Well I have to say, that was a pretty awesome weekend.

Next year I'm going to have more of a plan, though; we managed to make it to the Sci-Fi in Academia panel, which was really interesting, but we missed some of the others we wanted to go to. Since it was my first time, it was fun just wandering around looking at stuff the whole time.

I bought a Q*Bert board game! Back in the day, they had this whole collection of board games based on popular video games like Zaxxon, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, etc... They tended to be terribly stupid, but I used to <3 them anyway. The Pac-Man one was pretty elaborate; they used marbles for dots, and your Pac-Man guy could actually "eat" them by pressing down on them and making the thing's mouth move or whatever.

OMG IT'S MONDAY YOU GUYS. :-/

Just finished Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher; I thought it was really good. I love the tone of his books--there's always an element of humor but it's always very dark and much of his work could be read as more tragic than comedic. There's always stuff I can easily identify with, and this book was no exception; I was involved with a church youth group when I was a teenager that in hindsight was more than a little wacky. Parts of The Wishbones and Joe College also cracked me up by being almost like looking into a mirror. His characters all seem kind of sympathetic, too--none of these people are really bad people; they're just all dealing with the circumstances they've found themselves in.

I kind of feel like starting a sci-fi series or something, since CONvergence is still floating around in my head. However, I've also got the new Palahniuk book, which looks intriguing. I wasn't too crazy about Snuff but the premise of Pygmy seems pretty interesting.

It felt weird to be back at work today; I felt a little dazed and confused for a while but eventually it started coming back to me. By the time I was at the gym after work I started feeling normal--it's weird how I cling to these routines so strongly that it actually ends up being a little disconcerting when it all changes for a while. The younger jwright_71673 would probably be at odds with this aspect of 35-year-old jwright_71673.