A new semester is underway, and along with it comes the requisite mocking of jhaydu. From "kiddie pool shark" to the jhaydu schedule, things are off to an excellent start on that front.

As I probably mentioned before, I spend a large portion of my summer working. While the job did pay, and it's not like I had anything else to do with myself, the work I was doing (when there was work to do) was decidedly boring and tedious. Sure, I like typing, and I do it well enough, but spending the better part of an eight-hour day sitting at a computer transcribing gets to you after a while. It's not so much the typing that bothers me, it's listening to the same repetitive-sounding revocation opinions time and time again.

And then the summer was over. In under 24 hours I was transplanted from working in Trenton to being drenched in the most torrential downpour I've ever seen back in Hoboken. I was looking forward to the change of scenery, and to getting some work done with the free time I envisioned I would have during the week.

The original plan was simple: get back to Hoboken on Sunday, put out a special edition of The Stute by Tuesday night, and relax from Wednesday until Sunday. This delusion was quickly shattered, however, as the sheer amount of legwork required to assemble the content for the issue turned out to be far more than I had imagined. After a couple of 5 A.M. nights, the paper finally gone done sometime Thursday morning, and in my infinite wisdom, decided the best way to cap off working on the paper was to go home and fix a problem with my mom's new laptop (I had promised to do that at some point, but the choice of timing was more spontaneous). So the early morning saw me sprinting from my room to the Hoboken train station to catch a train as part of an elaborate system of transfers that would place me less than a half-mile from my house. After spending five minutes wrestling with the ticket machine at the station (and being short on cash with which to purchase a ticket aboard the train), I watched my plans fall apart as the train left Hoboken, sans me.

And so I fell back to plan B, which was to get home and figure out the rest later. So I took the PATH to Newark and got a later train to Hamilton. Naturally, this later train arrived after the departure of the bus I needed to take to get home, so I walked the three miles or so from the train station to my house. Upon arriving, I fired up the laptop and quickly found the source of the problem — this laptop has a small switch on the side that can enable or disable wireless connectivity. At some point, this switch had been moved to the 'off' position. The switch was restored to the desired position, and then it was back to the train station (I got a ride this time, as I was not about to walk back less than ten minutes after I'd just walked home).

At this point, I still had the illusion that I would have some relaxing free time before classes started. This was quickly eliminated almost immediately upon my return to Hoboken, as I realized that the freshman orientation events needed to be covered for the paper, and there still weren't enough staff members around to make it easy. That evening, I called a quick meeting for those who were around to assign coverage, taking on my fair share of the events, many of which were happening that evening (as was the arrival of the special orientation issue). Naturally, everything for that night fell to me, including distribution. As I hadn't slept in over 30 hours that point, and had already done quite a bit of walking, I was in no condition to handle all of that. After a brief nap, I awoke (I think) to handle distribution, only to find that the paper had not yet arrived. At that point I decided to blow off everything for the rest of the night and get some much-needed sleep.

By the time I woke up, it was Friday afternoon, and so the day was wasted for an imagined trip to the shore during the week. Instead, I finally got to unpacking the remainder of my stuff, and was then swept off to Home Depot and Applebees with jmikola. The need for organizing stuff for The Stute necessitated my skipping a work day (and abandoning any plans) on Saturday. Saturday night saw another road trip, this time with Krup, jerm, and Sneaky Gene. What was originally planned to be a mere trip to Krup's house to swap cars ended up with us at a bar, downing Long Island iced teas and Irish car bombs. Sunday passed without any noteworthy event, mostly cleaning and organizing from the mess I'd made over the past week.

And then there were classes. There's no need for any detail, except to say that every class I have this semester appears to be a complete waste of time.

My current reading material is the very strange and very fucked-up literary work that is The Illuminatus Trilogy (note the cheap plug for my reading list project there). Progress on the book thus far has been slow, since it's hard to follow and borders on frustrating.

That's about all that's worth mentioning now, and as always, another update will occur whenever I feel like it. This one is basically just a cover to use the phrases 'kiddie pool shark' and 'interlibrary loan shark' (both mpowers1 creations) and the picture of jerm's illustration for the former.