I am, and I don't know why. Tired, that is. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it, except that perhaps the steady low-level anxiety of not yet knowing what's going on with my job hunt. Intellectually I continue to know that everything is going as it should, but emotionally there's a quiet worried gnawing that just goes on and on and on... and I don't know how to get rid of it.

It's later. I called back one of the recruiters I'd been avoiding, and ended up getting phone screened by some people who probably think I'm somewhat clueless, but somehow that bothers me much less than nothing happening. So I'm better now, although a tiny bit ranty about what they're doing to Sailor Moon S in the dubs. I was expecting some content cuts for censorship reasons -- can't have those 7-year-olds seeing anything inappropriate! But to my great surprise they're not cutting any content, merely changing nearly all of it. I remember a discussion on some newsgroup -- rec.arts.sf.composition? -- years ago, in which it was discussed at length how stories can have the same plot but nonetheless be entirely different stories. That's what they're doing to SMS; keeping the same plot and changing all the details of the story. It's very, very weird to watch, and I end up ranty; I assume this is being done inadvertently, because they want dialogue that 'sounds better' or they think the American audience won't understand something, or even just because they feel like it. And if that's why they're making these changes, it's really because they don't have any respect for the creator's original intentions. They don't take it seriously. They don't think it's art of any sort, and so they feel free to throw in random extra dialogue that changes the tone of a scene severely, because hey, it's just a cartoon, who cares? Well, I do. It makes me grr.

I have been doing things, other than periodically angsting about my job hunt and watching Sailor Moon with varying degrees of annoyance at their treatment of it. I've been wading through my library books; wading may give the impression that there is unpleasantness, but really, it's not. I'm just conscious of how many of them there are. Right now I'm working simultaneously on a book of Ezra Pound's translations and a book called Sparks of Genius, which so far seems to be about how teaching children theories without connecting them to reality is a bad and confusing thing, along with lots of quotes from Einstein and other famous smart people (artists and scientists both, nicely) which are used to support the argument that creativity has the same intuitive origins for everyone. I'm only two chapters in, so that's a very fragmented summary. If it keeps being interesting I'll doubtless say more. I do like books about thought and thinking and ideas about how and why people have such different paradigms.

Listening to LaunchCast has gotten weirder, as more people I know are using me as a DJ and vice-versa. It feels strangely personal to get a song with a listing of how people I know rated it.