(no subject)

I just bought a Roomba. (Thank you, woot.com!)

Who wants to put bets on how long it takes me to train it to hunt cockroaches?

VRRT VRRT VRRT DEATH TO BUGS.

Actually the cockroach issue seems to be dying down, though of course as soon as I say that they'll launch some kind of horrifying bugs-on-my-face-while-I-sleep counteroffensive. In the past week I've only seen one of any real size; there are quite a few teeny tiny baby roaches still rambling around but they're easily killed. I just have to get 'em before they start breeding.

Also, I think you guys should know that these are some dumb ass roaches, yo. Seriously. Aside from the tiny ones that like to hide under my shoes (big mistake), I almost never see any of them in the kitchen; they've spent most of their time wandering around an empty corner of the living room like morons. I'm guessing this corner was once where the last occupant of this flat kept his dirty dishes. Now it is a poisonous wasteland littered with the bodies of the fallen.

I'm still exploring the new place; I turned the oven on for the first time last night, and WOW okay that's gonna keep my kitchen warm come wintertime. There's a hotspot on the top of it where a significant amount of heat leaks through; I'd be more worried about this if I were responsible for the gas bill, but gas is included in the rent. As it stands it's the perfect place to let bread dough rise.

(no subject)

Oh man, stock market crashes, they make me all nostalgic.

The last time I can recall the stock market dropping five hundred points in a day, I was in high school. I was, in fact, in a graveyard, not on any personal account but for reasons too bizarre to coherently explain. I was in a graveyard when the radio broke with the news about the crash, and I thought, huh, that's not normal, is it? Then I went home and told my mum, and she apparently hadn't heard, because she freaked out and we spent the evening watching the fall of the American Economy on the news. (I have to tell you people, I'm pretty sure at this point in our culture, the revolution will definitely be televised.)

Now, this was during my high school years when I had taken all of one economics class, and mainly what it had taught me (besides the "Spastic Bird of Supply and Demand" -- supply goes up, demand goes down, like the malfunctioning wings of a brain-damaged seagull, I kid you not) was that there must be a better way to run the economy of one of the most opulent countries in the world. I mean, basically our financial status as a nation is dependent on a system that is for all intents and purposes dictated by moodiness and fear. It's like deciding foreign policy by asking the opinion of a maudlin drunk.

Not that I really understand how the stock market works, and please, don't explain it to me -- much as with manual gearshifts in cars, I prefer to savour the mystery. But there is an element of "Seriously, what the fuck?" to the entire system. Though it is so typically human of us to invent an economy wherein courage and steadfastness can tip the balance in our favour and also wipe us out of everything we own.

I don't want to be amusing about the fact that a shit-ton of people are about to lose their jobs, but it is an absurd time we live in. This afternoon, Mum texted me in all seriousness to warn me not to walk too close to tall buildings, in case stockbrokers were jumping. All I could think about was that scene from the Hudsucker Proxy, where the elderly board-member tries it and goes face-first into a plate of solid bullet-proof glass like wham.

Hey, listen, if we have another Great Depression, I'm pretty sure I'll still have a job. You guys can come bunk at my place, okay?

Well, someone's got to show courage and steadfastness, and it's not likely to be the soulless money-grubbing golden-handshaking bastards who got us into this mess, is it.