The Happiness Thread

Spring is my favorite, before the insects start coming out en masse.

 

Are you in the Midwest?

 

Indeed I am. why do you ask?

 

oh just trying to pin down your summer weather

 

Walked two miles with my best friend after work and then drove with the window down singing Jet's album Get Born on the way home. Long day, but not bad. Pretty chilled out here at the end of it.

 

I am actually training for a 213 mile ride in one day this summer, my place to Albany NY, so yeah, we were kind of slacking it a little :} I have done 200 miles on the trainer in a day, I am kind of excited about doing in on the road.

 

The weed store in the Chicagoland area had a cop car parked outside. The cop was inside, in unif0rm, but wearing a little orange vest over top that said "SECURITY" on it.

Since the feds still don't like it, the business couldn't accept credit cards. Cash only, and the minimum transaction seemed to be about $50. There was a line.

That's a lot of cash, better a cop guarding the place than Igor and Guido with the spiked bats and AKs.

 

The banks will come around the second the feds stop promising to kick in their doors if they process a transaction. And with something like 68% of Americans in favor of legalization, it should only be a couple more decades before our lawmakers catch up.

Japan, on the other hand... Hard no, never gonna happen here. Same-sex marriage is making progress and when it happens it will be with a brief "Oh, I guess that's okay after all." Most of the opposition is either full-on Argument from Tradition ("But men don't marry men, it doesn't work that way," or the straight-up batshit insane argument that it will hurt the already low birthrate*. "But if they can't marry each other, they'll naturally end up in heterosexual marriages and begin producing babies." I don't know how many times I've seen that in essays and speeches. God knows if same sex marriage had been legal back in the early 2000s Mrs. A and I never would have tied the knot, and it's probably only the threat of my coworker being able to legitimize his relationship under Japanese law as well as that of his home country that has stopped us from having kids.

Spoiler: *

Me, I think the Japanese have realized at a subconscious group level that the country and the world are overpopulated, continuous growth is unsustainable, and it might be nice to get a seat on the train every so often, but antinatalism is probably a Debate Room topic and I requested a ban from that corner of WF.

 

From what I've heard, the liquor manufacturers oppose it. I'm sure you can be drunk and high at the same time, but not on the same paycheck.

 

The farms smell awful so I know for a fact that people who live next to them are not happy about it. I've also heard that there's some evidence that the turpenes can pollute dairy milk (there was some debate in my county over a growing facility being built next to the university dairy). Of course none of that is unique to the marijuana industry.

 

I went to U of I at Champaign Urbana. Farms smell terrible. The school is one of the land-grant colleges so there's a substantial agricultural education component there, and when the wind is from the south... whoooo-hee!

 

I was born in Champagne Urbana.

 

Autocorrect or some outside joke?

 

Just bad spelling on my part.

 

I spent some time working on my French today.

I'm not very good at it, but that's okay.

Je suis ne tres pas bien au cette, c'est ça va.

 

Finished a new story. I love the short bliss that follows as if I've just penned the best twenty or so pages of my life to date. Tomorrow it might suck, but today it's good and finished.

 

I FINALLY FINISHED STUDYING MY KOREAN LESSONS (5 OF THEM)

 

Stayed up till at least 4.30am due to work, applied to a production I'm really excited for (it's Shakespeare) and had to memorise the lines pretty quickly in order to film a self-tape to send in. Long story short, the hypotheses I had been experimenting with actually worked, I've stumbled onto it by sheer luck, it was the best acting I've done in my life so far, and I nailed it in one take.

Exhausted but so thrilled, and tbh I don't even mind if I don't get the part, I'll literally just use this in my showreel anyway.

 

Anyonghaseyo. Chemigaotosayo. Che chingu sogehagesumnida.

 

Showoff

 

Lesson 1, Korean Basic Course (199x)

Hello. How are you? (pretty much archaic, "How do you do this fine day, sir?" at this point). Allow me to introduce my friend.

 

That got very dark very quickly!