Augh!

My friend Bill has the Battlestar Galactica board game, and I love it. Except that I also hate it.

You don't play very far into the series, but the goal is to make it to the planet Kobol, which is 9 "distances" (I dunno what they're called) away. You use the FTL drives to jump, and your admiral (generally Adama) chooses your destination, which can be 1-3 "distances". Problem is, the Cylons are beating the shit out of you constantly. Other problem is, you run out of resources and humans REALLY FAST. There's fighting, there's politics, there's "OH MY GOD, THEY'RE KILLING US, DO SOMETHING!", and it's really fun. But we have yet to see the humans survive all the way to Kobol. One time, we would have, but we had to stop early, at 6 "distances". We totally would have made it. Second and third times, Cylons crushed the humans. This fourth game, the humans ran out of food.

The other really awesome and aggravating aspect is that not everyone is human-- we start with Loyalty Cards, and yeah, someone's gonna be a Cylon. Lying in this game is getting silly, since we can just about tell who is and who isn't telling the truth. I was a Cylon three out of four games. When I was a Cylon, I decimated the human race, except for this last game. I decided to try and help them win. But even with four of us on one side, we still lost to a single Cylon player. Part of it is luck-of-the-draw, and the rest is what the players, human and Cylon, do. Personally, I think we're doing all the wrong things (what else is new?), and I really want to see someone besides Jonathan being the admiral. Being the president (I was Pres. Gaius Baltar, not Roslyn) was really fun! I had the power to do some crazy stuff, but the most I did was making Jon my Vice President, giving a couple of Inspirational Speeches, set up some Food Rationing, and signed off on some Excessive Force to help blow up a bunch of Cylons (it cost us some people, though).

But we can't win! Where are we going wrong?! Argh....

Tomorrow (Sunday), we're having tons of people over for some form of Hannan reunion. I'm hoping that I can skip out a little early to head to Japanese bible study. I dunno, does anyone else get tired of introducing themselves? I've been saying the same stuff in person that I write in this blog, which is largely the same from post to post. "I'm going to OCC, I study Japanese, I wanna double-major in Linguistics at Eastern, maybe I'll go for a Master's in Cognitive Linguistics." I'm sick of hearing myself. I don't want to say all this thirty times tomorrow. I don't want to make small talk, either. It's not interesting, it's not stimulating. It's generally just annoying because it's so boring. Let's talk about fun things. Let's talk about ideas, concepts, let's argue, even.

It's not even just small talk, because at least it has it's place. You introduce yourself, you get to know enough about another person so that maybe you can segue into a real conversation. Gossip is the issue. Idle words. Mouth-noises for the sake of mouth-noise. Please, everyone, stop. I would rather everyone just sit in silence, because at least it's authentic. There does not need to BE conversation if it's void of substance. Anything that lacks that element is fake and mindless, and I DESPERATELY want to be done with it. This is why I dread family gatherings.

Well, that, and the all the crap I'm gonna catch for not talking to anyone.

I've been reading some snippits about a lot of different things recently, and the most, I guess, jarring? It was about stoic sages. The little blurb I read was something like "A stoic experiencing strong emotions is as natural as his falling asleep." So even stoic sages are not constantly "stoic" (I feel the word has taken on too-strong connotations in modern usage)! The goal is to control "primitive instincts", and not just to live devoid of emotions. That's cool.

I feel exhausted, but unusually, not in the physical sense. So much shit is getting to me. The whole Grandpa-hospital thing is wearing, and I say that completely taking my position, as neither Grandma nor Grandpa, for granted. Thinking about tomorrow feels like my nerves are being grated. I'm still stressed about how poorly I did in math. I haven't stepped foot in church since St James, and I don't know if I can even bring myself to look for someplace other than St Andrews, which is a problem. I haven't had a really good, thoughtful conversation in a longer time than I like. My temper is getting out of control.

I'm glad I have a house, friends, Nova, a family, and a computer with internet access. I'm not anxious about upcoming classes, I'm excited and a tad impatient, even though they start in about five days. I'm glad I raked the lawn, because I picked up about a half a bale of hay, and people are gonna be walking back there.

Sean