Spring Break Week here at the University.
The last time I really went anywhere or did anything for Spring Break was back in 1998, when I visited my sister at her college in Tennessee. My dad and I drove down there, but then my dad had to leave after a couple days and I stayed the rest of the week. I rode back up north on a Greyhound. The first part of the trip proved uneventful other than a drunk racist screaming at the black busdriver. By the time we started moving out of Kentucky and into Indiana, the snow hit. The bus inched along, stayed for a long time in Indianapolis before officials decided that the straight shot up US 31 from Indy to SB was one big sheet of ice, so we'd instead take back roads over to a station in Gary, Indiana (which is in the very NorthEast corner of Indiana, almost to Chicago). We waited there for hours. Exhausted by then, I grew overwhelmed by the "create-a-drama" activities going on in the bus station waiting area and started looking around for anywhere else I could be. I found a bus station bar & occasional grill with a sandwich and television. 24 hours after I originally left, I finally made it home. And now it's supposed to snow this Spring Break week, as well. Nothing really changes for me this week, though, so I'll accept winter's last gasp and just have fun with it this time around.

My real break comes in May. I mentioned this before, but we're heading back east for a few days. Our hope is to spend about a day and a half with each side of the family, roughly, get in at least one ramble session with Jeff (juandelacruz on Vagrant Cafe) and catch up a little bit with the rest of his family, and then spend maybe a day and a half in Chicago...I'm hoping to meet up with a few Chicago folks, perhaps, and otherwise just enjoy a brief vacation I'm sure I'll greatly need by then. The weekend after that is the big Vagrant Convention dealie, and while I'm not quite sure how that's all coming along, I'm sure it will be fun, as well.

Much of this past weekend I spent working on various school-related work, and had a great time doing it. Our church bookstore had a pretty big shipment (for us) come in, so I worked on that, as well. Late yesterday afternoon, Stacey was bored and looking for something to watch and all that looked good to me was Silence of the Lambs. My main goal yesterday was to read a good chunk of Invisible Man (by Ralph Ellison) since I'm co-facilitating our session on that in my African American Novel class, so I read that and sat next to her while she watched the film. She ended up liking it quite a bit and once it was over, around 7, took off and rented Hannibal, the sequel. I'd not seen Hannibal since the original theatrical release, so I stuck around while it was on (we had to watch it AFTER Arrested Development, of course, and she was gone while the Simpsons was on). I'd warned her that Hannibal just isn't quite as good...I'm not a cinemaphile so I don't know much about Jonathan Demme (who directed the original) other than that he also directed Philadelphia, which I never saw...but Ridley Scott (who directed and produced Hannibal) is somewhat inconsistent, and at times becomes infatuated with sensation -- though I am admittedly biased toward the understatement of, say, a Hitchcock -- and where Hannibal suffers and Silence shines is in the fact that Silence is much more psychological and mentally manipulative, whereas Hannibal far too often falls into a "Check out this Gore, Dood!" mentality. In case anyone wonders, I never did see Red Dragon or whatever the "prequel" is...never too interested in that, to be honest.

Some person on vagrant (who rarely posts anything of substance, anyway) decided to step up the idiodacy lately, for some reason, so I had to delete a couple posts that were either completely inappropriate, or just inconsiderate to post on certain threads. He sent me a whiney pm about it, I told him he knows better and should either knock it off or leave, to which he called me an "asshat" and said "i'm smarter than you, anyway." I'm not really upset or anything, it's more funny than anything else, but his own lack of diplomacy and my own busy-ness leaves me not really in the mood to negotiate or haggle. We'll see what happens. This is mostly just a case of someone wanting attention and craving everyone to think he's funny and wacky and mr. bizarre humor, most likely, but this is the sort of thing that makes Carter and I wish we were rich enough to buy plane tickets and show up on doorsteps.

In other news, I wrote a critique of this blues seminar I attended a few weeks ago. I ended up writing 8 pages, about twice as much as expected. Anything less, however, wouldn't have done the subject justice...and hey, the professor asked for outside sources, so he was just asking for my style of verbosity. I had fun, and that's the important thing.