After we watched Trekkies, my girlfriend had suggested that I get involved with Trek fandom again. I used to be a member of a ship or something, but I don’t remember too much of what I did. I went to a couple of conventions years ago, and my girlfriend said she wouldn’t mind going with me if I wanted to attend one. Her motive for suggesting I rejoin the Ranks of the Nerds was the idea that I should have more friends, and she’s right and I think I’d enjoy it. So I’m looking into Starfleet, the club I used to belong to, but I’m not sure if I fit into Region 7 (which includes Maryland and DC) or Region 1 (which includes VA) - apparently aren’t any chapters near me. As for the convention-going, it turns out Farpoint (the convention I attended twice several years ago) is coming up in just a few weeks, but the guests are George Takei, Robin Curtis, and Philip Anglim - and George Takei was at the second convention I went to, so I’ve got his autograph and have no great impulse to see him again. But I do want to play around with that sort of thing again, so we’ll see what happens.

I was going to make this entry into a rumination about friendship and giving and things like that, but I didn’t really like where that was going. Instead I’m just going to say that I did something nice for someone, and it made them really happy. Chris-O is one of my very few friends from E2, and his homenode advertised that he’d like to receive postcards, foreign coins, transit maps, and guitar picks. So I packed up some coins left from our trip to Turkey (I think they’re worth about twelve cents now, they might have been worth as much twenty when we were there) and grabbed a whole bunch of brochures from the racks at the Metro stations, and sent them off to him with a goofy note on Hello Kitty stationery. He received my little package today, and it made him really happy - he sent me a /msg about it, and put some notes in his homenode and everything. It makes me feel so good that I can make somebody happy like that. In fact just in case he changes his homenode, I made a copy of how it looks today so I can look back at it and feel good again. (You’ll get a pop-up ad if you click the link - sorry about that. Also, none of the links on my copy of the page will work.)

I am eating the most heavenly food in the world, and it’s almost ambrosia but better.
At Thanksgiving my girlfriend’s little sister’s boyfriend’s mother (ha!) made some 1950s salad that has Jello and marshmallows and fruit and nuts, and apparently it was really good - but being a vegetarian, I didn’t have any. One of A’s friends had come to Thanksgiving too and wanted the recipe, so we got it for her and then had it around our house too. The other day my girlfriend drove all the way to Potomac or somewhere out that way - probably only about 30-45 minutes away, but it’s a long way for groceries - to go to a Seventh Day Adventist grocery store that was known to have lots of vegetarian items. She bought kosher marshmallows and seaweed Jello, and made a vegetarian version of the 1950s salad (which I swear is a dessert, though supposedly it’s actually a salad). I put some in a Tupperware for lunch today, and I am eating it and it is just so amazingly marvelously good. Yum.

Ow. Owie owie ow.

I had three moles removed this morning before 8:30am. The anesthetic was great - apparently the doctor made sure it was working by jabbing me with a needle, but I never felt that. Except that now it’s wearing off, and it feels like somebody is burning me or something. Owwww. But hey, I was only about half an hour late for work. Time to get started on the day.

For most people, riding to work on the Metro is a solitary event. Sometimes couples commute together and converse, or friends run into each other and start to chat. But for the majority of us, it’s a time to enjoy quiet pursuits without the intrusion of others. A great number of people read; newspapers are common in the morning while books are more popular for the ride home. Magazines can show up at any time (I was reading Newsweek before getting out a piece of paper to write) and not infrequently religious texts will be read, sometimes accompanied by barely-moving lips in recitation. Many people do their work on the Metro, marking up legal documents or other paperwork. Sometimes people review their datebooks, and the more geekly among us play with our PDAs. Nearly everyone is lost in their own word-filled world - but then some are not. Women occasionally start the trip by finishing up their beauty routines - fixing hair, applying lipstick, or whatever they need to do. But this morning I caught a girl working on what I’ve always thought should be a solitary grooming practice - tweezing her eyebrows. She had a little hand mirror with her, and carefully plucked out hairs I couldn’t even see - and not from the bridge of her nose, but from what seemed to be perfectly normal eyebrows. She left a red spot at one edge, where the sensitive skin was unhappy about being abused in such a manner, and though I also saw her applying some sort of cream I had to wonder why she chose to engage in such a delicate task on a swaying, lurching subway train.

(I should not that the activities described above are almost always performed by people who are seated. Those left standing sometimes fiddle with PDAs or read books, but more often the stand silently, staring out the window at the monotonous tunnel interiors.)

I have decided to be moderately happier because I can at least work on E2 and ODP. Sigh, I wish I weren’t such a dork. Oh, and I can always do, like, real work or something. Snert.

Well so far it’s a sucky day. Apparently I screwed up a work situation over the weekend. This morning I wasn’t paying attention while playing Lunatix and got myself killed off early before playing much of the day’s game. I discovered my Neopets account has been frozen and I’m not sure why, but I wrote to them. So far it’s a bad day.

Oddly enough I find you are all special to me, even those of you I don’t know outside of LJ and don’t really communicate with much. By reading your journals I feel somehow closer to you and interested in your life. I wonder sometimes if anybody is interested in me, but I suppose people read me from time to time. Even if you didn’t I suppose I’d keep writing. But right now I’ve mostly been reading - except that I haven’t gotten caught up and I’ve got to quit. I need to cuddle with my girlfriend a bit and not still be geeking when she goes to sleep, and I need to get some sleep myself.

After searching all around for that darn software that lets you leave comments directly on a website, I finally found a little article about it - unfortunately all of the services seem to be defunct now. Too bad, as I remember Third Voice was kind of fun. Odigo doesn’t include the function in their current software offerings, Gooey is now a porn site, and the Utok server just isn’t responding.