Setsuled's Journal

I was up and at them at 7:30am this morning. So yesterday apparently accomplished that much (though it rendered "them" warier).

Just as I'd anticipated, I had no real sleep on Sunday night. I kind of relaxed awhile, but it never got serious. At around 4:30am, I decided to soak in the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West, a few beautifully shot moments of waiting at a train station, and then I left to wait at the trolley station.

Apparently I was rather fortunate to choose July 3, as trials rarely begin the day before a holiday. So I was able to leave at 11am, and I don't have to go back.

Being out and about on so little sleep and on foot makes the world seem curiously big. I got out at Grossmont Centre on the return trip to eat tofu and eggplant in garlic sauce. There was a creepy business-suit guy sitting across from me on the trolley. He chewed altoids and asked me about La Mesa and El Cajon like he'd just purchased both cities.

In the Juror's lounge, I'd finished reading Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, which was a good book, but reading so much Dostoyevsky in such a short period had left me feeling somewhat wild and giddy. I find I'm encountering the concept of alien personalities spontaneously forming in a society often these days. Notes from the Underground is told from the perspective of one seemingly at odds with everyone just by virtue of his nature, and he finds it a painful situation. It was interesting because the narrator was a flawed personality whom I couldn't nevertheless fail to recognise as being much smarter than me. But his was definitely an alien's dilemma, and I was reminded of Taxi Driver and of one of the new anime series I've been watching lately, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which is about a teenage girl who's convinced she's an alien because everyone around her is very dull. In what is both the first and second episode (the episodes are arranged peculiarly, seemingly jumbled entirely--the first episode is actually the eleventh, the second the first), Haruhi and the series' male lead, Kyon, discuss the possibility that all significant advancement in our world has been achieved by a few very unusual individuals who are possibly aliens.

Anyway. Sorry, Lou Dobbs--you cannot stop the illegal alien within.

I feel a bit dim to-day. I guess that's to be expected with the abrupt schedule flip. I may just vegetate to-day . . .