Title: an homage to my new favorite band.

A very good weekend. Some discoveries and such, in brainwaneWatch 200[1].

I had a great deal of fun, on purpose, this weekend. My classes are over for the [academic] year. I could kick back some, and I did. It was amazing. I had forgotten how relaxing it can be to not even have access to homework for a day or two.

Stuff I learned:

• My apartment is big enough for a good party of five or possibly six guests. Not seven. I think I knew this; it was just demonstrated briefly, in color.
• Trivial Pursuit seems a lot easier when you're the ref who's asking questions and not answering them. It's a little matter of perspective, that's all. (Perhaps Seth knows this. And Set also seems to have this property; spectators see sets that participants don't see for minutes.)
• I can inspire people. Not necessarily to boycott Microsoft or anything that neat, but certainly I have an effect on others. In This Modern World [tm], that can be tough to remember, except when the world throws it in my face. Example: a week ago, I met Steve. Now he's started a weblog and I've fallen in love with Moxy Früvous.
  Subsidiary point: I am at a point in my life where I am the only one who can make certain choices that will affect me forever, and will affect my loved ones forever. I'm not used to this.
• Have I mentioned that Moxy Früvous rocks?
• Showers and rest after dirty manual labor feel great. Especially when it's been two days since your last shower, and you've logged about eight hours in a hot car.
• The Marx Brothers stimulate the same reaction from me that Gogol did. It's absurdist. And I like it. Incongruity is one of the things I like. I'm forming a sense of taste, which at its most basic is being able to say, "I like x, I don't like y, and these are the reasons." Taste is, at heart, about excluding the bad. And maybe I can even approach some sort of systematic subjectivity, which others share, and that's what culture is.
• I really enjoy and need some forms of appreciation in my life that my relationships and friendships of long standing don't give me.
• I never thought that celebrity deaths would affect me. But I didn't know what to say when I heard about Douglas Adams. I was reading a paper on Sunday morning, rooting around for some news after the comics, and then I saw the headline. I don't want to partake in astroturf grief. I didn't know him. But his work touched my life.

  I still don't know what to say.

---

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/15/125631/301