Yesterday, I went downtown with Peter and Nicole to watch "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", which turned out to be a pretty good movie. It's basically about a guy who gets memories of his girlfriend selectively removed, and raises some interesting questions about memory, fate (or more accurately, the Japanese concept of en - 縁), consciousness, and of course, science/technology vs ethics. Jim Carrey's portrayal of the introverted, shy guy (especially the internal monologue) struck me as being particularly genuine (i.e. something I can relate to), and his relationship with Clementine reminded me a lot of my relationship with a certain ex (well, the ex, since there's only one). Apart from that, I thoroughly enjoyed the general wackiness of the semi-lucid-dream narrative (since I like pretty much all things wacky)...
Today, I got up at around 8:30 to pack, and after a quick visit to the Reg, checked out of Hitchcock shortly before 10am. After meeting up with Nicole and Peter at Stony, we headed to the Shoreland, checked in there, and went straight to our customary end-of-quarter breakfast (sans Eric, unfortunately, since he left early). This quarter, we decided to try a new venue, and went to Velori's (or something like that) on 53rd, which purportedly was cheaper and as good as Salonicas. Although the cafeteria-style serving line was somewhat discouraging, the food was indeed excellent and cheap. I got 3 pancakes (very fluffy and yummy), two (real) eggs -scrambled, two sausages and coffee for under $6. Definitely worthwhile if you can make the 20 minute hike from campus (or if you live somewhat in the area, e.g. in Stony, Shoreland or Broadview).
Peter then had to go back to Stony to finish packing and to go up North to his friend's, so Nicole and I decided to take advantage of the Spring weather (feels like 70C, although it's actually 60) and take a walk to the Point and along the Lake (of course, after changing to sandals). Once at the Point, I found a nice island (well, okay, a flat rock) out in the water to lie down on and basked in the sun while beeing cheerful and childish (i.e. more so than usual). At one point, I saw something along the lake by MSI that looked like a gorilla walking backwards. It also might've been a couple of humans, but I decided that that seemed implausible. Then a fly landed on my arm, and since it seemed reluctant to move, I commanded: "Fly, fly!". But, just to be doubly ironic, it stayed on my arm. I was highly amused, and Nicole was amused by my amusement over a fly that refused to fly on command. We then started walking, or in my case, hopping/clambering from rock to rock along the broken-down shoreline, which was very fun, but also decidedly bad for my already severely cracked feet (and 8 year-old sandals).
At some point, we also decided that I was a merciful god who condemned people to horrible deaths by vegetables, and eternal pickling. I think it started when she threatened to tickle me, and I told her that "she who tickles a god shall die a horrible death of lettuce". What I did not tell her was that I, myself, had once been condemned to a horrible death by lettuce for eating a sandwich. Or no... wait. I think Alison condemned me to a horrible death by lettuce when I told her about my turtles that died from neglect, while she was drawing a "No sammiches" sign. Yeah, that's it.
We scrambled along the waterline for a good 2.5 hours, but as it turned out, we had only gone down to around 45th street, and it only took us about half an hour to walk back.
Anyway, I'm back at the Shoreland (btw, the front desk dude is annoying... he's senile and illiterate, which means he spends 5 minutes carding us every time we come back). I spent some time scrubbing dead skin off my feet using a porous rock I found by the lake (which will also serve as the base for my new art piece, titled "rock on a stick, on a rock"), and I'm trying to decide what to do now...
My spring-break todo list:
-add trackback support to IlohaBlog, as well as an "archive by title"
-catch up on about a hundred IlohaMail-related emails, and maybe do a new release (or at the very least, implement one of: view by thread, todo list, sharable calendars, POP3 folder support).
-read (finish Lessig's "Code", read "Art of War in the Western World", and perhaps "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which I borrowed from my roommate)
-watch the 3 DVDs I stole from my roommate ("Ran", "Spirited Away", and "When Harry Met Sally" -a UofC classic)
-shoot lots more ducky footage
-do stuff for my financial aid application
-work (i.e. actually work on the project I'm getting paid to work on)
-make a Hitchcock movie/media/everything database
-think of a way to make enough money to stay in college
-go to museums that I normally don't have time to go to
-go to China Town (and maybe Greek Town?)
-relax and recuperate
Somehow that last item seems out of place... but we'll see.
I've added support for receiving trackback pings, but I can't really test it because IlohaBlog still can't actually send pings (which is fairly trivial to do, but nonetheless, it's not yet there).
So, if you use TypePad/MovableType (or anything else with trackback support), I would greatly appreciate it if you can try pinging this entry the next time you make an entry. To get the ping URL {right|control}-click on the "trackback" link below, and copy the link (or just click on it, and copy the URL in the next page). Alternatively, your client might be able to auto-detect the ping URL from the embedded RDF tags.
If it works, the excerpt sent from your client should show up as a comment, but with "Trackback: " prepended to the title.
