Welcome to "no good segue friday."

So I'm trying to get my circadian rhythm sorted out by the time I start training for my job on Tuesday by gradually waking up earlier and earlier. As a result I've been dead tired the last couple days. Actually, it works far better for me to do something like this in one fell swoop. As cranky as I am without sleep, if I'm sufficiently excited about whatever it is I have to get up early for, I usually am pretty cheerful and function properly. I used to have to do it all the time for TV-10 (I'd have one day a week where I had to get up 4 hours earlier than the rest of the week), or in high school when I had Scholastic Bowl (tournements were obsenely early in the morning). And at the beginning every semester I'd go from getting up at like noon to getting up at a proper time for class.

But.... my mom's kind of prodding me to do it this way so I don't end up all tired my first day of training, and it's just easier to do it than argue with her.

Anyway, the job gives me hope that someday I can move out, and then I'll no longer have to ever again utter the phrase "it's just easier to do it than argue with her."

I'm going to need to get a new alarm clock. The one I have has a battery so theoretically it's supposed to still go off if the power blinks off. But the battery part of it just doesn't work, no matter how many times we change the battery, and the power blinks off constantly at my house. Which, is kind of weird. I know we live out on the edge of town and everything, but it didn't used to blink out as often as it does nowadays. Seriously. Every two or three days it blinks out. And every damn time I have to reset the VCR and my alarm clock. It's a pain.

When I had the interview, they asked me (among a THOUSAND much more painfully difficult questions) what my favorite author was, and of course, I picked Kurt Vonnegut without even really thinking (the title of this blog is the title of a collection of his short stories, if anyone doesn't know that already). The guy seemed surprised. I'm not sure if it's because I was like, "oh, I like pulpy genre books," and then bust out a serious author as my favorite, or if it was because I was really trying hard to be the sort of cheerful, friendly, person that you would want to buy books from, and then turned around and picked a depressing author as my favorite.

No, Kurt Vonnegut isn't Dr. Zhivago or Shakespearean tragedy depressing. He's more gently bitter. He kind of points out everything that's horribly depressing and/or fucked up about society, but he does it partially tongue-in-cheek with characters you can enjoy, and no one dies from a lingering illness or commits suicide or anything. So after most of his books, I feel a little melancholy, but not as depressed as say, after I watch something about the war in Iraq.

And they also asked me what my favorite movie is and what I'd say to someone if I were trying to get them to buy it. This was also kind of a no-brainer, I went with Pleasantville. Since I've written school papers on it AND been trying to make people I know watch it and love it as much as I do for years now, so I actually have a kind of canned spiel about why it's so awesome already. And it hit me, Pleasantville is also gently bitter. Because one of the issues it attacks is nostalgia, and how people always think things used to be better. But they never were. No matter what era you think of, there's always been something horribly wrong. And it's a depressing thought that it's not so much things were better and now they're going downhill, but after all this time we never got it right and maybe never will. But the delivery is this fun, slightly goofy narrative.

And then I was thinking of my favorite musical artist, Ben Folds. And he's the same. I mean, there's purely funny songs of his, and the rare serious happy song. But as a whole... he's got the mildly bitter thing going on. Fred Jones is this song about this guy who's worked at this place so long that no one there even knows who he is or cares, and now he's retiring and doesn't even have that anymore. "He's forgotten but not yet gone." The Ascent of Stan is about this guy who was a hippie when he was young and sold out and now he's this miserable middle aged man who wishes he was poor but happy again. Fair is about this couple that's having an arguement, and the woman gets in the car to drive off, but the guy jumps onto the hood of the car. She hits the brakes to stop and get out and tell him she was wrong, and he's thrown into traffic and dies. He's got a couple songs that are just generally, "growing up kind of stinks."

So I'm wondering if I'm just one of those people who actually TRIES to be depressed all the time. I hate those people. You talk to them about music, and inevitably their favorite is the most depressing band possible. And if they like any other bands, their favorite song is the most depressing song that band has to offer. I guess at least I only like mildly depressing things, though. I mean, Pleasantville is no Schindler's list and I don't sit in my room dressed in black listening to The Cure all day.

Eh. That was just some stuff I had in my head I felt like yammering about.