Rhapsodising

Yuk. Feel sick.
I have spent the evening doing very little, talking to Pedar, thinking about writing letters but not writing any, and basic stuff like that.
Hannah and I went into rhapsodising mode over Konstantine earlier - my depressed state of a week ago coincided with the time I was playing it obsessively, and the same thing seems to be happening to her. That song is so beautiful it can't be put into words.
Talking of music, I've ordered Nirvana's greatest hits album, succintly titled "Nirvana." Amazon finally agreed to send it to this address and not Sunny's address in Darwin, Australia.
I guess I'm more tired than I thought I was. I was going to stay online, but I've already done everything I could do, and this update really wasn't necessary. It's just something that puts off going to bed.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually afraid of going to bed - I try and avoid it with such a passion. But I know that's not true - I cling to it with the same passion in the dark hours of the morning. It's a matter of my being a night owl, I guess - I like the night. I don't want to waste it in mere slothful sleep. Equally, I don't want to drag myself from my oasis in the morning, the time when I am at my least intelligent and most sarcastic, a weak combination.
If I had my way, sometimes I wouldn't get out of bed at all. snowdrop24 kids about it, but she's more right than she realises - there are days on which, left to my own devices, I would stay in bed for twenty hours out of twenty-four. I like the place between sleep and wakefulness... somehow, everything seems better there.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

So... today is Armistice Day and I was asleep during the two-minute silence. Before I begin being cynical, I will say the soldiers in the First World War did fight under unimaginably awful conditions, and we all know so much about the trenches. About how in the front line trenches, the soldiers wallowed in knee-deep water, assaulted by the smell of rotting bodies crawling with rats, cold, wet, hungry and a very very long way from home. They were to come back to a hero's welcome - which of course didn't materialise.

However, every year since then, there is a two-minute silence at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, so "we will remember them."
But isn't it strange, the display of ardent patriotism on the part of the British? They seem to be patriotic at only certain times - during the World Cup, for example, and during the Queen's Golden Jubillee. The fact that both happened at the same time was just sheer bad luck.

The Daily Mail published an old photograph a few days ago - it showed Armistice Day, 1940. The picture showed a lady dressed in a pretty dress, wearing heels and a hat with flowers, and there was a tray of poppies around her neck. So far, so good... but the only other person in the picture was a ragged street urchin, and the backdrop was a familiar view of London during the Blitz - in other words, a bombsite. The newspaper claimed this picture showed the patriotism of the British in the face of adversity. I claimed the picture showed the stupidity of the British in the face of everything.

I complained to Pedar about all this at length. He launched his hands in the air in that gesture we have in common, and said, "What did I tell you about the Daily Mail? They're... weird."
I agreed. The British are only patriotic when it suits them, which is during wartime, the World Cup, and royal anniversaries. Armistice Day is a good idea in theory, but the poet was right. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

"For a while there, it was a toss-up whether I married a stripper or a whitebait."

Eddie the computer guy came round this afternoon to try and fix the problems in this computer. Ah, the irony – after a year of not working, Microsoft Word decides to work, on the day we get someone in to look at it. Argh. Not fair.

Anyway, he looked over the whole computer, and he even took the cover of the CPU so I got to see the inside of it – it’s mostly empty space. Eddie suggests getting another stick of memory – maybe 128MB – because it should both speed it up and deal with some of the bluescreen errors, which I’m all for. Having shown me how to do it, he then pieced the computer back together, and helped me back up the registry, as I’m always worried I’m going to screw up something major in the registry editor, so that’s a load off my mind.

Once he’d left, Pedar decided to order something off Amazon. It appears that the stuff he wants can’t be shipped to anywhere outside the United States, so it got sent to Indianapolis. I rang my Bua, just to make sure she knew – she seemed pleased to hear from me. She always seems pleased to hear from me, which is one of the reasons I like her so much. She laughed uproariously at the thought of getting our parcel, and promised to hang on to it.

Because Pedar spent $50, he gets given $30 to spend at Amazon.com – I’m getting it. It should appear within the next six weeks, which I suppose gives me lots of time to decide what I want. All I know at the moment is I want Ursula Le Guin’s Tales of Earthsea, that novella by Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and the book M*A*S*H was based on, as it was apparently written by a staunch Republican who based Hawkeye on himself... (what?!)

Talking of ( M*A*S*H... )