Eventually, I got up and churned out a crappy essay for Foreign Policy. It looked terrible in the pile with the others. I discovered that I have New York jury duty scheduled for the week of March 2, which is not something I can even think about right now. I napped on the couch in the office to regain my strength.
Dream: I was a journalist dispatched to a mining colony out in the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The colonists dressed in simple tunics and pants, tough and insulated, and I had arrived in light armor designed for protection from various environmental dangers. Under a dirt-orange sky, they were drilling through wispy brown topsoil and a brittle, asphalt-like substrate. Once the upper layers were cleared away, they excavated loamy chunks of a beet-colored undersoil, as well as the ores still beneath those. I stepped away from the mining operation to observe the local children playing in an abandoned tunnel; they were guarded by a humanoid android of similar build and dress. The temperature was rising quickly for some reason, though I didn't notice immediately due to my suit. I can still see their faces running, stretching like taffy, melting like ghosts from the light as they tried to escape the heat of the tunnel. A countdown in the heads-up display in my helmet started at 24 hours, halved, halved again, halved again. The mother died, still pleading with a starship captain for escape; numb, he was telling her that there was not enough time, not enough time. By now I had figured it out: the military was testing a new weapon, a device that would burn off the atmosphere of an entire planet before reducing it to dust with immense nuclear explosions. They needed to know how it worked on living beings before it could be deployed against our enemies. Only the android was left to keep me company now, its skin burnt away and chattering to itself. "Why am I alive?" The countdown cut to fifteen seconds. I felt calm and turned away from the initial flash, then turned and threw my arms wide to embrace the blast wave. I was nothing and woke.
Luckily, I was up in time to get to my next class and grab free coffee from the Snell quad on the way over. After that came my Latin America class. The class before us regularly runs over its end time, but today they used up nine of the ten minutes in between. I just barged in and sat down at that point -- our class starts in one minute, get the fuck out. Not that it mattered; our professor was her habitual ten or fifteen minutes late, and when she did arrive, she couldn't get her selected movie to work. Once it did work and more time was wasted, she left to get something at the library and was gone for twenty more minutes. This class is an utter joke and I don't understand how we're getting credit for it.
I went to Iris's once again to share dinner and beers with her, Malcolm and Alaric. We took a polaroid or two and filled our bellies. Back at the apartment, Alaric and I decided to continue with the fifth season of The Sopranos. The TV/internet connection is still on the fritz, so we had to use my computer and an HDMI cable. The HBO Go app responded by failing with a "video error" a couple times per episode, and we barely got the first one started at all. Close paraphrase of the error message: "Sorry, we cannot play this title right now. Please try again later." This would come after we were halfway through the episode. Why...
Quote of the day:
"It doesn't obey anything. It doesn't obey my commands." - Prof. Rivera-Ottenberger
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