Still Alive

Today was a very good day.

I didn’t really sleep a lot last night, because today was also my first day at the new dayjob, and that’s the kind of thing that makes me restless and afflicted with the kind of nervous insomnia that means you sleep without really sleeping. I rose before seven AM for the first time in a week, shaved off the remnants of my most-unmanly-neckbeard, got dressed in an outfit that did not involve ties or dress pants, then caught an early train into the Cultural Precinct on the Brisbane River.

I arrived far earlier than I needed to, so I stopped at the cafe beneath the State Library and drank coffee while reading and idling away the spare half-hour. All in all, this proved to be a remarkably pleasant and civilized way to start the working day.

Then, around nine o’clock, I went and started work (I’m still struggling with that, really. Having a good day at a non-teaching dayjob is the kind of thing that catches me off-guard).

All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying, well, yes, I am still alive, regardless of what my internet silence may suggest. I’m just…adapting to a new routine, I guess, and recovering from the marking (which, traditionally, tends to wipe me out for a couple of weeks). The fact that I broke my office chair doesn’t help – sitting at the internet-enabled computer in my flat is a remarkably uncomfortable experience at the moment, and I’ve never really learnt the art of writing blog posts in Word before transferring them onto the computer.

Slowly, though, very slowly, the urge to do things and speak to people is coming back. Eventually I will figure out where the blog fits in again.

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I spent a lot of time watching movies over my week off, although my brain was so fried from marking assignments that I basically mainlined very bad cinema and surprised the hell out of myself by enjoying it. I finally got around to watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for example, which is one of those movies I’d avoided on the basis of it promising to be eight different kinds of irritating. And it probably will be, should I go back and re-watch it, but it will always have a sentimental spot in my heart for its treatment of Fred Dukes (aka The Blob) in the first fifteen minutes or so of the film. One of the recent Punisher films was similarly watchable, in a please-don’t-pay-to-much-attention-to-the-plot-here’s-John-Travolta-chewing-scenery kind of way.

I suspect I’ve managed to miss something with Kick-Ass, though.  It was kinda…eh.

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And, er, that’s it really. It’s been a very quiet week.