The More You Change

Driving home from Pittsburgh is always a somewhat cathartic experience for me. It's hard to explain exactly why - I think just having a few solid hours of activity that demands my attention without requiring cohesive thought distracts me enough on one level, and lets me think enough on another level, that in some ways it's like pushing a giant mental "reset" button.

Regardless, the drive home tonight went really well. After escaping Pittsburgh proper, I didn't run into any slowdowns at all. I got to drive through some fog, which was actually pretty cool (I suppose it would have been bad if there was snow or a bunch of other traffic, but alas...)

Per my usual habit, I checked DC101 a little while after getting into Maryland, and caught all of "Tonight, Tonight" by the Smashing Pumpkins. That song has long been a favorite of mine; I absolutely adore the "walking to the gallows" sound of the drum section. I don't mean that to sound morbid: the song is about figuring out that you don't have to be content with old patterns of thinking / feeling, and I've always felt like the drums along with the lines about "resolute urgency" and "We'll crucify the insincere" do an amazing job of portraying this feeling of putting one's emotional foot down to take a step down another path. I think the idea of "dying to self" shows up in a lot of spiritual philosophies, and I like how the song approaches that idea optimistically, but with a very human recognition of how hard it can be.

I like the video a lot, too, except for Billy Corgan's vampire-esque figure lurking all over the place.



After getting home, I hung out some with my Mom and my brother, drank some Sam Adams Brown Ale, and read some Cryptonomicon. I am absolutely determined to finish that book by the end of the semester, hopefully by the end of this week. I found out that I have a fairly substantial coding assignment for my computer security class to get done over break. I haven't looked at it yet, but apparently we have to write a bunch of buffer overflows that execute code to query some server somewhere...it should be fun, at least, even though apparently it takes awhile. Meh.