My long and detailed analysis of King Lear is coming, but there are a few things I need to get out of my system first.
I was in Atlanta, Georgia (appropriately christened “CNN land” by E) when Kurt Vonnegut died. I was probably in the CNN building when it happened, as yet I still didn’t know until a day or two after the fact when E solemnly passed me the phone during a call from her mother. He was gone, the only author I’d ever wanted to meet (except for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but that wish was always a bit far-fetched). The bastard.
The other day I was talking with my father about a man he met while in California just recently who had actually gone to college with Vonnegut in Indiana. Apparently they’d been quite good friends, since when the man my father met got the rather pompous application letter from Harvard Law School and told Vonnegut he wasn’t going to go since they were such assholes, Vonnegut immediately urged him to go. In the end the man wrote his essay on the subject of how pompous and ridiculous he thought Harvard was, how he couldn’t believe anyone would actually want to go there, and that he most certainly would not be enclosing his application fee, since it would only be putting salt on the wounds Harvard had caused him. He was accepted with open arms and graduated some years later.
The realization that I’m in my last semester of high school (unless I somehow managed to fail my government class, something I hope to hell does not happen) is finally starting to cause me a degree of anxiety, particularly concerning what the hell I think I’m going to do with my life after high school. There’s really no way I’m going to be able to continue on in my current manner.
The situation is particularly sticky because my parents managed to find out that I was just recently accepted to both CSU and the Colorado School of Mines. I only applied to Mines to see if I could get in (I am not an engineer by any stretch of the imagination) and CSU in the omnipresent in-state fall back. I also applied to Cornell College in Iowa, where Kitty goes. I’ve still yet to hear back from them, but to be perfectly honest, they are my school of choice right now. I miss Kitty like you wouldn’t believe.
My parents want me to go to Mines. I probably will.
This just goes to show you what free will is good for.
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On a mildly lighter note, I stole “Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened” from E the other day and spent most of the weekend playing it. It’s… interesting, though difficult to play on a laptop with only a touch-pad, since it makes navigation rather difficult. But anyway, at one point Holmes is in Switzerland at an insane asylum, and he encounters a rather enigmatic inmate with no name who was found half-drowned on the bank of a river. It turns out to be the long presumed dead Professor Moriarty.
The renditions of the characters are actually fairly good. Holmes and Watson are both pretty much as I imagined, but I always expected Moriarty to be a blonder Sherlock, not a squat, graying man with all of the personality and personal charisma of a toad.
It’s just something that’s been bothering me.
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Also, I recommend that anyone with a soul goes out right now and picks up some music by both The Young Dubliners and The Pogues. “A Pair of Brown Eyes” by either band is one of the best songs I’ve heard in a very, very long time.
It reminds me of Whitekeys, for some reason, even though his eyes are not brown.
