Or at least, I’m trying not to be. I noticed myself tending to hide out in my apartment the past week, ostensibly because I wasn’t feeling well and needed to unpack, but when faced with the reality, I didn’t really get much unpacking done during that time, and didn’t make good use of my time even hiding out in the apartment. I also noticed myself sleeping too much (12 hours last night… I’m usually happily functional on 7 hours), which is something I tend to do when I’m letting things pile up rather than acting on them. Doing is also key to keeping the depression demons at bay.

So, today I packed up the laptop and took my first trip to the coffee house in about a week. Early in the week is the best time to be here, anyway, as it gets hard to find seats later in the week. I ran into one of the folks from Coccinella (sadly now defunct) when I came in, which is awesome. I gave him my card, we’ll see if he gets in touch. (He’s in much the same boat as me at the moment, job hunting… he wandered off to work on his grad degree in philosophy, and is back now.)

Wil Shipley is sitting a few tables over, but it looks like he’s working, so I’ve opted not to bother him. I keep on meaning to go over and say hi when I see him in here (this IS one of his regular haunts after all… this is the same coffee shop they wrote Delicious Library in), but it’s hard to step up and break the ice. “Hi, I read your blog, I like your software, let’s chat?” Heh.

For those who are keeping track, I did, in fact, get Gentoo running on my G5, except for one very small, minor, deal breaking problem: the display I’m currently using (my television) apparently doesn’t play nice with the bootloader, meaning I get a blank screen and no way of knowing what I’m selecting (like, say, whether to load Gentoo or OS X) until it’s already loading. So, I’m going to chalk it up to a learning experience (namely, I now know more than I care to about configuring a kernel), and get back to thinking about data, and how I want it organized.

It’s a daunting task to take several years of files across multiple computers and drives, and get it all collected and sorted and not duplicated, and then prep it for clean backups and archiving. I think that once I DO get it all organized, Slingshot and LifeBoat are going to come in exceptionally handy, and I’ll be a lot happier (and ostensibly more productive, but I’m not holding my breath).

All quiet on the romantic front. I’d have to, y’know, be social for it to be anything else. I’ve been giving a LOT of thought to finally putting together my thoughts and observations on love into a full essay, and have slowly started gathering notes and quotes and such towards that end. Those who’ve known me for a long time can attest to the fact that love, and the idea of love, have been perennial topics for me for most of my life. I can remember sitting and thinking about it when I was 5 and 6, trying to figure out the butterflies in my stomach when certain girls were nearby, and the topic has never really fully left my thoughts since. The difference between arousal, infatuation, crushing, and love, different types of love, the abstraction and the concrete behind it. I think it’ll be rewarding (if only for myself) to sit down and put it all into words, and hopefully it will make it more clear for those around me as well. It’s still a ways off, though, as I really want to do the topic justice, and there are other things that are more pressing that I need to do (like get a job).