Relief!

[evilhippo]

Those few hours in which you can just sit around and do nothing, guilt-free, after turning in a paper are quite nice. I sorted the recycling and re-did my two oldest icons for the heck of it. (I don't understand this new one I just made. I think it's pretentious, but I'm keeping it anyway because I think it lends an interesting feel to my journal. Like those people with the slightly faded landscape pictures and things that don't really mean anything, but look vaguely artistic. Look! You can't see my face. And I'm putting on gloves. Must be symbolic.)

I think having just finished a paper makes you sort of pensive, too. Which is why I'm going to sit here and look up "malt," because on the bus today I realized that I didn't really know what it meant, since I couldn't figure out how single-malt whiskey and a malted milkshake could be related (other than being beverages). Turns out it has to do with the grain. The alcohol is brewed from malt, the milkshake is mixed with malt. That... umm... still doesn't explain what malt is, but I figure the definition is sort of like love in that it just is.

After giving it a bit of thought (as best I can considering the difficulty I occasionally have hearing my thoughts in here) I've become increasingly amused by the fact that it's completely possible for me to get along well with someone socially, yet disagree with them on every part creatively. In fact, I can name several people right now that this is true for. And there are some people I get along with beautifully creatively, yet totally fail to understand and find myself unable to get along with socially. Is this normal? I'd always thought that the creative parts were a lot more... I don't know, linked with your personality. But maybe it's also weird to assume that, since you like someone's work, you'll also like them. I mean, I'm terrified of Neil Gaiman now. I think he'd be afraid of me, too. But maybe that's a "too much respect for" versus "just insane and probably scary" problem. Of course, the only way for me to really test this theory out is to... um... find people I admire, stalk them for a bit, then try to become friends with them. (And, well, the question's too wide to really be boiled down to one answer too, isn't it? I mean, there can be a totally obnoxious comic with a few good jokes that you like. Bands whose older or newer albums suck compared to the other ones. People who sit here and ramble on about nothing at all because they can't really remember where they were going with this except that it was going to sound philosophical, but then again things like that probably happen a lot on only four hours of sleep.)

Perhaps it would be wise of me to go do the rest of my homework that's due tomorrow so I don't have to worry about it tonight. I need to actually be able to sleep or else I'll die. I'm already a day behind on my French homework, but at least I wasn't so late today that I missed the quiz. Yay!

P.S. Firefox works so much better when you raise the process priority. Whoa. Suddenly I feel less compelled to up the amount of RAM in my computer. (Which is to say, I can wait until I find a way to ask for it for Christmas). (Ha! As if "running fewer programs at once" is even worth a thought.)