My last day of work was definitely bittersweet. I’d been feeling for a while like it was time for me to move on, but it’s always sad to leave something familiar behind. I have a lot of good memories from that job and have made some good friends there. My superiors said some very nice things and thanked me for all my work over the years. And then I cleaned out my drawer and left.

I’m glad to be done with school. It took me a couple years longer than I’d planned, but I’m glad I did it. (At least now I am; I’m not sure how I’ll feel several months from now if I’m still struggling to find a decent job.) Even if it doesn’t pay off monetarily, I learned and grew a lot, and I’m glad for the experience. I’ll miss the weekly meetings with my advisor, which frequently (but enjoyably) veered off topic into issues of usage and prescriptivism and the mindset of copy editors. I’ll miss walking across campus, climbing the well-worn steps in the library, and finding a carrel in a secluded corner and writing.

Graduating with my master’s feels quite a bit different from graduating with my bachelor’s. I haven’t had real classes in over a year, and I was actually finished with my program classes two years ago. I even finished with my thesis about two months ago—the defense was March 8, and then I had a week to do revisions. Then it took me another week to get the stupid formatting perfect so that the library would accept the PDF of my thesis. It’s been kind of a long, slow coda to the grad-school experience. It still seems odd to think that it’s really over.

I still don’t know what’s next. I decided a while back to not go on for a PhD, so I’m just looking for a job but haven’t found one yet. I have a couple of freelance writing gigs, but they’re more of a side thing, not enough to live on. But if I can get enough other freelance work going, I think I’ll be happy with that. I’m hopeful that something will work out, but I think this is one of those times when I need to take a couple of steps into the dark before the light appears.

Last week I gave my thesis committee the final draft of my thesis, and I’ll be defending it this Friday at 8:00 a.m. (ugh). I’m eager and terrified at the same time. I don’t think there’s a real risk of me failing, but there’s a fair chance that I’ll pass with revisions, and those revisions will be due less than a week after defense. The end is in sight, but I’m definitely not done yet. Then it won’t be until late April that I actually graduate. Don’t ask me why the thesis has to be done a month and a half before graduation. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m just happy to finally be close to done, though now I’m once again facing the daunting task of finding a decent job.

Meanwhile, the kids continue to grow up. Lego is turning seven next month, and Duplo will be five the month after that. El Guapo is obsessed with cars, and he loves doing whatever the two older boys are doing. He loves to watch Lego and me play Lego Star Wars, and he’s pretty good at singing the main theme. It seems like every day he’s picking up new words, and he’s stringing them together pretty frequently. Now when I leave for work in the morning, he says, “Bye-bye, Dada!” Tonight we were watching Star Wars: Episode IV, and when the Jawas captured R2-D2, he said, “Uh-oh, Boop-Boop!” over and over. I guess that’s his name for R2.

I’ll try to get back to posting more frequently here once I’m done with school and life starts to return to normal. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to post about over the next few months with graduation and jobs and moving and all that.

First, rescuing Han takes about half the movie, and this does nothing to advance the plot or develop the characters. I guess the rancor scene shows that Luke can be kind of resourceful under pressure, but his Jedi training is apparently completely worthless here. In comparison to the arena scene in Attack of the Clones, he ends up looking pretty weak. Anakin was able to subdue one of the creatures there with the Force, but here Luke runs around desperately and, in the end, gets kind of lucky.

During the barge fight, I realized that Luke was pretty blatantly ignoring a lot of Yoda’s teachings. Yoda warns him about being reckless and tells him that he’ll know the light side from the dark side when he’s calm and at peace. He specifically says, “A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.” But what does Luke do? Bust out his lightsaber and start slashing. And then he blows up the barge to make sure no one is left alive. I found myself wondering how killing Jabba’s entire entourage was so different from Anakin slaughtering the Sand People. Sure, Jabba and his thugs were criminals and murderers, but the Sand People kidnapped Anakin’s mother and tortured her to death. Yes, I realize that Luke was acting out of a kind of self-defense—though he walked into Jabba’s palace and got caught—but I wonder how big of a difference there really was between them.

And when Luke goes back to Dagobah to complete his training with Yoda, what happens? Nothing. Even though Yoda warned Luke about stopping his training to rush off to rescue his friends, I guess he didn’t really miss anything, because Yoda tells him now that he doesn’t need any more training. The Empire Strikes Back greatly deepened the mythology introduced in A New Hope. Return of the Jedi gives us no new insights into how the Force works or what it means to be a Jedi.

And apparently Yoda had no intention of telling Luke that Darth Vader was his father, because Yoda doesn’t say a thing about it until Luke finally asks himself, and then Yoda hesitates before answering. Then, to make matters worse, Obi-Wan spouts this garbage about his lies about Anakin being “true, from a certain point of view”, before rambling on about how “the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view”. What so-called truth was Obi-Wan clinging to? Rationalizing one of the most epic screw-ups in the history of the galaxy, which was his decision to train Anakin?

Of course, this is really just Lucas waving his hand to smooth over the biggest retcon in the series, but it says a lot about the Jedi, or at least Obi-Wan. Are the Jedi all moral relativisits? Is the truth simply whatever you want it to be? It also brings to mind a line from Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” Besides being the most ironic sentence ever, it’s simply not true; lots of people deal in absolutes, and the Sith can still deal in relativism, as demonstrated when, after his conversion to the dark side, Anakin says, “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.”

But I digress. I think Obi-Wan should have owned up to the lie. He needed Luke’s help taking on Darth Vader and the Emperor, and he lied to protect him because he was afraid that Luke would follow the same path as his father. But maybe the weirdest part is that Luke doesn’t seem very bothered by any of this. He seems surprisingly okay with having been lied to and manipulated for the purpose of killing his own father.

Then comes the reveal about Leia. Some have said that this plot point is the result of Lucas trying to duplicate the emotional impact of Darth Vader’s “No, I am your father” in The Empire Strikes Back. I can’t get too worked up about it either way. It’s certainly not as cool as Vader’s reveal, but it’s not terrible.

But then we get to the good parts: the first all-out space battle in the trilogy, an epic lightsaber duel, and killing Ewoks. That’ll have to wait till next time.

Underplaying the Music You Want to Hear

This is probably my biggest frustration. I want to hear a particle artist or song, so I thumbs-up it or favorite it or love it, and then . . . I never hear it. The site seems to have that artist or song in their catalogue, so what gives? Why don’t they play the stuff that they apparently have access to that I told them I’d like to hear? A lot of artists I like get played only rarely, and many never get played at all.

I heard a Toad the Wet Sprocket song on Slacker the other day for the first time in months. Why do I never hear them? I have no idea. Their music is apparently available on Slacker, but it almost never comes up. Every internet radio site I’ve tried—Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker, Jango—has the same problem. It doesn’t really matter how many song or artist seeds I provide or how much stuff I favorite or thumbs-up. They’re all pretty similar in this regard.

It’s especially frustrating when I hear a song that I like from an artist that I’m not familiar with and want to hear more of. I’ll favorite the song or the artist or even create a new station just based on that artist, and I still hardly hear anything from them. Pandora is supposed to be specially geared towards music discovery, but I have to say that they kind of suck at it. But now that I have access to Spotify, when I hear a song from a new artist that I like, I’ll just listen to an album or two there instead.

Overplaying the Music You Don’t Want to Hear So Much

This is the flip side of problem #1. There’s plenty of music out there that I kind of like or don’t mind, and this is what seems to be played the most. Pandora seems to be the worst, which is why I got sick of them and started going elsewhere. I’ve provided dozens of artist and song seeds and probably hundreds of thumbs-ups, but half of what I get is this mediocre indie stuff that I just don’t care for that much. I kept expecting it to grow on me, but it never did.

On Slacker, I get lots of Weezer and Bush and Jakob Dylan. Not that I dislike any of them, but I’m not crazy about any of them either. And it’s always the same four or five songs from each one. Weezer apparently has eight albums, but I still only get four or five songs from them. Yeah, they’re great, but can I hear something else please?

Sometimes, as if to spite me, internet radio will play music from an artist I like, but only their songs that I don’t like. For example, I like Wilco, but I think their album Sky Blue Sky was kind of a dud, so I don’t really want to hear it. So what Wilco songs does Slacker play? The same three or four songs from Sky Blue Sky, plus the occasional song from A.M. (my second-least-favorite album), but nothing else. Again, they have six other albums. How about you play something from one of them?

Binary Rating Systems

Every site out there gives you the option to love/favorite/thumbs-up or hate/ban/thumbs-down songs or artists, but none of them give you more nuanced control. Out of all the internet radio sites I’ve tried, I’ve seen only one that got this right: Launchcast, which is now defunct. On Launchcast, you could rate things between 0 (meaning it was banned and would never play again) and 100. If I kind of liked something but didn’t want to hear it a lot, I could rate it around 60 or 70 and count on the fact that it wouldn’t be played all the time. If I got tired of it, I could lower the rating. If it grew on me, I could bump it up. The stuff I really loved got rated 90 and above, and—miracle of miracles!—it got played the most.

On every other site, you love and hate everything equally. And if you don’t commit one way or the other, they’ll just keep playing it anyway until you get so sick of it that you ban it. But I hate committing to banning something that I feel indifferent to, so I end up burning through my limited number of skips to get to songs I actually want to hear.

Bad Tagging

This isn’t that big of a problem, but I’m still surprised at how common it is. I would assume that these sites would get their music straight from the record labels, but oftentimes it seems like it’s all been uploaded from someone’s mess of a mistagged music collection. It’s especially bad on Last.fm, where I’ve seen songs with the wrong titles, live or acoustic versions listed as album versions, and missing tags. Slacker has some problems, too, but it’s not as bad. The weirdest is a karaoke version of an album I own. How on earth did that end up on Slacker? Why would I want to listen to the instrumental version? I’m not going to blast it from my cube at work and sing along.

Maybe It’s Not All Bad

For all my griping, I do get a lot of enjoyment out of various custom internet radio sites. They’ve actually introduced me to about a dozen different artists whose albums I now own. And it’s all free (because there’s no way I’m paying for one of these services), so I guess I can’t really complain. Plus, the variety of options out there means that when I get sick of one site or another, I can try something else, at least until it annoys me too much. And Spotify is a nice alternative, though it obviously doesn’t fill the same role as custom radio stations.

But I still wish someone would bring Launchast back.

We need your help to ensure the quality of our research. We’ve enclosed a thank you gift. This thank you gift is for taking the time to read this letter. Please share this letter with others in your household. (italics in original)

The thank you gift was a crisp new one-dollar bill. Of course I had to show the letter to Brinestone so she could share in my excitement. The letter continued:

If your household is selected, we will send you an additional small cash gift!

I’m nearly giddy with anticipation. What could it possibly be? Two dollars? Or—dare I hope—five?

Redbox is not a video store. It’s a vending machine. That means you browse, select your movies, and check out all in the same spot. While you can spend fifteen minutes strolling through a video store looking at all the boxes and trying to decide what you want, if you do that at Redbox, you’re holding up the line. That doesn’t seem to stop anyone, though. Imagine someone dithering for five minutes or so in front of a vending machine over whether to get a Snickers or a Milky Way or maybe some chips. Then imagine that the next three people in front of you all do the same thing, and you start to get pretty frustrated with people.

The worst part is that it’s completely unnecessary. If you have internet access, you can browse movies on Redbox’s website, find a location that has it in stock, and reserve it. Then all you have to do is go to the right machine, push a button, and swipe your credit card. Picking up a movie only needs to take about 15 seconds. And dropping off a movie shouldn’t take more than a few seconds, either, except that you have to wait until the machine is free.

Like tonight, when I went to drop off the movie we rented last night. First I went to Macey’s, but I could see that there were about five or six people in line, so I drove over to McDonald’s instead. I was excited to see that there was only one person in line, so I thought it would only take a minute or two.

It turned out to be more like five, though, because the woman in line in front of me was a browser. I swear she looked at every single movie in the catalog and ended up checking out three. While I was waiting another three people got in line behind me. And then, after she swiped her credit card, which took her about three tries to get right, the machine asked for her zip code. I don’t know what she thought it was asking for, because she punched in four digits, and it didn’t look like any zip code from around here.

She tried hitting “next” about five times. The guy behind me cleared his throat impatiently. I finally chimed in and said, “It needs your zip code.” She turned around looking vaguely embarrassed, apologized, and put in her zip code and hit “next” again. Finally she was on her way, and I was able to drop off my movie and go home. What should have been a ten-minute-tops errand turned into more like twenty minutes because one person decided to treat a vending machine like her own personal video store.

And this happens at least every other time I use a Redbox. Quite frequently I get stuck behind two or three browsers instead of just one, so I end up waiting in line for fifteen minutes. And all of that could be avoided if people were just considerate of others and kept their browsing to a minimum or just reserved their movies online. I’m sure most people don’t even know you can do it online, but that’s still no excuse for holding up a line for five minutes or more.

Like I said, I love Redbox, but I hate a its customers. I’m sure one of these days I’m just going to lose it and start cussing out the people who are making me wait fifteen minutes to perform a thirty-second task. Maybe it’s about time to finally get Netflix.

Then there was the weekend trip to Denver in late July to see Brinestone’s sister get married. It was great that we were able to go, even though El Guapo was less than two weeks old, because Brinestone and her sister are like best friends, but weekend trips always tire me out. A full day of driving plus a full day of wedding stuff plus another full day of driving with only one Sunday of downtime in the middle is not a very restful vacation.

A couple of weeks later, Brinestone and the boys went up to Bear Lake for an extended family reunion of her mom’s side. I skipped out because I couldn’t afford the time off, but it was kind of nice having a few days of quiet, even though it’s always weird to be the only one in the house.

Then there was another family reunion, this time for my mom’s side of the family. We headed up Friday afternoon and came back Saturday night, so I only missed a little bit of work, but it was a tiring trip too. It was good to see family, especially my parents and siblings, but setting up and taking down camp for only a day’s worth of camping is a lot of work.

And finally, last week we flew to Georgia for Brinestone’s brother’s wedding. It too was an exhausting trip filled with airports and rental car counters and lot of time in miserable traffic in a very hot and humid city, but again it was nice to be there to support family.

Honestly, I don’t begrudge the time spent on all these trips to be with family. I love my family and Brinestone’s family too, and I’m glad we were able to be there for some important events and see relatives that we don’t get to see very often. But man, am I ever ready to just stay home for the next few months. For my next vacation I might just pass out on the couch for a while.

We got Brinestone admitted and checked in, but we weren’t able to get a hold of her doctor for a little while. Turns out he was stuck in traffic too after delivering his second baby of the day up in Provo. (He usually does about eight a month, so this was already a busy day.) Meanwhile Brinestone was in a lot of pain and was already feeling worn out after a very busy (but productive) day. She decided to get an epidural, so they called in a nurse-anesthetist. He had a hard time getting the catheter in—apparently Brinestone has pretty narrow intervertebral spaces, so he kept hitting bone—but finally he got the job done, and she started feeling a lot better.

The doctor discovered that the baby was posterior, but he was able to get him turned pretty easily. Then it was just a few more pushes, and the job was done. The baby gave us a very healthy cry when he came out, even before the nurses had suctioned him. They weighed him and announced that he was 8 pounds, 5 ounces—a pretty healthy size, though considerably smaller than Duplo’s 9 pounds 3 ounces. I was honestly surprised at how quickly and smoothly it all went. We’d been in the hospital about three hours at that point, though Brinestone said her contractions had started about an hour before she called me, so about five hours total.

There was a fair amount of blood that came out with the baby (and some blood that came out before her water even broke), which made the doctor think that Brinestone had had a partial abruption. It must’ve been pretty minor, because it doesn’t seem to have caused a problem for either her or the baby. Thankfully everything went smoothly, and both of them are now at home. In keeping with the tradition of giving the kids net nicknames based on their initials, we’re* dubbing this one El Guapo, for GPO.

And, of course, here are the obligatory pictures.

*Or at least I’m dubbing him that. I’m not sure if Brinestone is entirely on board yet, but too late! I posted first.