June 7-12, 2001 — Did it have to come to this?

The growing complacency of the frog population in the river behind my house is a major disappointment to the memories of my childhood. I can remember going outside almost everyday during the summer and catching as many frogs as I could. Those frogs were on edge, and it took the keen reflexes of an energetic, Nintendo-addicted nine-year-old in rubber boots to do the job.

But now, ten years later, the dulled reflexes of a lethargic, sleep-deprived nineteen-year-old are more than enough to catch members of the poor excuse for a frog population living behind my house. I'd've checked up on the crayfish population to see if they're easier to catch than they were so many years ago, but I've fewer urges than I once had to catch anything that possesses both possesses claws and an innate desire to pinch my fingers at its earliest opportunity.

During my summers spent catching frogs in the river behind my house, my parents thought I'd caught some sort of horrible disease when it began to look as though I had hives covering most of my body, all of the time. As it turns out, it was psoriasis (a skin disease that runs in families and causes skin to sometimes grow too quickly and to thicken into red patches -- attractive, huh?) kicking in, and it has mostly gone away since then. In grade eleven or twelve, I actually ended up with patches forming symmetrical shapes just below my mouth on each side of my face, little half-crescents curving toward my chin. They weren't very noticeable since they were only slightly red, so I don't know that anyone saw them at all. I thought they looked vaguely like the marks fangs would leave, remnants of the vampire-like canine teeth I would never have.

All this to say that one of these fang-shaped marks came back a couple of weeks ago. They're generally triggered by stress, so it came as little surprise that the week during which I was being driven insane by my project at work while simultaneously trying to launch the new Bran Van 3000 site would cause this to happen. It's a little disappointing to have such a lack of symmetry this time, with the mark on the right side of my face being far more noticeable than the one on the left. They've already started to fade a bit, and hopefully by the end of the month they'll be gone. It's not as though I've many people to impress in the meantime, so I'm not terribly upset by all this.

While things have become a lot less stressful since that week, last Friday found me in a horrid mood. It began with the news that Automatic Media has run out of money, putting Suck and Feed on vacation and bringing the future of Plastic into question. My father's declaration later that night that "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is a horrible movie after only sitting through 40 minutes of it before returning to the video store to rent "What Women Want" (combined with his annoyance at me for having suggested the first rental) didn't help. I'd convinced myself that the entire planet was out to frustrate me until I came unhinged, and by the end of the day I wanted nothing more than to go to sleep and to pretend that everything would be fine in the morning.

Things weren't fine in the morning. I couldn't bring myself to work on the computer at all (despite having considerable amounts of work to do), and I generally had a hard time remaining motivated. I had accomplished absolutely nothing by the time the sun had set, and I found myself watching my "Toy Story" DVD while waiting for my parents to return home so that I could drive to Johnston's house.

There was much talk of KrazyFest while at Johnston's, and I'm looking forward to it more and more. With Jeff and Amy having announced their intention to join us, we'll have quite a contingent out in Kentucky. Not everyone is convinced that listening to Bran Van 3000, Air, and Massive Attack for the entirety of our trip home is as brilliant an idea as I know it is (the theory being that we'll be sick of hardcore and emo after three days of it), but I've another month or so to change their minds.

And Sunday brought hardcore sports league. Baseball was the sport of choice this time around, so I pulled out my ageing Montreal Expos shirt in a move that was either vaguely ironic or incredibly lame, depending on your perspective. It made me smile, anyway. We were saved from the pains of picking teams by the ever-reliable one-two-one-two system that places all the twos on one team and all the ones on another. I ended up on team one, and with the powerhouse of Andrew, gNick, and myself making up the middle of the batting line-up, we were unstoppable. (In reality, I tended to send easy fly-balls to the infield on most of my attempts at batting, but my team still won and you know what they say about the winners writing the history books.)

That was about it for my weekend. It felt so brutally short that I'm considering taking a day off during the week. I've got to plan around the release of American Gods next week (and the day I'll end up taking off to read it), though, so I can't rush to any decisions.

My workweek began, as all workweeks should, with news of a federal execution coming off of the US newswires. It was upsetting to read about McVeigh's last meal of mint chocolate chip ice cream followed closely by a description of his being killed. I wonder if it was a calculated move on McVeigh's part, choosing a last meal that might seem a bit more humanising. Or maybe he just likes ice cream.

Meanwhile, the US government has succeeded in creating a martyr for a group of people who would probably be best served without one. Instead of letting McVeigh sit in jail for the rest of his life, becoming less and less interesting to the media with each passing day, he went out in an explosion of coverage that returned him to the front of newspapers around the world. And always with a footnote about the thousands of pages of evidence turned over after the trial; while McVeigh's guilt was never really in question, you've got to wonder about a country that kills its citizens but that can't even get the largest of its trials right. (Actually, you've got to wonder about a country that kills its citizens at all, but I'll leave those condemnations to the many European leaders who've beat me to it.)

Since (I hope) you don't come to antigreg for political commentary, I'll leave it at that. And since I'm writing this at work and I really ought to be going to lunch soon, I'm not going to bother trying to add to this. There's a lot more to say about my life these days, but I haven't figured out how to say it yet. A common problem, as you may have noticed...