Measured Out in Coffee Spoons

Time keeps flying by ever faster as I approach my grad school deadlines, tightening down slowly to that asymptote where I have only the thinnest margains in which to measure out my remaining time. I don't know what happened to November, but it's gone. The absence of night terrors about small grey men and strange metal lumps dwelling underneath my skin isn't proof that I haven't been abducted by aliens, but somehow I think the guy in the New Age bookstore was off the mark on this one. Whatever the reason, I have no time to waste. There's too much I need to write and not enough time in which to write it.

In the meantime, I've been remiss in my blogging. It's not that I haven't had anything to write about. I have. But every time I sit down to blog, I start thinking about all of the crap I still need to get done, and I panic a little. To date, I have started and failed to write blog entries on the following:

• Two photo essays, one on what to do with two pounds of muscadine grapes that a friend happens to have growing on her back porch, and one on how to make my family ravioli.
• A review of The Fountain (which is very good, by the way, but only if you're prepared to turn off reason for a while and watch it with your dreaming brain) in which I was going to talk about time and acceptance and brilliantly unify these things into a single concept that would have blown your minds wide open across your kitchen's back wall, where all the world might have seen them.
• Endless observations, some witty, some merely whiny, about the process of applying to schools.
• An essay about the endless bits of wonder and small magic that I find in cities. Such as a basket of pears my girlfriend and I found attached to someone's house one day with a note instructing people to take as many as they wanted.
  
• A ton of generic entries about my everyday life that would have caught my friends (the only people I believe actually read this) and fans (who exist in my head, but don't tell me to burn things) up on what I've been up to.

So here I am, and for once, the act of procrastinating has intersected with the act of blogging and the two have unified into a kind of procrastiblog. That sound you hear is the fourth dimension tightening around me.

Just a Quick Reminder

Hey folks. Just a reminder that, if you live in the U.S., tomorrow is your chance to implement some change or put in your vote for the status quo (if you don't live in the U.S., I'm flattered you're reading this, and I'm really sorry...just be happy you don't live with the guy*) . I'm not long for promoting any one candidate, but I will say I'll be positively green with rage if you don't vote for someone. Yep. Positively. Green.

As a bit of an election day special, Jay Is Games has been running nothing but politically based games for the past couple of days. One such, September 12, a Toy World, is an interesting meditation on the nature of violence and terrorism. You're given a crosshairs and your objective is to shoot or not to shoot. If you shoot, you can aim for terrorists, but watch out to avoid civilians. What results should be reasonably obvious to anyone who's given a moment's thought on the question of why people become terrorists in the first place (hint: it's not just because they're a bunch of crazy people who don't value life the way we do).

So there you go. Now go out there and vote (tomorrow).