Welcome to the last Waterloo post ever. I love you all (well, most of you anyway), and I'll even miss a few of you. Later kids.

What's worse?
1. Being violently hung over, or;
2. Knowing you should be violently hung over, but only feeling a little tired.
From past experience (and some fairly sound medical science), I should feel like a giant sack of crap today, but I'm mostly a-OK. This is kind of worrying.

Just when I have to leave. The bastards.
My local Zehr's has just set up self check-out stations. They seem to be a standard checkout stand with a set of scales underneath the bagging stations to ensure you only put things you've paid for into the bags. Three cheers for minimizing forced human interaction!
It's not that I have some inherent dislike for checkout attendants or anything, I just hate the standardized four sentences of insincerity that comprises your only possible contact with them. I feel like carrying a little card that reads: "Not bad at all. You?" and "Cool." I'd just pass them the card and be on my way. If I'm going to converse with someone, I want, at the very least, a topic. Maybe even digressions, or if I'm really greedy, a theme.
Seriously though, big up Zehr's (Bo! Bo! Alledemassif!) for having the massive balls to remove direct human supervision of merchandise transactions. It'll save them money in the long run, and if the grocers where I end up living pick it up, it'll save me having to sit in line.

They want you to be Jesus, to go down on one knee,
but they want their money back, if you're alive at thirty-three...

I haven't been a big fan of birthdays in a long, long time. I guess somewhere along the line, my interests diverged so far from what the people who buy my gifts understand that they just kind of gave up.
More to the point though, I don't really understand celebrating the aging process. Why the hell would I be happy to be 23, as opposed to say, 22? Or permanently 19? Hey, congratulations! You're one year closer to looking like your Dad. What a great day this must be for you.
I haven't gone out for my birthday in, I think, seven years. It's been getting harder and harder lately too, as people have been getting wise to the act. Last year I was back in Winnipeg, and my friends started sniffing around at the end of August, but there's a few people with birthdays that time of year, so they didn't have the exact date. They asked when we should go out for my birthday, and I told them to call me on Friday, and we'd work something out. My birthday was on Thursday. They were less than pleased.
So, yeah. Happy Birthday to Me. 23 on the 23rd. Am I eligible for double gifts this year or something?

No e-mail and no job make Craig something, something...

Rafi thinks I should post more.
I think I should drink less when I don't eat a solid dinner. So much for the anti-nauseant effects of marijuana.

Five years ago, I went to Waterloo for a degree.
Four years ago, I went to Ireland for, basically, a woman.
This time last year, I went to London for a concert.
Now, I can't get off my couch for a job.

I'm in the worst financial shape I've been in in years, and it's only going to get worse, but I still can't find a few hours to knock my resume into shape and get paid. Understand, I can usually pull off damn near any scheme I put my mind to; I've gotten myself jobs while still drunk from the night before; I've gotten myself home from foreign countries with no passport; I've gotten myself into, and out of, a whole myriad of situations, savoury or not, the description of which will never, ever see the light of day.
But I can't seem to pry myself out of my ass groove to apply for work.

Free! Finally, I am free!
Never shall they have me again. By the strangest of miracles, I've escaped the Faculty of Mathematics.
After weeks of constant worry, mere hours away from my Financial Derivatives final, the word came down from the professor that we did not have to pass the final to pass the course. Sweet tidings indeed, as I didn't have even the slightest chance of a pass on that one. Somehow I managed to get enough answered to ensure me the 23% I needed.
The next day, I put in the only four hours I had left into studying for my last exam, and when the time came, was completely unprepared.
But lo and behold, everything I studied was on the exam, even practice problems I had read less than an hour before were duplicated wholesale. What I didn't understand (the first five of eleven chapters, amongst other things) was nowhere to be found, or could be avoided in optional questions.
I feel like a cat burglar who's made it out the window just as the coppers come barrelling down the hall. Constables Sloth and Depression can search as long as they like, but they won't find me out here. I left neither prints, nor hairs, nor anything to mark my passage. I've got what I need, and I'll be back for the rest in October.

I managed three unassisted reps with 225 lbs. on the bench press today. Basically, by any objective standard (and even more so by any relative standard), I'm frighteningly strong. I still weigh, and look like I weigh, 150 lbs., but at this point, I just don't give a damn.
I'm fucking huge.

So....much....MATH!
Blargh. I need a fast-forward button. I could just watch the next week or so speed by at a couple of hundred frames per second, and slow it down again just in time for the post-exam partying.