Falling in love with comic-book characters

On the bus yesterday I was sitting in front of a pair of teenage girls from the international school next door. They were Turkish but talking in English, so, ever the sociolinguistic observer, I pricked up my ears. Actually, there was so little code-switching (names of foodstuffs were mainly in Turkish) they could have passed for native-speaker Californians with imaginative word-building skills, e.g.

Y'know, those boots ... they look soooo cute on you. Like
.... blblblblbmm! ... all kinda .... balloony.

I was about to lose attention after a long discussion of the merits of different boot-types (apparently the 20-hole Dr. Martin's are the coolest) but then they started talking about falling in love withc omic-book characters.

Like, uh, when I was ten I was in love with that Ninja turtle ...
y'know, the red one.

Michelangelo?

Noooo, it was, uh, hang on ... Donatello?

Yeah, Donatello.

Yeah, but anyway, I reckoned my parents wouldn't approve.

Your parents wouldn't approve?

Yeah, so I went for, uh, the purple one instead. But I don't fall in love with
comic-book characters any more.

Not even the Sandman?

Oh, well, yeah, mebbe.

I was about to explode with laughter at the thought of almost-grown women falling in love with comic-book characters, then I remembered that in my twenties I was not only a big fan of The Sandman (along with Hellblazer, 2000 AD and Love and Rockets) but I also had a thing about his sister, Death, a really cute Goth-chick who would summon the souls of then early-departed. She made dying seem so romantic. I also had the hots for Halo Jones, not to mention about half the cast of Love and Rockets. In other words, probably the only thingt hat stops me from falling in love with comic-book characters thesed ays is the lack of a good supply of comics in Ankara. If I see those girls again, I'll ask them where they get their copies of The Sandman. "Sweet Death, kind Death."

(no subject)

After watching Ghost in the Shell I commented to a fellow-geek, "There are no ghosts in my shell, but I've got plenty of daemons in my kernel." Some of these daemons seem to refuse signals like HUP or even KILL, and are continuing to drive me even when I'm on holiday. After a week of marking hell, what am I doing but working on Parts 2 and 3 of my series of papers on desire, and even trying to translate Part 1 into Turkish (almost impossible - my colloquial Turkish is fine, but I have problems with things like "descriptivist fallacy")?

I'm also trying to get some serious qigong started. I'm practicing the Chinese stuff I know from years back (mainly the baduanjin) plus some of the newer stuff from hapkido. It's good, but makes me aware of what a terrible state my body's in. An old taiji friend once said that my doing qigong was like taking a rickety old plumbing system and forcing water round it at high pressure - some creaking is to be expected.

Today I decided to avoid behaving in this compulsive, driven way, go down to the office and spend a totaly self-indulgent time online. However, I've spent quite of bit of this time trying unsuccessfully to upgrade LyX (new binary RPM has fake unsatisfied dependencies, source won't compile). Time to go home and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Oh yes, and I need to wash my curtains. No! No!

>kill -s SIGINT
>kill -s SIGHUP
>kill -s SIGKILL
>kill -s SIGNUKE

(Will anyone other than Arya understand this post, I wonder?)