Having once again decided to attempt to use Linux on a regular basis, I have been installing Gentoo for the past 4 days. KDE has now been compiling for 24 hours. This is getting ridiculous. I need to find some binaries, because who has days to spend compiling every program on the computer?!
background noise: the boy least likely to - the best party ever
We had our Social Ad public presentation today, showing off the movie and information about alternative energy sources. There was a surprisingly good turnout, I think largely due to the press we received in the News Gazette and Hub on Thursday.
With this now finished there’s one less thing to deal with before this year can be done. There’s just another week, then finals, and things are finally, finally starting to cool down. I’ve felt like summer all this week, school has not been on my mind at all. I’ve just been hanging around, largely with the same people as last summer, too, so now I’m back in that mode.
This weekend was filled with doing CUWiN and Books to Prisoners work in the off time and some recreation. I was at Allerton yesterday afternoon, it was quite pleasant. I tried to clean to only mild success, the trouble is I have so much that I can’t just throw out because it’s still useful, and nowhere decent to put it. But, so it goes.
Come on summer, let me go rocketing into your arms.
background noise: 100th Window, Massive Attack
Well, baseball season’s over. Summer’s almost here. Another week of school, then finals, then it’s overwith. Mississippi should be a good way to kick off the season before starting work, but hopefully that will be fun too.
I love the night at this time of year. If only I had more time to enjoy it. But Star Wars tonight, perhaps….
Joseph and Kelly and Abigail and Terrance and Eli and Toby, known to themselves as scorners of Providence and children of a most obscure God and to everyone else as nothing but laughably existential teenagers, all looked tough in those days. To be sure, they were each different, but they shared a friendship in the way that only those with a common ideology can. In those days their hearts were like pistons and their mouths like carburetors, their words like gasoline and their eyes the glazed-over window to a mind singularly focused on Armageddon. To some of them it was the thrill of being hell-bent on anything that prompted them to the ferocious tendencies of their entirely overwhelmed youth. For others it was the uncomplicated and irresistibly vast force of a Life so strong. For Joseph and Abigail, it was a mode of escape from personalities of intense responsibility and an excuse to enjoy one another’s company without guilt or apprehension.
Their ideology was crafted from such a wide variety of forces and yet, remarkably, interpreted largely uniformly. They had succeeded in creating something that filled for each of them their most pressing need but did not cause strife or discord between them. Theirs was a strange nihilism, either an optimistic apathy or a most exceedingly pessimistic hope. They smiled and reveled in their successful indifference and did not despair in their lack of purpose. They were in some ways fatalists, sure of only the fact that nothing was certain and simply grateful for an Existence. They convinced themselves of the unimportance of Outcome and instead savored Process.
Though they spit and shouted they also laughed like thunder and spring rain and held for each other an affection that was in some ways the greatest contradiction to their self-proclaimed unconcern. In those days they were happy.
We won our baseball game yesterday in a smashing 10-0 victory over St. Jo. They were a pretty good team, and they had this coach that would ride the kids for every little mistake. And he kept challenging the umpire’s calls. At one point he and Rocky locked horns about something, shouting at each other across the field. I watched them argue from where I was standing in left field, at the traintracks running along the right side of it, and then out behind me across the sweeping fields of the Midwestern plain and up into a sun that looks for all the world like the eye of God veiled by some magnificent religion cumulus. I looked at these things and breathed the freshly cut grass and have never felt so American.