Just one note: the night job (night grocery vendor - an ideal job for sociological studies) is only on weekends, so is compatible with day jobs during the week. Besides, the 2 day jobs are also both part-time: one starts only in March and will be 3 days a week (teaching Roma teenagers how to read and write in a state high school), and the other is only 2 days a week (lifting crates, makes me feel communist and worker class - it's good to interact with bourgeois people when I do). If you add my software project and my blog to these 3 part-time jobs, you can understand why I'm kind of synched out of time.

Take care all, will be back, will lurk, will comment!

you are the media you consume.

I was a pretty wild driver by the time I left Vietnam for jolly ole England.  One of my first acts in London, I believe, was to "slightly" cut someone off as I passed him.  I had to stop a short while later and first thing I knew there was this bloke at my window, he found me on the wrong side of the car eventually, and chewed me out for about 30 minutes.  I apologized till I turned blue but finally had to roll up the window and drive off with him still hammering me.

Needless to say, my driving habits improved after that.

I can swear there ain't no heaven but I pray there ain't no hell. _ Blood Sweat & Tears

For some reason, this all reminds me of a professor I had as an undergrad, back before the dawn of time.  Or, er, at least before the dawn of the internet.

Anyway, said professor (we'll call him Dr. X) taught poetry, and his particular obsession was with the "sounds" of poetry, the way the rhythm and, in particular, the actual phonemes (sibilants, plosives, fricatives etc.) contributed to the feel of the poem.  This kind of stuff.  Dr. X was truly fixated on this, and more inclined to talk about "what the the sssss sounds are doing here" than about the actual meaning of the words.

Anyway, in a different class one day, one of my classmates appeared to have spent a little too much time around Dr. X, because he stood up and gave this long discourse on how the sounds of this particular passage in King Lear were actually re-creating the sounds of the thunderstorm against which Lear raged... etc.  And, in the grand tradition of Dr. X, he was getting a little carried away with the idea.

So the rather dour Shakespeare professor, without missing a beat, raised one eyebrow and said with no small amount of disdain:  "So you're telling me that instead of 'Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks,' Lear could just as well be saying 'Blue wine, and crackers with your cheese,' and it would be the same thing?!"

I have no idea why I remembered that story, and even less idea why I bothered to recount it.  But having typed it all out now, it seems a waste not to post it....

Ah.  Sounds.

:-0 (cough. did I just say that?)

Anyway, good luck with your move and the next stage.  Keep us posted.

As to smoking rants, flame away! We can whine past one another!

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Lovely.