"Rain"

I went to bed thinking melancholy thoughts, and woke up from a dream in which I’d been listening to the song “Rain” from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack. (I picked up the CD, a Japanese import, in Seattle during my visit a couple of years ago.) Now I’ve got a new musical melancholy trigger.

While I like the song, it sounds like something Aerosmith would turn out in a self-aware fit of maudlin. It’s a bit embarassing to have so cheesy a song be an emotional trigger, but I’m stuck with it.

Still 280.5, damn it. At least I’m up early.

Later: A couple of listenings later, I find it’s hard to stay melancholy while listening to lyrics like “If there is a Hell, I’m sure this is how it smells.”

Puberty at 36

A typical feature of puberty is supposed to be noticing of and wondering at bodily changes. I don’t remember going through any of that. I suppose I must have, ’cause I wasn’t born with all this body hair (Even with my head shaved, I still shed!), but it didn’t stick in my mind.

Two decades and change later, the notice-and-wonder fairy’s come. Ever since I started Hot Point (two and a half weeks ago) I find I’m constantly looking at and touching myself, wondering if some crease or ridge or curve is really something new, or something I’ve had for years and never noticed. Are my calf muscles really more defined? My trapezii just a little more trapeezy? That muscular ridge I noticed last night along the outer edge of my thigh — just my imagination, or all those presses and curls and extensions paying off?

Hard to tell. I do know my belly’s gotten a bit smaller, and my face a little less full. The face is an old development, though I didn’t notice it till I saw an old photo of me at my parents’ place.

(“So what’s he writing about this time?” “Oh, puberty and touching himself.”)

I did 40 minutes on the treadmill at the gym today; no weights. Finished off the last of Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others. A first-rate collection, every story brilliant. Go read it, now.

Digital camera

I took advantage of no-tax-below-Houston day (there should be a third, and last, such day tomorrow, according to the signs I saw) to invest in a low-end digital camera. It’s a Canon PowerShot A10. Only 1.3 megapixels, but it’s got a 3x optical zoom, which suits my purposes. What? Oh, my purposes are to use it to take reference photos. I can store the photos on my hard drive and call ’em up on my monitor when I need them; that’s why 1.3 megapixels is fine. Takes up less space than a physical reference file, and I don’t have to wait for the photos to be developed.

The salesman was a real hard-sellin’ sonovagun. He talked me into getting a 128 megabyte flash card (the 8 meg card that comes with the camera only holds 16 pictures, so this was a worthwhile purchase, and the guy on line next to me assured me that $44 [after a $20 rebate] was a good deal for such a thing) and a battery recharger. I made my save against getting a flash card reader when I learned that I could just pipe the images right into my computer through a USB cable.