Kids' shows do it with SUPERPOWERS!!

This week has been rather rough, and now that I'm finally catching a break I've been feeling tired all day, and I doubt tomorrow will be any better.  :/  I'm pretty much done with my job at my mom's office -- I might work an odd day here and there between now and September, but I'm really no longer needed there, so there's no point in working any extra.  And since summer's almost over (okay, it isn't, I still have a month and a half to go, but I consider that "almost over," so......XD), it's pointless trying to find something else.  Oh well, I'm still dirt poor, but at least I'm not broke.  ;-)

And I certainly earned it all too, considering I worked pretty hard this week.  Which is weird, since all I really did was sit at a computer all day (which is what I normally do when I'm at home, LOL 8D), doing database work using an outdated, cumbersome, and just plain horrible system, and yet I pretty much crashed when I got home that evening.  Maybe because I haven't been exercising or eating right or whatever.  But it wasn't all bad; I got to eat out at some excellent restaurants for lunch most days -- seriously, if you're ever going to find yourself in the Glastonbury, CT area one of these days, let me know and I can recommend you a few places.  And on Monday I bought even more books (yay consumerism?  Now I'm totally starting to understand what they mean by "retail therapy," except I buy mostly books and music.  I really wish I didn't, because consumerism is stupid, but whatever) -- Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death (I read this review of it a while ago and just had to have it), and the first volume of Maus (the second one wasn't in stock), as well as a copy of The National's High Violet, finally.  ^_^;

Other stuff: my mom finally made reservations for a hotel in Middlebury when I graduate next May (cue intense worrying and panicking).  Now, I'm just gonna take this moment to give some advice to any of you who haven't started/finished college/uni yet: when your parents (and other family members and friends, if they're coming too) go for your graduation, make sure they book hotel reservations at least two years in advance, preferably four, so that you can be sure you get a room close by and not have to go to some place in the boonies just to sleep.  Because trying to book rooms now was apparently an epic operatic drama, complete with five acts and multiple arias.  After thinking they were going to have to be put on a waitlist, though, my mom managed to luck out -- my parents and sister will be staying at an inn in East Middlebury (about five minutes from campus), the same one we stayed at four years ago when I went for my freshman orientation.  Good for us -- not so good for my aunt and cousin, who'll be flying in from California to watch me graduate, since they haven't made reservations yet.  O_O;  And then we're supposed to go out to California that June to see my cousin graduate, though we still need to make plans for that........

........And for the trip to Montreal and/or Nova Scotia we're planning on making next summer, and for me to get a new laptop by the end of this summer (the one I'm using right now is perfectly fine, but the warranty has run out, I have gotten lots of use out of it, I've been unlucky enough with it not to want to risk any further catastrophes, and it would be nice to have an up-to-date one), and for me to get a new phone (maybe?), and for me to get my driver's license by September, and maybe one or two other things I'm forgetting.  Yeah.  D8

Anyway, I'm still working on Lies My Teacher Told Me and Guns, Germs, and Steel right now, and I've really been enjoying both.  I'm giving Lies a break right now since I read a lot of this past week, so I'm reading Guns according to the schedule set out at ontd_pbooks (speaking of which, is anyone out there who's a member of that comm reading it right now?  If so, what do you think?).  And lemme tell you, whatever fears I had going into this book have turned out to be very much untrue.  Jared Diamond actually does a decent job at dispelling Eurocentric myths about the "rise of civilization," making sure to couch his analysis of what it exactly meant to "domesticate" plants and animals, and why some societies in some parts of the world changed faster than others (e.g. why did Europeans colonize Native American land and not the other way around?) in terms that make it seem as though white domination of the world was predestined, or that more "civilized" cultures are somehow better than "primitive" ones.  (I'm pretty sure the controversy regarding Diamond's racism and Eurocentrism comes from a related article in the New Yorker rather than anything in the book itself, though I'm going to have to do more research to make sure.)  If you're like me and were always curious about how to answer the questions I just mentioned (and similar ones as well), I highly recommend this book.  It covers a lot of material in a short space, so if you're like me and you're halfway tired when you're reading it, you're not going to catch everything.  But a great book nonetheless, and I just wish I got around to it sooner.

(And basically, with all the stuff I've been reading lately, the connections I've been making between these and other books has got my head swimming with ideas -- for example, how much of the American myth you learn about in school is completely made up [especially since it was created not only to legitimize a lot of really shitty stuff our country has done and continues to do, but also at the expense of real stories and histories that would provide real meaning to people's lives and strengthen ties between people of various cultures and backgrounds], what it means to be white, why Hobbes' assertion that life before civilization was "nasty, brutish, and short" was completely wrong, what kind of dire straits we're in regarding the environment and climate change and the kind of desperate measure we'll probably have to take [i.e. a steady-state economy] just in order to survive, why progress isn't always a good thing, etc.  I might have to write one or more in-depth essays on this stuff just to make sense of it all, but I'm lazy and I have the Summer Mush Brain™ I always get this time of year, so maybe it'll have to wait.  Maybe.  ^_^;)

Also, haven't really gotten around to watching LoGH since last weekend, so I should probably get on that.  And I want to try to start Avatar: The Last Airbender this weekend too (because ojuzu has kinda encouraged me too -- yes, I'll get around to Utena and House of Five Leaves one of these days, but I already have all the episodes for A:TLA, so that comes first); we'll see how that works out.

Finally:

ANONYMOUS MEME

......What? I couldn't help myself! XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

So, how's everyone else doing this lovely Saturday night/Sunday morning?