My Last Thursday

Last night, largely motivated by boredom, I decided to give the whole eharmony.com thing another shot, figuring that maybe something has changed since my last attempt, back when the personality-based matching system demonstrated that I’m completely incompatible with other human beings.
Guess what? Nothing has changed.
I don’t know that it would have mattered if anything had. I mean, I doubt that I would have actually signed up for the service if there had been a suitable match for me anywhere in this country, but I was curious to see if maybe there was someone out there, somewhere.
Oh well.
It’s sunny again today, but the thunderstorms are supposed to start back up sometime this afternoon, leading to still more flooding in the area.
So that’s fun.
This weekend will find me once again flying solo, as Scott will be out recovering from surgery.
Fortunately, as we’re making the change to the new shift, I only have to work two days.
Of course, he’ll probably be out next weekend, too, but that’s more than a week away, so I’m not going to bother worrying about my future boredom.
The week of the 10th I’ll be traveling to Tyson’s Corner every day for my Red Hat class, which will culminate in me failing the RHCT exam.
The following week I’ll be heading back to Michigan for about a week.
Last week when we were having lunch Kathleen and I were discussing my upcoming trip and the whole 100th anniversary thing for my grade school.
She asked me, “Are you going to get a haircut?”
This was, of course, a non-too subtle way of telling me that I need to get a haircut.
She went on to mention, as she has on more than one occasion, that she thinks I look better when my hair is really short.
Then she added, as she usually does, that I don’t have to have my hair done a certain way just because she likes it.
Immediately after saying that she went on to say that she thinks I should dye my hair.
I’m in agreement with her about the hair length thing (I’m just too lazy to get a haircut), but I’m not so keen on the notion of coloring my hair to try to cover up the gray.
I like to say that I’ve earned my gray hairs, and that it makes me look distinguished (or as my dad likes to say, extinguished), but the fact of the matter is that coloring my hair strikes me as an act of vanity that, quite frankly, I have no business engaging in.
After all, what do I have to be vain about?
And what difference would it make anyway?

Before the dye job
Random Chick: Eww, that guy with the gray hair is weird looking.
After the dye job
Random Chick: Eww, that guy with the brownish-blonde hair is weird looking.
Further, I imagine the end result of the coloring would look unnatural, detracting even further from my looks.
Random Chick: Eww, that guy with the unnatural-looking brownish-blonde hair is really weird looking.

Yeah, I know, it’s a fatalistic and self-deprecating attitude for me to take, but hello, this is me we’re talking about, so that shouldn’t come as any sort of surprise.
It’s pretty much that attitude that’s made it damn near impossible for me to get myself motivated about exercising.
Even if I were to get lean and muscular, would it really matter? I mean, have you seen those pictures of Carrot Top all buffed up? The guy is ripped…but he’s still freakin’ Carrot Top, so it doesn’t make a bit of difference.
As for the health benefits, meh. I mean, I’m pretty much guaranteed to have a heart attack somewhere along the line no matter what, and back when I was exercising regularly I didn’t really feel any advantage. Mainly my feet hurt from walking all of the time and my muscles were invariably stiff and sore.
Still, I do keep engaging in my half-assed attempts at exercise in the vain (this kind of vain does apply to my life) hope that I’ll somehow manage to make the transition from Endomorph to Mesomorph and that I’ll actually benefit in some fashion from having done so.
Today has been largely uneventful. I decided that I needed to go to Wal-Mart, and before doing that I stopped at the Dulles Town Center to get lunch at the food court.
After eating I walked to the book store and was enraged to find that while the manga section takes up an entire wall plus three additional sections on a free-standing shelf, regular non-manga graphic novels get one section on the shelf.
Over at his blog Neil Gaiman mentioned attending a panel on Graphic Novels in which manga was almost the sole focus.
In his words:

Also attended (as an audience member) a panel for librarians on Graphic Novels, which left me with the distinct feeling that, if I had been a librarian and had known nothing about what was out there in graphic novels and gone to that panel for information, I would have come away with the impression that most graphic novels are manga. Which seemed to do a disservice to the huge range of graphic novels out there -- the panellists were very well-informed and articulate, but only Jackie Estrada in her initial talk about what was out there seemed to be talking about anything that wasn't manga. And when a Japanese librarian got up and asked pointedly whether there were any other kinds of more respectable graphic novels than the boy-love manga the panel had been talking about, they told her about the educational manga that were now available in the US, as if there weren't any other educational or non-fiction graphic novels out there. Good intentions but, sitting in the audience, it felt a bit blinkered. I felt the same way I would have done if all they'd talked about was superhero comics. Good but I'd hoped for much more.

*Sigh*
On a less depressing, though only slightly less geeky note, there are probably many of you out there unfamiliar with Robot Chicken, a skit comedy series that’s part of Adult Swim on Cartoon Network.
Co-created by Seth Green, the show features stop-motion animation using clay models, toys, and action figures, and features some of the best satirical content out there.
I’ll leave you on this, my last non-workday Thursday, with this example of the show’s brilliant sense of humor, a satirical look at Star Wars featuring Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane as the voice of the Emperor. Enjoy, and have a good weekend.