the Shakespeare meme, still in business

for National Poetry Month: when you see a Shakespeare quote in your lj, post one in your own.

Then know, it is your fault that you resign
The supreme seat, the throne majestical,
The scepter'd office of your ancestors,
Your state of fortune and your due of birth,
The lineal glory of your royal house,
To the corruption of a blemished stock:
Whilst, in the mildness of your sleepy thoughts,
Which here we waken to our country's good,
This noble isle doth want her proper limbs;
Her face defaced with scars of infamy,
Her royal stock graft with ignoble plants,
And almost shoulder'd in the swallowing gulf
Of blind forgetfulness and dark oblivion.

funny how topical the Bard can be, isn't it?

state of the merde

so, aside from the fact that my entire body is a mass of aches and pains (due to overexertion and severe clumsiness-induced bruising), things are going most excellently. the job is good, the apartment is good (although still not fully cleaned or unpacked-into), and i'm in a pretty damn good mood overall.

Thursday, after a time-consuming miscommunication, i had dinner with my first real-life crush (my first ever crush was, of course, Han Solo), Erik, who happens to live in Austin now with his wife. i hadn't actually seen him in something like 20 years, but we picked up right where we left off. it's incredibly refreshing to talk to someone i've known for so long (since i was 14!). we talked and talked and talked and talked and they closed down the restaurant and we stood outside talking and talking and talking and finally reminded each other we should get going and then talked and talked some more. and tonight we're going to meet up at the Continental Club for happy hour and see a gypsy jazz band called Paris 49 that he insists i must see. i expect we'll, um, talk some more. and i hope i'll get to meet his wife soon, since she sounds amazingly cool. she's apparently one of the top contenders for Funniest Person In Austin.

Friday i spent quite a bit of time on the phone with former fling jbsegal, during which i managed to inadvertantly beat the crap out of myself while attempting to converse and do other things at the same time. this was fairly painful, but the entertainment value was worth it.

Saturday i did a ton of random household stuff: laundry, taking-out of trash (mostly packing material from Ikea), putting-away of clothes, and deflating-of-airbed. then the lovely and wonderful spinsono and i had dinner, sang Steve Goodman songs, and rescued a Freecycled bed from the far northern wastes of Austin, with the help of with the help of madspark's truck. i forgot, however, to retrieve the herbs Matt and Susan have been babysitting for me, or the pots from bquinlan and valkyrie_kitten's backyard. (i couldn't take them home the last time i was there because it was raining and they were full of mud.) incidentally, my patio gets just the right amount of sun in the early part of the day, but is protected from the harsh afternoon sun... and the light comes in at an angle, so there's an area that's always shaded for things that can't handle full sun. it's going to be perfect for growing herbs. i need to hit the Home Depot soon and pick up a good-sized rosemary plant to put in place of the missing shrub just outside my patio -- it'll make things look better and have plenty of room to get big. (i use so much rosemary that i'll kill a small plant within a few months.)

the orientation of the apartment, and the number of big trees surrounding it, means it stays amazingly cool even on warm days. we haven't had any real scorchers yet, but even in 80+ degree weather i've been able to keep the windows wide open, and when it's cooler than that, the apartment is actually a little too cool for my taste when there's a breeze. i should save a fair bit of money on my electric bill thanks to that.

not having to pay money for a bed meant that Sunday i could spend several hundred dollars (but less than the bed would've cost) on other important things like vacuum cleaners, bathroom etageres, bedsheets, cushy mattress toppers, oscillating fans, potholders, saltshakers, sink strainers, alarm clocks, and random miscellany from an especially overcrowded dollar store. i restrained myself from spending $80 on a supercool comforter set from Target (BTW, they also sell this one for less than half of what Bed, Bath, & Beyond wants for a nearly identical one), but succumbed to the lure of the salad spinner i've been coveting for several years now, which is just too long to covet something that only costs $20.

and last night i finally cooked an actual meal in the new kitchen: a chicken leg quarter, marinated in lime juice, olive oil, garlic, and black pepper and broiled, with a baked sweet potato on the side and a couple of small-but-delicious yellow mangoes for dessert. i should've added some chiles and cumin to the marinade, but i didn't think of it till later.

it's become clear that every time i use the stove the smoke alarm is going to go off, and it's one of those annoying ones that's wired into the electric system. i had to yank the wires to shut it up. there's another in the bedroom, and that one doesn't go off when i cook, and i never close doors when i'm home alone, so i'm not too concerned about having unhooked the stupid thing. i had the same problem in my Pacifica apartment; you'd think someone could manufacture a smoke detector that's usable in a one-bedroom apartment, wouldn't you?

installing a ceiling fan in the dining room area and fixing the screen so i can have both windows open all the way may help with that issue, but i'm hoping i can spend next weekend actually resting, because i need some damn recovery time. sheesh.

of course, all of this meant that i didn't get much time to rest, so i'm still bruised and achy and tired, although having a real bed to sleep on definitely helps. it smells a bit of cigarette smoke, and i couldn't find a properly impermeable mattress cover in the stores, so i've ordered a zippered vinyl one; with the thick fiberbed on top, breathability won't be an issue and it should help with the reek.

so. jazz and conversation tonight. life could definitely be worse.

attention, tongodeon

wasn't this the fancy Japanese toilet you were so excited about a couple of years ago?

goddammit

when i first looked at the news story, the Virginia Tech massacre had already eclipsed the UT sniper shootings in 1966. now it's the worst mass shooting in US history, with 31 dead including the gunman.

the majority of my friends are pro-gun. i've heard all the arguments in favor of guns being legal at least once for every person who died today at VA Tech. plenty of you are reading this post right now, and look, i'm sorry. i see your POV, i really do. and i've tried to agree with you, but i can't, because i believe that anything we can do that would make this kind of thing less likely to happen is a good thing.

yes, i know you can pull out lots of statistics to support your side of the argument. so can i. and i wouldn't trust any of them, because taken out of context, statistics are meaningless, and there's a lot of context involved in crime statistics. nevertheless, based on what i've read, i'm pretty well convinced that making these weapons illegal would ultimately reduce the amount of gun-related violence per capita.

i also know we could all stand here yelling till we were blue in the face and never get any closer to consensus (don't even start with the 'what if another student had a gun too'), so i'm disabling comments on this post. i'm not here to discuss; i'm just saying what i think. if you want reasoned debate, take it to your own LJ. (cry censorship and you will be mocked mercilessly.)

my sympathy goes out to all those affected by this incident -- the victims, their families and friends, and all the innocent bystanders whose lives have been changed forever just because they happened to be in the vicinity. events like this affect every one of us on some level -- who can read this story and not think about gun laws? -- but most of us will forget about today's deaths in a few days or a few weeks, consigning them to the history file and moving on.

it won't be that easy for the people who were there. whichever side you're on, spare a thought for them, and consider how we might be able to prevent this from ever happening again.

a polite society

it's been suggested many times that if everyone (or most people) went armed, there would be no crime (or there would be much less of it). more than one person has told me that they might be in favor of making it mandatory for everyone to carry a gun. and, of course, people will inevitably speculate about whether mass shooters like today's could have been stopped if someone else present had a gun.

i'm not here to speculate about any of that, and i'm asking you not to do it either, or to use a comment on this post as a forum to promote your views on gun legality. (i'll be screening comments, and i'll delete anything i consider too preachy or ranty. i'm serious, i really don't want a flamewar over gun laws in my lj. i was going to say i know this is a religious issue for some people, but then i realized my friends are, in general, more likely to be tolerant of different religious beliefs than of different political ones.)

anyway, i'm curious: if it were legal and/or encouraged, how many people would actually carry guns? maybe i'm completely wrong, but i think most people don't actually want guns, and i predict the results of this completely unscientific poll of a highly intellectual, liberal-leaning audience will bear that out.

how the answer to that question should affect the legality of guns is an interesting question, and one of which i'll allow discussion as long as it remains polite.

[Poll #967719]