--from a commercial I saw earlier tonight. I'm not kidding.

God, I love the Internet.

I am in a good mood for a change this morning. At least for the moment. This can be traced to two factors: The cup of hot cocoa I'm in the middle of drinking, and the song I just downloaded from Napster.

The song I just downloaded from Napster is of Rolf Harris covering "I Touch Myself." I was instantly cheered upon discovering that this existed, and it's every bit as special as one would expect.

Chicago itself was a bit unsettling, not that I saw very much of it. This started when the plane approached Midway Airport, and we flew over block after block that looked eerily similar. It felt like I was flying over Stepford or something.

It turns out that not only is the city one giant, monotonous grid, but that residents actually navigate using X,Y coordinates. Or, okay, N/S,E/W coordinates. It's not a city, it's a geometry illustration.

Not that I'm being reasonable about this. I know I'm not. But at the end of the return trip, the plane flew over New York, the streets and lights below were comfortingly chaotic.

I love New York. Sometimes I wonder why I'm planning to leave it for grad school.

In other news, I did take the GRE general test this past Thursday. As members of my notify list know, I didn't get very much sleep the night before, and hardly got the chance to study at all. I also didn't eat anything that morning, and accidentally took a train in the wrong direction to get there, with the result being that I showed up a touch late, although that didn't take away from my test time. And for some reason I can't account for now, I was sure the verbal section was the one that didn't count, and failed to take it very seriously much of the way through; this, however, turned out to be entirely unfounded; the one that didn't count was one of the math ones.

So my grades weren't as good as they could have been, but I'm not paying to take it again (and wouldn't have time to study anyway), so they'll suffice. Specifically, 700 verbal, 710 quantitative [math], 750 analytical [logic], on that ridiculous 200-800 scale they use for the SATs.

Which, despite my grousing, is not a bad set of scores.

(The annoying thing is that the last few questions all had one set of rules in common, and I'd just cracked it completely, having worked out every possible outcome, when time ran out. About thirty seconds more, and I'd've been done with 'em all. Oh, well.)

In any event, it's just logic puzzles. Not quite my usual style of thinking, granted (which is what I originally ascribed my comparative slowness to), but not especially hard, and fun to work through. I guess all those years of Talmudic study paid off.

Oh, and I got one of her Strange Horizons business cards. Those cards are cool, man. White print on a black background with a nice graphic. Perfect for a speculative fiction magazine.

We eventually wandered off to the apartment where she was staying, stopping along the way at the WB studio store. Where, I am pleased and excited to report, I was given the Slytherin T-shirt I've been coveting for months. (Thanks again, Mary Anne!)

Somewhere inside me, an eleven-year-old was screaming in horror and disbelief.

See, I've known the friend who got married last week for a Very Long Time. Since the summer of 1984, just before we started seventh grade. I only have one friend I've known longer, in fact (that friendship dates back to Pre-1A, 1977). And over the years, the amount of blackmail material I've accumulated on him has been matched only by the amount he's gotten on me. We've been through a lot together.

And for about a decade now, I've been threatening him with this speech, saying that when he got married, I was going to speak at his Sheva Brochos (literally "seven blessings," referring to the blessings recited after every meal attended by a quorum in the first week after a wedding; by synecdoche, it refers to the meal itself), and that when I did so, I was going to tell everybody everything.

The challenge was in writing a speech that wouldn't be anticlimatic (given the way it's been built up over the years), but which, at the same time, wouldn't actually embarrass him, or get either of us in trouble.

I pulled it off pretty well. It was entertaining; it alluded to several interesting incidents without going too far; and it left the audience with the question of whether the large accordian file I dramatically plunked on the table was really filled with a decade's worth of notes about him, or whether I was bluffing. It was fun.

The groom thanked me twice afterwards. First for what I said; second for everything I left out. <grin>

See, there's another advantage of being single. You don't have to worry about screwing up your wedding. <wry smile>

(It is, of course, well known that one purpose of wedding preparations is that they ensure that a couple is really meant for each other. 'Cause if they can survive the wedding, they can survive just about anything.)

I'll grant, however, that any hypothetical wedding scenarios that have played through my head over the years have involved marrying somebody whose family has the same cultural background as I do on such matters. The weddings I've attended have differed in only a few variables -- number of guests, location of wedding hall, size of smorgasbord, food served, band hired, photo/video crew hired, one or two minor variations in custom under the wedding canopy, and exactly who does what -- but the basic form is pretty much a given. So, yeah, if there were a whole other cultural outlook involved -- which seems to be the case with Jen -- I can see where I might wanna just disavow the whole thing and elope.

(Umm, "disavow" wasn't meant as a play on words. But it should've been.)

Oh, and that Drama paper I was stressing out about? I wasn't able to get it to the college before leaving to Chicago, but the professor accepted it this week, under the circumstances. The paper itself... well, I ended up comparing Much Ado About Nothing with Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. I spent most of the essay on the first two, and that part was good. The Hamlet stuff was kind of a stretch, and it showed. But, hey, better than nothing. Much better than nothing.

And that will do for this rare Positive Thoughts entry, which didn't quite stay on that theme the whole way through, but I tried. Stay tuned for the return of the usual sturm und drang next time. Oh, there's such a backlog...