Pseudorandom Personal Notes

Moved back to campus this past Saturday, same apartment, same room, same suitemates. I haven’t actually stepped foot on the campus itself since moving back due to the snow. In fact, I haven’t done much of anything since moving back. I was tempted to go to Sonar’s Kommencement industrial/EBM night yesterday evening out of sheer boredom, but the snow piling up dissuaded me.

I got the job I’ve been hinting at last week. While I’m not under an NDA by any means, I don’t want to go out of my way to discuss what I’m doing out of respect to my employer, PICnet. What I will say is that the job is a perfect fit for the blend of IT and politics/policy that I’ve been studying, and that I’m really excited about it.

I mentioned some time ago that I was trying to get away from the spiky haircut I wore for many a year. Over the last six months I’ve done that pretty successfully, ending up with my hair downright shaggy and quite rocker-ish. I went in to my old Bethesda hair standby Hugo for a haircut on Friday and asked for a clean-up of my grown-out hair, leaving it messy please. The lovely but somewhat off-in-her-own-world Ecuadorian stylist then proceeded to cut and snip with great precision and focus, though to what end I could not see without my glasses, quite blind as I am.

By the time she finished and handed my specs back to me, lo-and-behold, I was back to my old spiky haircut and less some four months of hair. I was quietly startled, but her justifications (“You look like, you know, baby with hair in your face. This more grown up, sexy. You have nice forehead, don’t hide it.”) persuaded me otherwise. Could you tell me you’d argue with someone who complimented your forehead, even if she was angling for repeat business? She did, however, use the icky plasticy gel I used to use that leaves me looking like a laminated anime character who lost a fight with a downed power line. With some less intense product I was actually remarkably happy with the cut, old look or no. Looks like I’m destined to have spiky hair. Oh well, it suits. I’m no rocker.

I went to Walmart today because we needed a trash bin for the apartment’s kitchen, and because there’s nothing else to do in snow-bound Catonsville. I discovered that, in a veritable orgy of planned obsolescence and mass production, it’s cheaper to buy an entire new Crest battery-powered electric toothbrush than to buy a replacement head for an aging Braun rechargeable. The difference in price is huge: $5 for the cheap Crest or $11 for new Braun heads. Needless to say I went with the Crest, but am still greatly puzzled by the whole ordeal.

Classes theoretically start tomorrow, but may be postponed by weather. If campus is closed again all bets on my continued sanity are off. Closed campus means not even our library or commons buildings are open. Crazy go nuts in a bad way.

I’ll be commuting down to DC (probably leaving my car at a Metro station and riding in) on Fridays for work. The PICnet offices are right by Metro Center. If any of you DC denizens want to catch me, Fridays are the day.

I promise (campaign promise, not promise-promise) not to let blogging slide while back at school. It’s not lack of time that stopped me last semester, but more a general mental malaise from being on campus. There’ll be none of that this semester. I have an espresso machine. And interesting classes. But mostly espresso.