(no subject)

# I wish I could snap out of this weird state of mind where I keep losing track of the words and where they're supposed to go, and end up staring at a sentence for minutes, wondering if what I've written is even English, before deleting it again. It's not just annoying, but also incredibly time-consuming. Damn it brain, wake up! Focus!

# Prompted by rm's post mentioning Marc Almond, which made me nostalgic enough to finally put up my old record player again more than two years after the move. I saw Marc Almond live once, completely by chance, when I was in Athens for a week with my (then) best friend A., it must have been in 1993, because iirc it was the first summer holiday after I started going to university. [ETA: Actually, that would have been 1991.] We saw an advertising poster, and somehow, despite our complete lack of Greek (my year of ancient Greek was somewhat helpful when it came to deciphering signs, but useless otherwise) actually managed to find the place where they sold tickets. It was an open air concert on the Lykavittos, although that is about the extent of what I remember, and really, this all sounds much cooler and more sophisticated than it was, because at that time we were both hopelessly dorky and spent most of the time in museums and excavation sites...

In hindsight, I guess I might have dragged A. there, and she may have been simply too polite to say something all those years when I made her tape copies of every Marc Almond album and foisted them on her; it's hard to tell and we aren't talking any longer, so I can't ask her...

I searched on YouTube on the off chance that it might turn up something from that show, which unsurprisingly it didn't, but instead I found the recording of a show in Moscow from May 1993. It's funny, a week ago I'd probably have said this isn't my kind of music any longer, but watching that video I remembered exactly what I loved so much about his music.

part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6



# MD — (*sigh*) I'm putting off posting until after the last episode. It's going into directions I didn't expect at all rather than those I did expect, which may be my own fault, but right now I really don't know what to think any longer. ( spoilers )

I think in the end the problem with this story might be that it doesn't play into RTD's strengths at all. What he does best is small character pieces; he's brilliant when he explores what makes people tick, how they react to certain situations, the ambiguity of human nature and human behaviour and all those complicated moral dilemmas, and CoE showcased that beautifully. I'm less and less sure if this sprawling X-Files-esque conspiracy plot where a very few people pull the strings in the background, with the main cast hopping across the globe all the time, was a good choice. CoE was just incredibly focused throughout in every respect — pacing, character arcs, plot. MD is sort of... I can't quite put my finger on it, but while I do like parts of the story, as far as I'm concerned they never really made up a convincing whole, and I doubt the final episode will fix that. I kept waiting for the relationships between the old and new cast to develop, but they never really did beyond them finally pulling together to solve the problem, not the least because they so rarely even were in the same place at the same time. ( slight spoilers )

# What else? I used to post a lot more about 'real' life day-to-day stuff; has my life started to bore even me, or is it maybe actually healthy to be a bit less navel-gazey?

My weekend walks keep getting longer. Last Sunday I walked from Baden to Pressbaum, which took me about nine hours, and the weekend before that from Purkersdorf to St. Andrä/Wördern (seven hours). I guess if I wanted some actual exercise, I should be doing something a little more strenuous like mountain biking, which is what everyone else seems to be doing, but I actually enjoy the slower speed of walking; somehow, it gives you a better sense of the distance you cover.

Speaking of bikes though, I finally resigned myself to the fact that somewhere someone is happily biking around on my pretty, barely used bike, and bought a new one yesterday. Walking to work is all very well, and also useful since it means about an hour of Russian audio book per day, but I've been starting to miss the independency the bike gave me. I just hope I'm going to have better luck with this one than the last one...

I was actually quite busy (by my standards, that is) the last couple of weeks. Got my skills card for the ECDL exam, which means I'll finally have to do some serious learning now, and had the first html/css class of seven today. I actually do know (very, very) basic html stuff, but I've never managed to figure out css, how to use it or what it actually does, so perhaps I'll finally be able to at least customise my journal and have my own banner...

Also finally had an appointment with the ophthalmologist after, as it turned out, six years. Oops. Got scolded, promised to return sooner next time, and now have new contacts and a prescription for new glasses, which was highly necessary, since I can't even make an educated guess about how old the glasses I'm currently wearing actually are.