And then somehow it was Thursday

[bironic]

Yeah, so I dropped that theory course. Yikes. I'm down to the recommended load now of one elective instead of three, and it's already more manageable.

Classes have been going for a little more than a week, and I'm really enjoying them. Something about having worked for a few years focuses your goals and helps you appreciate why you're here and what you want to get out of it. It's not just work, it's work with a purpose you care about. And my classmates and I all like each other (so far). Plus, this place is kind of amazing in itself. (Tuesday I met someone who builds social robots. Tonight I met a professor working on quantum calculators.)

Minor annoyances center on noise levels in my apartment and include my next-door neighbor, the desk-drummer; my upstairs neighbor, who sounds like an elephant when s/he walks around and makes my ceiling lights rattle; and the fact that I'm over the piano room, so almost every day it's the same parts of the same pieces screwed up in the same places. Oh, well; that's what my little nighttime white-noise fan is for.

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I had this dream last night that I was watching the House premiere, and I was going to post about it, but I had to, like, do my work and go to class and stuff, and now I can't remember most of it except for how Wilson was lying naked in a lounge chair and House was swimming in his pool (and how the H/W fans were going to be all over that), and Cuddy'd had a baby that may or may not have been House's and the baby was sick, and House authorized a CT scan for it, which he hadn't allowed before when things were less dire. I'm sure there was more to it, but pfffft, it's gone.

I blame daasgrrl. You will know why soon.

Today I learned that one of my classmates is also a House fan. Score. Makes up for how I just dropped that lit class. It was sooooo sloooooow, and the level of discussion was a joke. "Why don't you just keep talking about House with your friends?" asked my sister when I complained about it. She had a point.

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Saturday evening I had the extraordinary pleasure of meeting ignazwisdom for dinner and a movie. Never mind the cloying humidity and intermittent downpours of Hanna's remnants—it was a great time. Turns out she is as exceedingly awesome in person as she is online, in some expected and some new ways. Fun and very easy to talk to and we had some stuff in common I hadn't known about. I'm very happy to have her in the area, and I'm not just saying that because she's got a bigger TV than I do and likes House.

After curry we went to see Iron Man in a lecture hall on campus. Both of us had managed to miss it when it came out. They'd hooked up the room with a popcorn machine and soda fridge and everything, and there were some families in the crowd, and they showed previews for upcoming screenings. Latest observed quirk of MIT culture: Whenever the preview slide would say something like "Next Saturday and Sunday," the audience would yell, "Next Saturday and Sunday—in stereo…!" I wonder where that comes from.

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Iron Man: Not all it was cracked up to be, but still fun. I was afraid when they showed Tony Stark as a POW in Afghanistan in the trailer that the movie would turn out to be an unsubtle message about the war on terror—and it did, so that was disappointing. I prefer my messages to be metaphorical. Superheroes are set up to be metaphorical. Oh well. I was not comfortable with the villains being of an ethnicity that is being villainized in real life right now. I also wasn't a big fan of how the central theme seemed to be weapons escalation and cessation thereof. Lots of violence in a way I found more troublesome than in other violent action movies. I didn't buy Stark's sudden change of heart, mostly because I didn't buy that he'd never thought about the consequences of his work in all the years he'd been doing it, so it was hard to go along with the plot afterwards.

I did like that Tony was one of those superheroes who don't have superpowers of their own but instead rely on technology. Adds a sweet extra layer of tension over everything—what happens when their equipment fails (so to speak) and they're ordinary mortals again in an exceedingly dangerous situation? I liked when we got to see the strain all this civilian-saving, soldier-rescuing and villain-killing put on Tony and Tony's heart.

I liked the Zelenka-esque assistant in the cave as well, and of course the robot in Tony's lab. (They make robots approaching that here! I met someone Tuesday who built one!) And hey, now I know what Tony/Pepper means.

Also: Why didn't Stark just rip out Obie's power source when Obie had him in his grip so close to his chest?

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Okay, back to work. It took five days to post this.