• 12:19 A.M.
  So now that I have all this spare time

I wonder if I could get a job just sitting here motionless with my biggest fan

Well, my contract ended, no renewal, I am once again a member of the coupon-clipping UI-filers. In my estimation, I'm much more likely to get hired in the next couple months than I was in the wake of my last downsizing. Also, my coworkers seemed genuinely nonplussed that I was being let go. I even had a good-bye lunch at a local bar, which I almost missed due to my car being reposessed and the subsequent retrieval of same (basically, I have a bad habit of letting my payments pile up and then making a huge one, and I just got a new loan officer, who is not really as tolerant of these antics.) I got it back, a bunch of CDs and money was stolen out of it while it was out of my hands. Not cool, but maybe somewhere in my loan agreement it says that if they ever reposess my car they can steal whatever stuff is in the car, too. I'll have to look over it again. The repo guy was pretty mild mannered, for a huge hulking ex-airborne guy carrying a club. I don't think he is responsible for my stuff missing. It's probably an employee of the private impound yard, who will say they aren't responsible for anything. It's going to come down to the loan agreement, I'm sure. Note to self: do not help the repo guy take your car away, in the future.

On Labor Day weekend I went to a cookout with Ed, Kris, and women of all ages. Kris was sort of the planner of the event, and when a dusty dude dressed for transience offered to share his table, Kris immediately took him up on it. Thus we spent much of labor day hanging out with beach bums. At first I was a little uneasy, as sometimes the idea of material ownership isn't exactly the same between homeful and homeless people, but they turned out to be a lot nicer than any power-jealous, slack-misers we could have wound up sitting next to.

Karen + Eloise, chinchilla oversight comittee

During my time with the beach dudes, I watched a couple wearing red shirts walk up and down the beach path. Up and down, slowly, wearing chinchilla. Live chinchilla. Every once in a while someone would come up to them and they'd stop, talk, then hand over a chinchilla for petting. At first I thought this was the only method of socializing they were familiar with, but it turns out they were local ch-ch-a breeders, engaged in marketing. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. But when petting these huge hamster-bunny things on the beach, you're not really thinking about how their fine, short fur gets everywhere, and will clog up anything in your house that air passes through. CPU fan. Fridge vent. Heater. Also, when I was in high school, some of my friends had chinchillas.. well ok, one guy, who I knew through Monica, who was my friend in the sense that she once asked me to write "I love Danny Roscoe" on her shoe. She later drove Kris quite nuts. (indeed, I think Adam was in a band called "zoning chinchilla") Anyway. Chinchillas. Always associated with Kris and his girlfriends, now, in my mind. And clogging up computer fans.

Aforementioned Monica comes to mind especially since I got email from her last week. This is not something that happens a lot; it is in regard to my 10 year high school reunion. My personal feelings are that the reunion rates just above the prom on the continuum of "high school related functions that I have any business attending", which is to say, right at the bottom. Math meet? Sure. Mock senate? Yeah. Band photos? Sigh, if I must. Anything that popular kids do? No, man. Should I show up just to provide some contrast, popularity-wise? Help normalize the pecking order? Maybe I could show off how capable and well-rounded I've become! Yeah! And plus how well I dress now! And how I don't improvise adhesives to hold my busted optics together. Or, maybe I don't feel like I have closure with all the people I went to school with. I'd like to explain what the fuck is with me, to everyone who asked. Likewise, I'd like to find out what the hell is up with everyone else. It's not like everyone is going to have picked up a lot of wisdom in the interim, though. I don't expect anyone to know why they may have been so cruel, or weak, or whatever we were in school. Well, that's all the past. It does not inform me. Going to the reunion is probably just about as useful as getting drunk and writing whiny emails.

Just tonight, I went to a presentation on the Mars Opposition (the phenomenon of Mars and Earth being lined up in their orbits on the same side of the sun) at Kane Hall. It was given by a guy who I had met at a co-worker's birthday, several weeks ago (See? They loved me! Inviting a contractor to a birthday!) He gave an engaging talk on Mars, and why it seems like it would be boring (smallish to look at, covered in lifeless dust, resembles eastern Washington) and why we like it so much anyway (it's a place you could conceivably stand, unlike the interesting-to-look-at Jupiter and Saturn; extreme terrain and weather, good place to launch an invasion on Earth, etc). He showed that the oppositions get cyclically better and worse, and we're right in the middle of a "getting better" slope. The last time the opposition was this good was around 60,000 years ago, but they're just going to get better overall until September 11, 27,696 A.D., which will be about as good as it ever gets. The actual degree of better-ness or worse-ness is relatively tiny. If you're gonna launch a spaceship at Mars, seems like an Opposition is a good time to do it. Thing is they come around once every 70 years or so. ("around once a human lifetime") (Helen asked how long it takes to get to Mars. 7 months! Not bad at all!)

Outside, people were waiting in enormous lines to peer through cannon-like telescopes at the bright red dot hanging low in the sky. At one point, a commercial airliner flew its bright dot a little too near the target planet from our perspective, prompting a collective "whoa...whoa... Awww!" from the crowd, as it barely missed, like a Hole-in-2. Later, as we all stood in one enormous line, a man wearing a staff badge came walking up the line saying that there were smaller telescopes on the sides, and that we could come forward into the smaller lines to use those. After we did that, a lady wearing blinking LED earrings admonished everyone to get into a single line, as it was "the line for all the telescopes," a message which a few big-line-waiters sanctimoniously endorsed. Ignoring the blinky women turned out to be the proper response. I saw Mars, and it was a red and blotchy disc!

I wonder when planet Mars got named after a war god. It sure wasn't just named that when we found it. Someone named all the planets after the gods of the day, and now astrologists ascribe the characteristics of these gods to the planets, as if they had been named that all along. Maybe the idea is that they noticed that certain planets influenced people by being in certain places, and they happened to do so in ways following the personalities of the members in the pantheon? Or maybe they just called this one Mars because it's, I dunno, RED. Hmm. And, uh, the god of war, typically is described as being.. red. And Saturn (or Juno, the god of cheap analog synthesis) typically wore a big George Jetson ring around his butt. So, if the planets had been discovered and named by Christians, would they all be called "God"? Man, that'd make astrology super boring. Maybe we could just rename Earth once we start living on other planets and we figure out that calling it "Earth" is a little presumptuous. I mean, we could call it "Terra", but that seems too New Age-y. Planet names, definitely old-agey. Mercury, Venus, God, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto! Come to think of it, Astrology just doesn't work if you're not born on Earth. You have this funky blue planet that's not in any of the books, and the year is a different length, and all the usual planets are in the wrong places! And that's just in this solar system (which we have creatively named "the solar system").

Geez, so much has happened. Rode my bike almost to death in eastern washington. I went on a bike ride from Seattle to Vancouver. I met a bunch of authors I admire, like Doug Coupland, William Gibson, China Mieville, and Chuck Palahniuk. Next on that list is Neal Stephenson, who's gonna be here on the 23rd.