Ten years ago, we still used library cards.

I didn't have one, but I did have a secret spot behind the shelves where I'd stash my books. I had no idea who Neil Gaiman was at the time, but in the two hours between the dismissal bell and our car pulling up on the school driveway, I had the time of my twelve-year-old life in that library.

My friends and I read together next to the broken copy machine.

I took my shoes off to sit on the green carpet while flipping through Junior Inquirer.

I saw a picture of Imelda Marcos in a book about famous eccentrics.

I laughed at the memo pinned on the bulletin board, decrying the evils of Harry Potter.

I discovered that inaccurate variations of Greek mythology were the most interesting ones, because unlike Edith Hamilton's, they involved blue lightning.

I remember Jared of The Shadow Club. I remember Elly, Nel and Eleanor.

At some point I asked the smartest girl in our class to finally teach me how to fill up my own library card, only for them to install an electronic book-borrowing system the following year.

And if you were wondering, this out-of-nowhere rant was for the benefit of Avalon.ph’s 10th anniversary celebration. The fact that they're giving away a signed copy of Neil Gaiman's Adventures in the Dream Trade has nothing to do with it. Okay, maybe a little.

Yeah, they're going to give Heath Ledger the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, we all know it. I mean, they already gave him the Golden Globe for his spectacular show-stopping deadness, why not sell out like every other existing awards show? Because hey, nothing screams supah-serious credibility! like a pretentious trophy given postmortem.

I say Robert Downey Jr. for the win. Come on, Academy. Get some balls.

For ebonystarfire.

( Colorbars! And then some. )

Been reading Frank Herbert's Dune. It blows the mind. Now I want to watch the movie. Not the 2000 one, but the David Lynch one back in 1984. It has Sting in it. And that dude who plays Chucky.

My only question: Why does every other woman in this book have to be a Bene Gesserit? It's a little annoying.

Communications Technology Management: What a shitstorm.

They flood my inbox with crap.

So I got that part-time job as a simultaneous translator for Good Thinking, a marketing research company, which is great. I get P2000 just to translate two sides of a cassette tape. I need to send the transcript in three days.

It isn't as easy as I thought it would be, though. Three days isn't a lot of time. At all. It's been two days and seven pages later and I haven't even finished one side of the tape.

Plus the conversations are boring. What did I expect, it's a survey interview about toilet bowl cleaner. The only vaguely interesting part was when the housewife mentioned something about muriatic acid, and how it splashed right into her aunt's eye when she was scrubbing the bowl too fast and gave her cataract. That should sufficiently scare me into wearing goggles whenever I clean my bathroom. So the instructions say that you should wait a few minutes before scrubbing with the acid, but I don't care.

Goggles it is.

So, apparently, Heath Ledger was channeling Captain Jack instead of the Joker.

Told you so.

Yay for random Scarecrow eyecandy cameos, though.