A starving man received a small tidbit this weekend...
I spent a night in Evansville this weekend. (For those following the blog, I mentioned Evansville last in my first (and possibly not last) [On Following a Lesson in Networking] post.) I'm not entirely sure why I went. Partly it was simply because an old friend asked me to, and as a reason it is a good one. Partly it was simply a chance to take a break and have a random road trip to somewhere I've never been before, and as a reason it isn't particularly good, but I've done it before. The remainder, I just can't quite seem to figure out.
The theme, I think, is that my sphere of friends doesn't contain all of the variety that I seek. As much as I enjoy hanging out with my friends, I have this nagging feeling that something is missing. The easy answer is that I'm a horny male who isn't getting enough (any) sex, and that is what is bothering me. I'm sure that's what a psychoanalyst might tell me after some time talking and perhaps an outrageous fee, but I don't think it is the answer I am looking for. Therein, I think, lies the rub: I think the sort of person I'm looking for is the sort of person who could tell me what the real answer, the hard answer, to my dilemma is. My loneliness is a much deeper one, it's almost what some would call a spiritual loneliness. I don't think I'm looking for sex, I'm looking for discussion, conversation, and an intimacy of the mind, and I don't know where to go looking for it.
It was easy to fall into old patterns of discussion this ...
The Louisville Cardinal fights for Liberalism
Story discovered in the school's official student newspaper: BDSM beats all for improving intimacy. The headline and its bad pun brought an immediate laugh from me when I saw it hanging from the back of the seat at the basketball game.
Truthfully, sex articles are more interesting than much of the stuff the Cardinal prints, and a couple of my friends agreed that maybe we should start reading the Cardinal again. Also interesting is the fact that the byline shows that this writer (she also wrote an article on Louisville's porn store culture) is a Women's Studies major, which is the third major "Conservative" degree (people studying it, PoliSci, or Engineering at Louisville all seem biased towards Conservatism).
(On the other hand, if Women's Studies meant what most guys jokingly hope it means, I'm sure it would be a very liberal degree program.)
Book of the Moment: Emerald Sea
I've been reading John Ringo's works since he was featured on Sluggy Freelance. Ringo writes just about the closest I'll get to hard military sci-fi. The key factor is his humor, which explains his Sluggy mention. Emerald Sea is the continuation of There Will Be Dragons, a tale of a post-singularity ("death has been conquered") sci-fi universe falling back "pre-singularity" due to actions of several politicians. I was amused by the end of one of the most recent chapters I've read containing some self-mockery as Ringo poked fun at his own writing style and habit of randomly creating characters, focusing them in a chapter or two, and then killing them off. The passage may even be ironic in the fact that it involved a character who was introduced in this second book, and possibly might not survive till the end. I think the character will survive, though, as he appears to be leading some where, but we'll see.
