didn't have a problem with Copy Protection because the protection on CDs wasn't invasively done; I could still upload albums to iTunes and copy them normally to CDs for other family members. However, in recent months two of the four major label groups, EMI and Sony BMG, have begun to make their CDs compatible only with Windows Media Player in response to Apple refusing to license out FairPlay iPod compatible copy protection or raise prices of songs in iTunes. As a result, the albums are incompatible with iPods, the leading digital music player in the world.

What I find asinine about the debacle is that amidst a season of low CD sales, EMI and Sony BMG have decided to inconvenience potential customers in a way that many, like New Jersey banker Ryan Kuczynski, are deciding to cease being customers entirely. In this case, the labels are directly driving many consumers to download the album illegally or through iTunes. And without the support of Warner and Universal, the latter of which is the world's largest label and fundamentally disagrees with copy protection, EMI and Sony BMG don't have enough clout to force Apple to cave.

In this scenario, who am I to support: Apple, a company that may be legally inconveniencing other companies but has provided me with great and consistent products and service, or two major labels who are directly inconveniencing me?

I wonder.

made my day

Today in Abnormal Psychology, Dr. Wardell was lecturing on self-report measures of stress, specifically LCUs (Life Change Units.) Essentially, this is a system assigning numerical values ranging from 1 to 100 to stressful events. It is based around marriage at 50 LCUs and death of a loved one, which comes in at a whopping 100. A person looks at the list, marks down what stressors they have (in what numbers) and totals their score. Scores of 100 and 200 are serious enough; a person who climbs the stress ladder to a score of 300 indicates a 3 in 4 chance of suffering from a serious stress-related health issue in the near future. As Dr. Wardell put it, "to reach this point in the simplest way, a person would have to be married three times in one year and have all their spouses die. At that point they're looking at a serious prison sentence." He added with a smirk, gesturing at the chart, "Which, as you can see, is another 63 points."

Mathematical inconsistencies aside, that was spectacular.

My Big Damn Heroes

Back in 2002, a show came on the air that captured my interest and imagination as soon as I started watching it. Though it only ran for a short period of time before being cancelled, Firefly became and remains one of my favourite television shows of all time. The 'Verse of Whedon's creation was refreshing, intelligently thought out, and believable in its humanity; in short, everything that Star Wars and Star Trek weren't. Whedon showed viewers a future where people have expanded into the stars and found nothing besides themselves staring back. Without aliens, Whedon didn't have that failsafe that Roddenberry and similarly-minded science fiction auteurs relied on. His characters had to be people, and be believable in that role. This engaged me more than any other science fiction. As a space western, it was a success because the two halves fitted so well together. It avoided the one thing that always bothered me about other science fiction: sound effects in space. The more I watched, the more I fell in love.

So of course, I was crushed when it was cancelled. Like many other fans of the series, I resented Twentieth Century Fox for its marketing blunder and lack of confidence. As we turned our anger outwards, we found that we weren't alone, that thousands of others felt the same way we did. Many of us fought a guerilla marketing campaign, spearheaded by such fan groups as Fireflymovie.net. Gradually, we realized that as consumers, we still had influence. We bought the series DVDs and lent them out, and as we did this, something great happened. The people behind the show responded. They talked with us, shared our frustrations, and helped us fight. The cancelling of Firefly was in many ways a blessing, because it brought together thousands of us Browncoats in line behind our Big Damn Heroes. They went to cons halfway around the globe, where Firefly never aired, and found out DVDs were selling out; they found more of us. After much effort, we got finally got victory. We finally got more Firefly. We finally got our Big Damn Movie. Joss, like us, never gave up, and tonight we get our reward.

I'm seeing the movie tonight as soon as my shift at work is done, and I'm so excited I can barely sit still. Every time I see a trailer, I squeal uncontrollably. Tonight is a personal victory for me and Browncoats alike, evidence that there is room in Hollywood and multiplexes for us. Tonight, as we head to the cinemas for our victory lap, we can't help but think one thing:

We've done the impossible, and that makes us mighty.

Huzzah

Last night was pretty slick. Donell came by and we just kicked it for a while. After watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which was as hilarious as Donell had promised, I switched the night's programming from Lost in Translation to the two hour series premiere of Firefly. I knew that if I could just get Donell to watch it, I could get him to love it. Why? Because I haven't enountered a person yet who didn't watch the premiere and love it. Without fail, Donell enjoyed the premiere and made some comments about needing to buy DVDs. Success.

After that, we pulled out our guitars and Donell proceeded to not only try to correct my atrocious posture and technique (well, that's what I get when I play my guitar once a month or so,) but to teach me the Foo Fighters' "Everlong." Progress was slow, but made. I didn't quite get the proper pattern of chords, so we just played a stripped down version. It was also turned into a very necessary lesson in technique and fingering. All in all, it was a good night and Donell's rad for putting up with all that. Now I just have to keep practicing and keep learning. Given my track record, that's a tall request but I think I'm up to it this time.

I'm writing again, at least tentatively. The muse has been gone for a long time now, but it's been sparking recently. Of course, it has been sparking at 2 or 3am when I'm trying to catch three hours of sleep before work, so the thrill of being inspired is somewhat bittersweet. I try to just scribble down a note or two then try to get somee rest, but I'm still a slave to it.

Just like old times.

The idea is a play. Three acts, naturalist setting, moving at a slightly stuttering pace. It's about a disfuctional relationship between two people whose idea of romance has long since been replaced with boredom and reciprocal domestic violence. Think Streetcar Named Desire's Stanley, except ripped roughly down the centre. So far it's fairly fun to play out bits of scenes in my head. Things are looking good for now, and it's nice not to be stuffed behind a deadline like I was for Fractions.

Here's to the muse.