"...And what if thou withdraw / In silence from the living?"

Currently in Earphones: "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" Soundtrack by Danny Elfman.

Wow, Anja and I have hit Seven months of being together. What else can I express other than the usual swell of happiness and contentment at the fact? I love her dearly, and am so lucky and blessed that she loves me the same. Here is to the more months to come spent happily together: E tenebris lux!

Oh, and if I haven't mentioned it before, Danny Elfman kicks amazing musical ass. Going through my under-listened Charlie and the Chocolate Factory score reminds me thus.

Also, I now own a copy and have a fair to middlin' respect for Brotherhood of the Wolf, the second film by Christopher Gans. For the good, I have this to say: Highwayman's Coats + Tricorn Hats + Quarterstaffs + Rain = really cool. It's too bad the shorter version of the opening fight is the one that made it into the final cut; the extended version under the deleted scenes is pretty neat. But when watching the latter you start to marvel more at how extremely durable the peasant thugs are and less what a neat can of whup-ass is opened by our two protagonists. Oh, and as cool and prop-worthy the Henson studio's Beast of Gévaudan is, you'll either like it or hate it. Personally, it would have been cool to have it really be some werewolf type creature instead of...Well...That would be spoiling things.

In school news, I need to be writing a paper in English 3 with poetry comparison. I chose one from the text and my personal favorite, William Cullen Bryant's Thanatopsis. Although my prof, the soon-to-be-off-to-Germany Katharina Schwarz, warned me against the difficult analysis ahead of me, I like the poem enough to put a good effort toward it. What drew me toward it initially (when I read it in high school) was it's lyrical and comforting view of death along with the fact that he wrote the first part when he was 17.

And, for a final bit of news, I got a summer job doing logistics (read, figure out the best way to do great hunks of labor, then do it) work for the UC. Still need to go through a background check and a few more bits of paperwork, but it looks to be profitable, if not intensive.

Enough. More Later,
- James

PS - My back bike tire sprung a leak again, damn it! Turns out it was because the valve of the inner tube hadn't come through the hole in the rim smoothly, and a small crease developed in the tube, visually represented by the valve going gallywunkus at an odd angle instead of straight out. Sure enough, when I dismantled the tire at the bike barn, I could hear the air leaking out of the creased side of the tube. To add insult to injury, there weren't any more extra-tough tubes available, and although I saved a couple of bucks, regular tubes look really flimsy in comparison to those thicker hombres. Ah well, everything is back together and working smoothly. As Preston pointed out, in relation to my luck with my bike, I should be called Mal: "Did the primary buffer panel just fall off my gorramn ship for no apparent reason?"