And I can take or leave them as I please

In lieu of content—

I've seen Robert Altman's MASH (1970) one and a half times, but I'd never seen the television series until tonight; another whole swathe of pop culture I'd missed. There was a thirty-year retrospective and a marathon on, so I watched a handful of episodes, and my reactions are thus: a young Alan Alda? And if there isn't already some unholy crossover in which it is revealed that Major Frank Burns ("Goodbye, ferret-face!") is the ancestor of Arnold Judas Rimmer, Technician Second Class ("Astoundingly zealous. Possibly mad. Probably has more teeth than brain cells"), then the internet is a poorer place than I'd believed.

There will be an actual post when I'm conscious.

The dust in darkness makes me wheeze

I dreamed last night that I was lost in a museum. It was cavernous and patchily lit and its walls were sliced out of some dark, veined stone, in which black and bronze-colored fossils—ammonites, spined worms, plated fish—were embedded, but there were also stone and metal sculptures and eighteenth-century canvases and cases of parchment maps with the names of Arctic cities written in Latin, and crowds of people who all seemed to know where their favorite galleries were, while I wandered in and out of rooms, trying to get as far away as possible from the family with whom I'd been fighting, who were only about half my real-life own. This was supposed to be the American Museum of Something or Other, though from the outside it had looked like an ornate villa with iron balconies and granite cornerstones and swarms of ivy on the roof-tiles; I remember there was a lightning theater, and a kind of causeway between two of the galleries, with an immense-eyed mosaic on the floor. But the more rooms I hurried through, the more I felt I was falling back in time. The people around me were not the visitors to the musem that day, but the visitors from ten years ago, or a century, or the dates of the paintings I passed. There were things made out of horn and bone in little windows in the walls, beneath the belemnites and lithographs of Venice. I might not ever have been able to surface back into my own time, and I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't been woken by the wind banging into the blinds; by the time I got back to sleep, the dream had mutated into some weird fanfiction, and I remember that much less vividly. I blame Russian Ark and P.C. Hodgell's Dark of the Moon, and maybe a little of Mary Gentle's Carthage Ascendant and greygirlbeast. But I also think I've dreamed of this place before—not inside the museum, but the configuration of buildings that I saw from outside. Maybe it's my own interior version of the Smithsonian. Either way, it was not a pleasant dream. It just had great scenery.

So. Content.

I caught the plague a few days before Christmas, and spent as much of the week as I could almost literally in bed: my brain dissolved into slurry and I was even more exhausted than usual. That was not fun. The last few days, however, have been a distinct improvement. On Monday, I walked into Arlington Center, and despite the fact that the used book store I wanted turned out to be closed for New Year's and I had to walk back in the drizzling rain, it was a great advance to be on my feet and conscious and relatively coherent, and not to fall over as soon as I got home; in the evening fleurdelis28 came over for the traditional New Year's fondue and we watched Wallace and Gromit and talked way more about capital punishment than I think either of us had expected. (New Year's Eve itself had been celebrated with the Marx Brothers, who were on TCM. At midnight, we raced upstairs, threw the front door open, and shouted, banged pots, and blew the conch shell, a time-honored ritual guaranteed to drive away bad luck and infuriate the neighbors.) On Tuesday, schreibergasse and Grace stopped by for a night on their way back from Portland; we visited Pandemonium in its new location, had dinner in Porter Square and a game-playing evening in Arlington with some friends of theirs, and experienced the wonder that is a steep raise in T fares. The Charlie Ticket was sadly, aptly named. On Wednesday, I walked back into Arlington Center and the used book store was open, so now I have what I wanted from them. And yesterday I walked into Harvard Square, which has determined me to buy new shoes, and met with nineweaving for Burdick's and dinner and catching-up conversation. I am now the proud owner of Liikkuva Linna, which is the Finnish translation of Howl's Moving Castle, with cover by Miyazaki and signature by the author. Since Diana Wynne Jones is one of the earliest writers I can remember, this is unexpectedly cool.

And today I am packing and unpacking, and wondering if I should rent M*A*S*H on DVD. But my brother is home for the weekend, so I think I'd rather talk with him instead. He's more infrequently accessible, and besides, he brought me a knife.