Don't want no Captain Crunch don't want no Raisin Bran

I have recently realized that I have a faintly masochistic reationship with cereal. It probably developed out of the fact that, historically, Grape Nuts were the only cereal that I could eat for breakfast without being pretty much famished before 11. My guess is that I decided at some point that any cereal that could not seriously injure a person at high speeds just wasn't worth the effort of eating. I was not really consciously aware of this, mind you, but when I was shopping for cereal on Sunday--having forgotten that the first Sunday of the quarter is the day on which Trader Joe's has been maximally pillaged by swarms of locusts, tribbles, and undergrads--I was more aware than usual of the selection criteria that I applied to the few surviving boxes. And I have come to the conclusion that, as far as my preferences are concerned, Apparent Tastiness is second only to Resemblance to a Block of Wood.
You may have noticed that these two criteria are somewhat at odds with each another. For what it's worth, due to the sugar content, their oat bran flakes aren't bad, but their high fiber multigrain medley is.

Oh yeah, and you may have seen this here graph. Here's another one. Yaaaay.

I'm much too fast to take that test

As you've probably heard, I'm done with school for now. I was waiting to post until I had something concrete to say about that, but uh, that's it for now. FURTHER BULLETINS AS EVENTS WARRANT

There is one thing I'm rather conscious of, which is that, in my experience, when people leave, they just up and completely disappear all of a sudden. This is probably not going to happen with me. I mean, I don't have anywhere to be just yet, I still have most of a year on my lease, and heck, if I did move, I'd probably have to do it again within a year anyways...so I'll be in town, and most of the people I know here are still students. So I'm mildly interested in documenting what happens when someone actually sticks around. My guess is that the philosophical social circles rapidly begin to feel irrelevant to people, and I'm hoping that doesn't happen here, but I can certainly see how it might.

Oh hey, and on a completely unrelated note (I just got an email about it as I was typing this), I got the Macintosh version of Democracy, and have had trouble installing some of the new mods for it (in which one can implement such exciting policies as Space Program and Property Tax (wheee)), so I emailed them about it, and now I guess I am beta testing the new auto-install software, which is an oddly fun thing to do.

(At this point it is worth noting that while I normally do like to layer multiple meanings into my post titles, I really did just choose this one with Changes in mind, and the fact that it is also appropriate to beta testing is totally a coincidence)

I woke up in a Soho doorway; a policeman knew my name

oh, oops, look like I lost my posting momentum again. I meant to post when I got back from Santa Barbara, but I forgot. Ah well. Few days ago I went up north for a UCSA Exec Retreat, which was pretty good, even though I didn't do an especially great job finding us a room and a car...I got 1) a Chevy HHR, which was reasonably cute but severely weird to drive, 2) lodging at the Oakland Economy Inn, about which the less said the better, and 3) a healthy degree of trepidation about Southwest's all-in-one travel booking service. I'll be back up in San Francisco for another meeting next weekend.

And then yesterday I went on a minor geek binge at the comic and game stores. At the former, I got another X-Statix trade, which I'm really enjoying. For those of you who aren't already familiar with it, it's a Milligan/Allred title (formerly X-Force) about a manufactured celebrity mutant superhero team. They're dysfunctional and self-absorbed, and get killed off constantly. It's wonderfully satirical and silly. An example: one of the original team members' mutant power was the ability to generate shockwaves when drunk; her codename was "Gin Genie." Any comic book whose characters are David Bowie references is okay by me.
And then at the game store I got the recently re-released Waterworks, because seeing it brought back fond memories from my early childhood. The slightly weird thing is that I have no idea whether these memories are real, or even my own. I have had this problem before, for instance when I remembered taking a class, but wasn't sure whether the memory was about me or my sister. More generally, I have trouble identifying with much younger versions of myself. For example, I can remember thinking or doing things (misbehaving, as often as not), but my own thoughts at the time are totally alien. They're unfamiliar and often inexplicable and I feel little to no personal connection to them. It's kind of unnerving when I think about it too much.