Words are inadequate

Neat trick of the day: the music video I was watching in my dream was apparently too loud and woke me up.

("Runaway Train" by Soul Asylum.)

In other news: got my first vaccine shot on Wednesday. (Moderna, if for some reason you're keeping score at home.) Yesterday was a little foggy, as is today, but overall not nearly as bad as the flu shot. Though my arm is still pretty sore.

Current estimates for second dose are around four months, though there's some indication that this is a case of underpromising and overdelivering. I am actually hopeful, for the first time in ages, that I'll be able to make it out to the Gathering in late August.

I woke up this morning and my two alarm clocks (one big red-numbered one so I can read it without my glasses, one that turns on a light so I can wake up more easily) were reading different times. I checked my phone and it gave me a third different time. I said "Must be time to get up and go to work," and got up and opened the bedroom door.

Except it didn't open on the hallway, it opened directly into the living room. Which was about half the size it should have been, with a lot more light.

"This is weird," I said. "Am I dreaming? I'm not dreaming, this is a lot more clear and coherent than a dream. Besides, if this were a dream, my roommate Mya would be here and I could get some sort of explanation from her."

At that point Mya walked in. She'd come back early from her work trip to Ontario and wanted to tell me about it. I finally convinced her that I was worried and pretty sure the apartment was different from how it was supposed to be. So she called someone and said "Tucker's freaking out because he's lost in the apartment."

"I am not lost! The apartment's different from how it ought to be!"

That was about the time I realised it was, in fact, a dream, and woke up.

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It has been a really long few days. More later.

Fascinating interview with William Gibson in the Paris Review: "For years, I’d found myself telling interviewers and readers that I believed it was possible to write a novel set in the present that would have an effect very similar to the effect of novels I had set in imaginary futures. I think I said it so many times, and probably with such a pissy tone of exasperation, that I finally decided I had to call myself on it."

PURE EVIL.

Irregular Webcomic, David Morgan-Mar's daily Lego-based comic with about a dozen storylines, has come to an end after well over three thousand strips. Not to worry! He's rerunning them all from #1, with new annotations. So now's the perfect time to jump into one of the geekiest and consistently funniest webcomics around. (DMM's other big venture, Darths & Droids, is nearly at the end of Episode 3. I really hope he covers episodes 4-6 as well. Luckily, according to the FAQ they'll be covering episodes 4-6 as well.)

Making the Grade, a history of maple syrup, and a good follow-up to my earlier discourse. [via rbandrews]

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Last night's sleep was not precisely restful. I dreamed I finished up the %&$ Space Story and attached it to an email and sent it off to the editor in question. About ten seconds later I got back an email response consisting of "No." I was kind of shocked, until I realised that I hadn't actually added in any of the stuff I'd meant to and been asked to. Then I was just miserable and mad at myself for blowing my chance at getting it published.

I used to dream a lot more, and even lucid-dream about half the time. I stopped in late 2002/early 2003 when a lot of other things in life were going pretty wrong, because my dreams were all ending up like that one.

Came down with a 48-hour head cold on Thursday night, but I caught it early enough to not stress myself. Spent Friday doing not a whole lot other than sleeping and staring blankly, and was functional enough to do some gaming on Satyrday.

Sunday night uilos and I went to see Mr and Mrs Amanda Palmer, for whom the line was literally around the block. It was a good show: they were kind of adorable, and Neil read a few poems and "Orange," the story he read at Balticon in 2006. I'm not quite sure what I think of Amanda's music; I enjoyed it but I don't feel inspired to run out and buy albums.

We're visiting DC (ABG, Dar concert, possibly other things) this weekend, and I'll be working from work for a couple of days as well. Possibly I can use some of the travel time to do some writing. Here's hoping.

It is unlikely that scathach will ever leave me a message on my parents' answering machine telling me the six things that I need to break a curse. It's even less likely that three of those things will rhyme ("bun," "gun," and something else that escapes my memory; perhaps "sun"), and that the other three will be a past, present, and future version of the same thing (which also escapes my memory). And my parents do not, and will not, have any kind of "lock" on their answering machine preventing me from listening to a message a second time.

To top it off, scathach is certainly not going to show up on my doorstep to tell me again what the six things are, accompanied by a smiling but silent Scott M.

Note to self: if Scott M. is not talking, it is definitely a dream, of the more surreal variety, and I can wake up from it secure in the knowledge that I'm not missing anything.