Simply having a wonderful Christmas time

As bad as a lot of Christmas music is, I do enjoy a fair portion of it. The above song, however, is the worst. It came on in the grocery store today, and the thought of having to endure the whole thing was nearly enough to make me put down my basket and walk right out. It can singlehandedly prevent me from having a wonderful Christmas time.

I just now remembered that last night I had a dream about the philosophy department. Apparently it moved to some other UCSD campus, and the view from the lounge overlooked much of San Diego, including USD. This prompted me to realize that I haven't had many philosophy dreams, as far as I'm aware. When I graduated high school and college, I had exceptionally vivid dreams about those places for several months. I'm guessing the difference, among other things, is that there wasn't the same sort of anticipation and mental preparation leading to a big climax.

Wait, I got sidetracked; I really was planning to talk about Christmas. This year, about as many people as usual have been decrying the awful consumerism of it all, how the holiday has been co-opted by commercial interests, instead of properly being a celebration of the winter solstice, or the agreed-upon birthday of a religious figure, or trees, familial love, and ham. But really, this phenomenon is really just one of many symptoms of our commodifying mentality, rather than a cause. And if one's going to be grumpy about a symptom, then look, there are 364 other days in which our values are being shaped by what can be bought and sold, maybe we should complain then, and ease up a bit on the day for which the point of all this buying and selling is to make other people happy.

So I plan to enjoy the holiday festivities, spread some happiness however I see fit, and celebrate next Arbor day with ham and familial love. Because really, there should be more holidays like that.

Any trick in the book now, baby, all that I can find

Not much is happening right now. I just applied for a bunch of university jobs, and they have a web-based application tracking system that I've been refreshing every 20 seconds or so, so that's been keeping me pretty busy. Also, I'm pretty pleased with myself for having solved my fruit fly problem. By "problem" I mean there has been a fruit fly in my room. This morning he brought a friend. They're attracted to my whiskey, unexpectedly enough. They spend a fair amount of their time trying to figure out how to unscrew the cap, taking frequent breaks from this to stand on my mirror, and I've been pretty reluctant to smash them. So today I caught them during their morning break and nailed them both with Windex. So not only do I not have fruit flies, but now my mirror is nice and clean.

This little vignette should give you some sense of the current level of excitement in my life. Oh, also I stumbled upon an album that I'm finding pretty entertaining. It has a "Sunshine Superman" cover by Mel Torme, "Quinn the Eskimo" by Julie London, and "Daydream Believer" by someone called "Lord Sitar," whose name is, I think, self-explanatory.

Where streams of whiskey are flowing

IRISH WHISKEY UPDATE:
I have recently tried this stuff. I like it. A little milder and sweeter than Tullamore Dew, if not quite as smooth, but the best part is its very complex finish.

Man, check out the wikipedia article on Darkwing Duck (NB Section 7, "'Let's get dangerous' in other languages")
Speaking of TV nostalgia, I am roughly two days away from obtaining a complete copy of "VR.5," a show that I was mildly obsessed with for the like four weeks it aired back in 1995. I am reasonably certain that watching it now will utterly fail to recreate my youthful enjoyment of this show. Such is the problem of diachronic anhedonia, or, as I sometimes call it, "the Funyuns problem"

I'm so tired / Tired of waiting / Tired of waiting for you

So, I just got back from the LSAT. Oof. That was not a short test. (Also, why the hell do they have these things so early in the morning? Is there any sensible reason to go from 8:30-2 on a Saturday, instead of, say, 9:30-3? grr!)
I'm not sure how I did. As it turns out, my slipshod preparation for the logic games actually paid off; I only had a little bit of trouble with one of four games. Inexplicably though, I did have a fair amount of trouble on the reading section (usually my strongest)...had to guess on some at the end, and rushed through several others, so kind of a lot is up to chance at this point. Well, it wasn't entirely inexplicable. First, it had 28 questions, whereas there were only 22 in the games section. Also I measured my time in terms of "remaining" rather than "elapsed," and perhaps as a result didn't hustle as much as I ought to have. I dunno. We'll see how lucky I was. I doubt I did poorly or anything, it's just a question of how strongly it inclines admissions committees to overlook my undergrad gpa. Anyways.

I had forgotten that USD is really pretty nice to look at. It reminds me of Pomona and Scripps in a way, in that it has the same sort of meticulous, self-consciously rustic quality, charmingly quaint, but with a pristineness that borders on sterility. It's like it found a tiny piece of (probably specious) heritage that it sits around polishing all day. And...apparently I find that appealing? :-/