Incidentally, apparently I'm not the only one with Dell battery woes. It would seem that they've had a longstanding policy of batteries that abruptly die after a number of charges. Not as in "on average, our battery lasts 300 charges" but as in someone found a little electric counter in the battery that tracks the number of charges and then shorts out the battery when that value is reached. Tricky, Dell...

I do not understand why I am so tired... I really did sleep in for much of the weekend. I had a reasonable bedtime last night. Unless there is some outside factor, the only thing I can think of is that the time I spent in bed was not spent in fruitful sleep. Which, honestly, would account for the stiff back and itchy eyes (although those have been itching for a few days. I thought they were due to sleeplessness, but they bugged me all of Sunday, really). Either way, I'm having trouble staring at documents for more than a few minutes before the words swim before my eyes and I find I'm dreaming without closing them. It's really rather annoying.

I did better at sleeping this weekend, although I'm still not always that good at getting my eight hours in. The weekend was alright. I auditioned for The Little Foxes with Burlington County Footlighters. There's a grand total of one character in my age range. Guess who they had me read the one time they called me up? Yup, Oscar, the guy who's supposed to be 40-50. Do I really look this old? In other news, I had a horrible time with snoring last night... I actually woke myself up a time or two after a bad one and the back of my throat is a bit raw. Maybe I just slept in a funny position last night. I really don't know.

In other news, I signed up for a course with Camden Community College in their continuing education program. It's just for fun, with the hopes of meeting people. *wry grin* Hopefully, I can balance it against my other activities. And other than that... not much really to report. Life is proceeding apace, I guess. Life is proceeding apace.

I had originally intended to go to Capoeira today. I got sidetracked by calling up Dell customer support to deal with an issue where my machine wouldn't come out of hibernate. Good news is, they say it's fixable. Bad news is, the only way to fix it is by wiping the hard drive and reinstalling the system. Eep. So I need to get my hands on an external hard drive to back up my material. Adding to the annoyance, my desktop machine's power supply died (at least, I hope it's just the power supply), so I'll have to get a drive large enough to old the 70-odd GB of my laptop. Or, I just accept some losses. The most frustrating aspect of this is that the current problem didn't start until Dell recently installed some updates to solve a different problem.

The dreams... I wish I could remember them more clearly. There was something going on where I was helping to maintain a virtual world except that I was also inside of that virtual world. And things kept going horribly wrong. The details escape me now, but basically the world balance kept going off and people and things kept dying around me. During the dream, I experienced the world as myself, and also through kind of a third-person view with a little status display. I remember there was something terribly important in the dream, but I don't remember what exactly it was now. I suspect that the "things going horribly wrong" part of the dream relates to recent playings of Dwarf Fortress. There was a goblin raid and I lost a number of my citizens, including a miner who'd been with the town since its start. Eh, like the wiki says, "It's fun to lose", but I personally find it very frustrating.

I am far too easily amused...

"Britney Spears Denies Having Seminal Moments with Her Angina"
Those were the words that greeted me as the header for a spam message. I deleted it, along with all the others, but it gave me a chuckle. For those who read that and had a moment where it sounded dirty, "seminal" can refer to a matter involving semen or sperm, but is more typically used to refer metaphorically to seed, to something like a seminal book, ground breaking for its time. And "angina" of course is a feeling of tight and painful constriction in the body with most of us being most familiar with angina pectoris which is chest pain, often resulting from a sticking heart valve. Anyhow, it gave me a laugh.

*sigh* And what's up with me? Pretty much nothing. It's been a slow week. It's been an off week at that, where I never seemed to get enough sleep. Today, I did a half day at work (it was supposed to be our every-other-Friday off, but they've been asking for overtime) and came home and just crashed for six hours. Hopefully, that will get me in a bit better shape. Capoeira has felt like a bit of a bust. Whether it's the lack of sleep, the week-long break when I was in Pittsburgh, or just a general slump, I just can't seem to get anything right. And I'm suspecting that I never properly learned the rôlé because however I'm doing it just doesn't work. And, while I'm not worried about advancing in ranks or looking good, I have a hard time enjoying it when I just don't seem to get it. Well, we'll see if more sleep helps. More worrying, my elbows have been giving me trouble lately. I hope I haven't managed to damage them.

I meant to post something nice and significant... but I'm running dry here. As mentioned in the prior entry, I did see The Dark Knight. It was a good movie. The camera work in fight scenes is much better in that you can actually make out what's going on. Heath Ledger was pretty good in his role, although I really don't think people would be suggesting Oscars if he hadn't died like he did. All in all, it felt like a nice solid film.

So, dreams... I guess I kind of have two topics I wanted to talk about as regards dreams, both the "what you see when you sleep" kind and the aspirations of life.

First off, I have been having some really weird dreams lately... there was one a few days ago involving me being in Pittsburgh with my kilt on Michael and Bev's couch, and this girl who kept putting her hand on my thigh and teasing me about how she would find out the truth about how kilts are properly worn. And I remember that in the dream, this was a continuation of a prior incident where she'd been teasing me about my kilt. And yet, I can't place the girl. I have one name which comes to mind, but it doesn't really make any sense because it's someone with whom I really don't have much contact — I've met her 2-3 times and I recently participated in a drunken phone conversation with her (no, I wasn't one of the people drinking nor was I the person she'd actually called) where she claimed to be one of my "fangirls" but I can't really say that I know her beyond hearing about her from others and having a passing acquaintence. The other weird part of the dream was that the feeling of mixed anticipation and fear as her hand inched up felt very real. In the dream, I was not really interested in the girl in question, and I was a little uneasy about the prospect of being exposed before family and friends, but I also felt comfortable about my body. Which, oddly enough, leads me to the next dream which involved nude posing and Dwarf Fortress. The earliest part of the dream I remember, I was talking to Michael and I noticed that he apparently had Dwarf Fortress running on his oscilloscope at work (incidentally, this is not entirely farfetched. Many digital oscillscopes these days run Windows or Linux) but found that it was actually hooked up to a magnifying device so as to provide a way to zoom into the picture (I've had that as a minor complaint once or twice while playing in that one has a choice between full screen or a fixed-size window as best I can tell). He then proceeded to show me that the ASCII graphics in the game resolved into actual images if you stared at them long enough. In this case, a number of the geographical features turned into nudes when stared at (a classic case of "you find obscenity where you look for it", I guess). And then, all of a sudden, the developer was there and she (yes, I know that the actual developer is male. Dreams being what they are, I didn't remember that then) asked if I wanted to pose for one of these images and I acquiesced. And I think I woke up a bit after that, but not until I had peeled off my clothing and started arranging myself in poses.

^_^ Usual million-dollar question, what does it all mean? Well, one school of thought is that dreams are entirely composed of things that you recently saw or experienced. I have been playing a fair amount of Dwarf Fortress in the last week and I have been in Pittsburgh lately (which was where the participation in the drunken phone call came in). The nudes and the odd comfort with my body may be the result of keeping up with The Bare Pit (fair warning, the comic is not sexual, but there is nudity) as well as recently reading some of the Air Gear series which is rather prone to fan service. Another school of thought is that dreams come from deeper psychological conditions — maybe in my mind, I have body issues and these dreams are a way of safely confronting them. ^_^ Then, there's the idea that dreams are prophetic, but I really don't think I can apply that here.

My second topic is dreams in the form of life goals and aspirations. I recently watched Wanted (I also watched The Dark Knight, but that will probably be another entry). The film greatly departs from the comic book, sticking only to the premise of the wish-fulfillment fantasy of a powerless schlub suddenly gaining the power to take control of his life and revenge upon those who wronged him. In the comic books, this consisted more or less of killing everyone who's angered him from his cheating best friend to the girl who turned him down for Prom in high school. In the film, he's a bit more moral about it with his worst offence being bashing his friend in the face with an ergonomic keyboard. Anyhow, the movie can be kind of summed up as Harry Potter with guns and sex (no relation to Bungle in the Jungle which is more explicitly Harry Potter with sex and guns). It's ridiculous and cheesy enough that it comes out onto the other side into awesomeness. And, at the end of the movie, as in the comic book, the main character addresses the 4th wall. In the movie, the line is "This *is* me taking control; from Sloan, from the fraternity, from Janice, billing reports, ergonomic keyboards, from cheating girlfriends and sack of shit best friends. This is me taking back control of my life. What have you done lately?" Which probably pretty much nails the majority of the viewing audience who's just sitting around wasting their lives watching a movie. And yeah, sometimes I look at my life and wonder what I've done. I sit there and think that I could have put more effort in. I could have done better. But, ultimately, most of us don't get godlike assassination genes or convenient Hollywood scripts, so we just have to eke things out on our own. But maybe, just maybe, I'll get some progress made on my side projects. It would be nice.

As usual when I saw I'll speak on N topics, I find topic N+1. *sigh* Capoeira is driving me crazy. It's not my lack of progress. It's not that I don't enjoy it. It's that, ever since I started, I've had some part of my brain crunching at the moves in the background and trying to figure them out. Except my body isn't up to it. Which leaves me experiencing the techniques over and over again with all of the muscular movements ghosted onto my sense of kinesthesia and touch as that bit of my brain screams at me, wondering why I can't do what it's just explained to me. Eventually, I'll catch up enough that it will all be back to a background hum, or I'll pick up enough of it to satisfy myself. Until then, I'll be more than a little distracted.