Dream of Waking

Well I just had my eyes lasered less than an hour ago. I can’t see much but most of that is probably from the dilation. I’ll probably be pretty functional once that wears off. I just put in some eyedrops they gave me and that crap stung. They said I’ll be in the most pain tomorrow so we’ll see how that goes.

In about six hours I’ll be on my way to getting my eyes lasered. I’m not nervous yet though I might not sleep well. I think one of the worst parts is anticipating how I’m going to spend my week off. Misery is a given but what will I be able to see? Will it be stumbling around the house because I can’t see a damn thing or will it be bored out of my mind because I’ll be able to see but everything will be too blurry. I think the worst would be being able to see distances and not being able to read. That puts books and video games out of the question and that would really suck.

For the sake of comedy I’m leaving an entry open so I can give my first impressions as soon as I get home, regardless of if I can see or not. I don’t need to be able to see to type.

Katie’s birthday went well. Probably better than to be expected because I somehow managed to not screw up the cupcakes. Some might have even called them tasty. I got her The Omen collection on DVD and the Leisure Suit Larry collection. Mom got her a big skillet thing and some cash for her to get some glasses, which is exactly what she wanted. We went to Nashville with the intentions of seeing The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D but she had a headache from the sugar and we forgot to bring the directions to the theater with us so we wandered around the Coolsprings Galleria and found out that Suncoast was still there and I had an awesome burrito. Overall I thought we had a good time.

And by it I mean my pop-tart addiction. The best pop-tarts, the only pop-tarts really, are the frosted brown sugar cinnamon variety. Frosted cherry and frosted smores are edible but nothing compares to the frosted brown sugar cinnamon. I’ve eaten two boxes of 8 within the last week. That’s sixteen individual pop-tarts. It’s all in the technique. I eat them in pairs. They come in pairs and that’s how I eat them. Two at the same time. It’s a double dose of flavorful love in my mouth.

Everyone who doesn’t wish Katie a happy birthday tomorrow will never get a chance to find out how awesome my cupcakes are. Really. I’m making a list.

That’s what Katie tells me.

I’ve recently discovered a ton of music I’ve been missing out on for basically the last year. Specifically Panic! At the Disco, Heavens, The Hold Steady, and The Draft. They’ve all been totally up my alley musically and I had no idea. Especially Heavens, where the fuck have I been? Matt Skiba singing stripped down Trio songs in a low vocal range? I hate myself for missing out on this for so long. Panic! At the Disco is way better than I expected.

House inspection tomorrow. Four more days till the weekend. One week till the surgeons zap my eyes out.

+ Messiah

This one sounds like fun (play a cherub, possess people, solve puzzles) but getting into the game it becomes real apparent why this one never took off. The controls flat out suck and not in the interface way. Everything feels real sloppy when it comes to camera control and movement. It’s old and barely playable. Uninstalled.

+ Sacrifice

This one had okay controls and I played through the tutorial and lost all desire to play a third-person RTS. Uninstalled.

+ Painkiller

It’s like Serious Sam except not so fun. I played through the first two episodes (of five) and got stuck and bored in one of the levels in episode 3. It was just the same thing over and over, though the level variety and cool physics kept me going in the beginning. Uninstalled.

+ Gunman Chronicles

Ah the Half-Life mod to be commercialized that wasn’t Counterstrike. It hasn’t been updated to the Steam version of Half-Life so it’s pretty rough on graphical options. Once the game got started I remembered why I never finished this one. I was at the last level, the last boss, and the game shafts you into fighting off hordes of the little bad guys you spend the whole game fighting to stop them from killing the NPC who’s fighting the super bad ass last boss for you. You play next to no part in the ending of the game. Lame. Uninstalled.

+ Heavy Gear 2

This one was oh-so-promising. Big robots blowing stuff up, small unit tactics, decent if a little dated graphics. And then I couldn’t finish the fourth mission due to a nasty crash-to-desktop bug at the end of the level. I’m sorely disappointed. It’s games like these that drive people to consoles. Uninstalled, with a broken heart.

+ Homeworld 2

Hey, why don’t I remember ever playing Homeworld 2? Oh yeah, my copy is bugged and the install never finishes. Install aborted before it could finish.

+ Tron 2.0

I’ve beaten this one before and it’s totally awesome. It’s what I’m currently playing and it still looks and plays great.

There you have it. These have all been within the last two weeks. What I typically do is grab a handful of games that pique my interest and stack them on the right side of the desk. Once I play and get bored with the one on top I put it on the left side and take the next one off the top of the right stack. Currently the right stack has the following in waiting:

• Return to Castle Wolfenstein (for the bazillionth time)
• Postal 2
• Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries
• Ground Control 2
• Master of Orion 2
• Apache vs Hokum

But I’m really enjoying My Chemical Romance’s “The Black Parade”.

I’m finally getting around to playing Heavy Gear 2. It’s an old mech-ish game that Activision made with Dream Pod 9′s Heavy Gear property after Activision lost access to the Battletech/Mechwarrior universe. I say mech-ish because although you’re a person inside a giant robot, the gears are only in the range of 14′ to 20′ tall rather than 200′ mechs. It’s also got a better focus on stealth, maneuverability, and posture since a gear is more or less man shaped and less of a walking tank than a mech.

Anyway. I’m running buck wild through an enemy base, blowing up buildings, chasing down infantry, whatnot. I come to a choke point in a valley and come across one tank, like many others I’d blown up. Except this one was rather close before I spotted it and blasted me in the face with missiles and my gear blew up. And then Heavy Gear 2 crashed because it’s buggy.

Now I’m on the internet whining about it.

Edit: Fuck this enjoyable buggy game. I beat the mission twice to be greeted with a crash to desktop.

On one of her trips home while I was in Iraq Katie brought back some of the stuff that’s been stuck under the stairs in my parents’ basement for about three or four years. On a whim I decided to find out what was in those boxes tonight.

The easiest stuff was the toys. Opened and unopened. Covered in dust. Hopefully I can make some shelf space when we move and I can get them dusted off and out of the boxes.

Then the sentimental stuff. A cedar box from a trip to Lake of the Ozarks with mom when I was 10 or 11. It was locked by some tiny locks with keys long missing so Katie went to work at opening them while I was looking through the rest. There was another box that was some kind of jewelry holder with my confirmation ring (worn once I think) and a ton of movie ticket stubs. When Katie got the cedar box open all it had were some fancy stones (hematite and something else), some foreign money, and a magnifying glass. Apparently I had plans to become some international geologist. Or European rock investigator.
Then there were pictures. Old pictures of people whose names I can’t remember and ex-girlfriends. And some girl who’s playing my gameboy. After those was the yearbook from my junior year. I only have yearbooks from my freshman year and my junior year because I was new at Springfield High in my sophomore year and still didn’t know anybody by the end of it and I graduated early in my senior year and never picked up my yearbook at the end. Lots of people in there that I had forgotten about.

Finally there was the sketchbook and flimsy folders crammed full of papers. That’s where the pain was hiding. I was a depressed kid. I was angst incarnate. I’d forgotten about that too. If I had done something stupid and people were to psychoanalyze what I just found, I might have been institutionalized. I had no idea I was so melodramatic.

I spent six hours in the drizzle and cold to see Dick Cheney. It was not by choice. It was all pretty insane. I’m not here to hate on Dick Cheney though. I don’t like the guy, at all, but he did come out here and deliver his speech in support of us (being the 101st) and he stuck around to shake hands with everyone who wasn’t already fleeing the rain before he hardly got off the little stage.

What would have gone here has been deleted, erased at least three times.

I’m anxious. I’m nervous. I’m excited. I’m angry. I’m tired. I’m bored. I’m the little kid whose arms aren’t long enough to reach what’s on the counter. Everything I want is ever so slightly out of reach.

Today was my part 2 appointment for my laser surgery. They looked at my eyes, dilated my eyes, took pictures of my eyes, looked at my eyes again, and then took more pictures of my eyes. I won’t complain about this process, I’d prefer if I didn’t get screwed up in surgery. My surgery is dated for October 30th. It totally pees on Halloween but at least it means I’ll be off for the rest of the week. At least it’s right in the middle of my last visit to Springfield and my next visit. I’d hate to go there for Thanksgiving totally miserable and blind.

Now that block leave is halfway over, things at work are starting to get retarded again. I guess it was only a matter of time.

After thoroughly enjoying some Metroid Prime: Hunters multiplayer with Jim and Chris and Matt this weekend I thought I’d go back to the single player game and try to finish it up. Now I’ve finally gotten all the weapons and I’m finding bits and pieces here and there and now I’m in the Vesper Defense Outpost and there’s a goddamn timed mission that I failed on the first shot. This is going to make me insane.

I tried to finish Metroid Prime 2: Echoes but the stupid spider guardian is easily the worst boss ever, and that’s horrible because Metroid Prime and Prime 2 have some awesome boss fights. It’s not that the boss itself is hard, it’s actually pretty easy, but the final stage of the fight requires multiple precision morph ball jumps that I simply don’t have the rhythm or coordination for. It’s always that last stage of the fight that gets me.

Metroid Prime is making me suck at Metroid games and that makes me a sad panda.

So look me up because I plan on deleting everything but my account itself from my myspace.

Katie and I’ve been pre-approved for our home loan.

The very first line of House of Leaves. Before the introduction even begins, though after a short foreword by the “editors”. Unlike the house the book is about the book itself seems shorter than it looks. When I first picked it up, with it’s larger than paperback size and 700 something pages, I thought I’d be reading this book forever. I just finished it tonight. It looks long but it goes fast because there’s a lot of offbeat typography that doesn’t take up full pages, like near blank pages but for a few words in a square block.

I can’t ruin anything for anyone adventurous enough to track it down but the simple summary is it’s a book written like an academic research into a film called The Navidson Record, which is (from the book’s description) a Blair Witch-ish movie about a family living in a house that’s actually larger on the inside than on the outside, that is commented on in the footnotes (in addition to the original footnotes written by the researcher) by a guy who finds the materials the researcher was using after his death, and all of this is overseen by the final product’s editor. In essence, a movie commented on by three authors; the researcher, the man who finds the work, and that man’s editor. There’s almost too much to it to describe. The book goes by quickly enough but there’s so much to it that I could probably re-read it right away and pick up parts that went unnoticed the first time I read it. There’s sections in the appendices that I don’t even remember being referenced.

It kept me up at nights because I’d want to finish a chapter and see what’s next and if that’s not a sign of a good read then I don’t know what is. It’s confusing at time with footnotes referencing footnotes that reference an obscure line in one of the three appendices but it’s that way on purpose. Mark Z. Danielewski just released his second full novel so it’ll be while before it comes to paperback but I look forward to reading it as well.

I got my VA loan eligibility certificate so this week I’ll be paying a visit to banks to try to get a loan. One step closer to buying a house. This is good news. My dad used to deal in real estate and my mom’s a real estate agent so my chances of screwing something up and getting screwed are pretty low for a change.

I’m spending a weekend in Springfield this Columbus Day weekend. Katie’s planning a Kill Bill movie event at Andria’s. This is the first I’ve been able to get up to Springfield since the weekend after I got home towards the end of July.

Another laser surgery appointment on Oct. 12th. Not the surgery yet but part two of the screening. The little informational sheet they gave me at my last appointment implies that this one could take a while. It’s too bad I couldn’t get the appointment earlier than 2pm, I might have been able to weasel out of work if it were a long appointment scheduled for the morning.