I’m currently listening to the official Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack, which is a delightful panoply of stylistic excellent music, music that evokes mood and mentality in a fashion that many other modern works simply and utterly fail to do. This is not a posting about music, mind you (though I could easily make it so), but I wanted to mention it as a segue that represents a certain mode of thought. “Mood music” if you will.

School residency started yesterday. I felt a strange mixture of dread and elation at coming back, feeling unprepared but at the same time eager to pick up a new study. I’ve been getting a lot of compliments and congratulatory comments on my recent marriage and move across the country (something that surprised a good deal of people, and has proven to be a conversation starter since). My hair still has highlights from when it was dyed this past July, which has been the source of most of the compliments (“wow, your hair looks great” and such). I dig the positive attention, but what really does it for me is the relative familiarity I’ve achieved with the other students, a familiarity that largely remains unchanged after not seeing or hearing from any of them for a full six months. At this point, I am an “old hand” at the residency, someone that new students can come to if they want to know how things work.

I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing this coming semester, which is a change: past semesters have had me coming in with a pretty firm understanding of exactly what I was going to do. This time, I come with a concept and that’s about it. I want to study mysticism, the mystical counterparts to several of the mainstream religions, with a focus on mysticism in the Baha’i Faith, since I have more of a direct interest in that one in particular (I’m a Baha’i, something that I’ve mentioned at least three times before on this site… do a search for “baha’i” to see where). Of course, there is another component to this study: I find myself feeling tapped creatively, and would like to find a way to reenergize and get motivated on really USING my creative resources again. So the other component, if it were to be summed up (and I’m going to have to for the study proposal) is studying the relation between spirtuality and creativity.

And yes, I am in fact writing this blog entry partially to help codify what I’m thinking. I went to my first exploratory meeting today, and found myself rambling a bit, so I want to cut down on that. We’ve got a large group this time (largest its been in several semesters), so the exploratory meetings are a bit more full than usual, leaving time as a bit of a precious commodity.

Other things about the residency: I forgot my alarm clock, which has left me exploring alternate options of waking up. What I’ve settled on is twofold: I’ve set an alarm in my phone to wake me up, and then also set a cron job in my laptop to start playing music at a set time. Of course, I forgot to set my laptop up last night, so all I had was my phone (which worked, thankfully, otherwise I would have missed breakfast). We’ll see if it works next time.

I’m rooming with my brother, which seems to work out pretty well: I tend to roll into the room around 1am after being in the computer lab most of the evening, and then a bit later than that, Uri rolls in after jamming with the other musicians out in the chapel. (The room is a sight to behold… and the acoustics are fantastic.) So that way neither of us is stuck with some early sleeper or anything that would get irritated with our night owl tendencies.

As ever, I find that I don’t really socialize all that much. I’m in the room at the computer lab set aside for laptops, which rarely has even one other person in it at any given time (perhaps half a dozen of us or so even bring our laptops). This means that, while I’m easy to find if anyone bothers, it generally doesn’t occur to anyone to go out of their way to find me, even if they need me in particular for something. A little frustrating, but that’s the price I pay for wanting to use my computer instead of the shitty, outdated PCs they have in the computer lab.

Really, my socializing time is at meals, and I generally try to sit with a wide variety of people, in order to keep things interesting. There is only so many times you can hear a person talk about what they plan to do next semester, and how the previous semester went, you know? (Actually, that’s a bit unfair. While nearly every conversation starts with that, they often get FAR more interesting and varied from there.)

This is basically my day: wake up, shower, breakfast, morning meetings, lunch, some computer time (no returning group this time, since I did EXCEL instead), and then dinner, and then more meetings, back to the computer lab, then bed. Repeat (with some variations) each day for the week. It’s not a bad way to be, though I do find I’m pretty tired by the end of the week.

Mmm, one more week, and then I get to fly back home, where my sweetie will be waiting for me at the airport. I miss her very VERY much (hey, I know it’s only 3 weeks, but we’re newlyweds, cut us some slack), and am really looking forward to being back home with her.

In a lot of ways, the time away has been good for us (well, me), because it’s given me time to myself (well, sorta), and allowed me time to reset myself and start communicating again (well, as much as I ever do), because I felt like we weren’t communicating very well of late. We’ve had a few long talks while I’ve been gone, and I’m definitely VERY glad we did. I really feel much better about where our relationship stands now than I did when I left. (That’s not to say it was bad, just not as good as it had been in the past, nor as good as I would have liked.)

In other news, Mac OSX 10.3 is now out (I haven’t picked it up but plan to when I get back to town), and Final Fantasy XI will be out at the end of the week. Final Fantasy X-2 will be out in mid-November. I’ve sent my resume to Microsoft’s game design section, to OmniGroup about their testing intern position, and to Apple about becoming a part time “mac specialist” (what they call their retail salesmen) at their U-District store. We’ll see if ANY of them come to anything.

Everyone has posted recently, so if you haven’t gone through my various friends’ blogs, I highly recommend it. Uri has updated recently, as did Mickey, Eli posted at the beginning of the week, and Adam and Chris both posted yesterday. Chris’s blog (The Root Beer Blog) is the newest of them, but already has a good storehouse of well written, interesting posts, and continues to grow on a regular basis.

That’s enough for now. I’ll write more soon.