Friday, 20 February 1998:
Jumpy, Jumpy, Jumpy...
Boy, what a busy week it's been at work. Things kept piling up about three times as fast as I could get through them. At least I got to some sort of reasonable stopping point at the end of the day. I'm sure glad it's the weekend.
I'm also glad that I'm feeling more motivated at work than I have in a while.
But tonight at the coffee shop I was feeling terribly fidgety and distracted and uncomfortable. I'm not sure why. I'm a very fidgety person anyway, rarely able to sit still very long (it's amazing that my cats are lap cats given this), and I still have a terrible nail-biting problem (probably explaining why I got a chip in one of my front teeth). It's strange how laid-back I am in some ways, and how wound-up I am in others.
So, I ended up leaving the coffee shop earlier than planned, because I just couldn't keep sitting there. So instead I'm now sitting here, writing this.
Ah, well.
I've decided that I'm going to write a big thing on comic books for my APA, since I'm so pumped up about them lately. I'll probably write it in three parts: A brief explanation of why I enjoy them, a brief history of the art form, and a number of reviews of my favorite comics. If nothing else, it should be fun to write, and I'll be able to use a lot of it on my comics Web page.
For some reason, of all the reviews of science fiction books I've put on my Web site, I keep getting irate e-mail responses to my review of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Typically I seem to be accused of lacking the imagination to appreciate the book, which is strange since my basic reaction to the novel is that it lacked the imagination to really plumb its theme (soldiers fighting a war involving relativistic space travel, resulting in them fighting throughout many centuries) to much depth. Instead, it's a trite Vietnam metaphor, with shallow characters and even shallower backdrops. Oh, it's a decent enough action/adventure piece, but really not anything like what it could have been, I think.
Well, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, but it's strange how my review of this book seems to annoy people. It's not like I get irritated mail of my review of David Brin's Startide Rising.
Michael Rawdon
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