Monday, June 16, 2003

You know, it’s bad when you really want your work-day to end, and you’ve been at your desk for twenty-five minutes.

Work continues to be completely uneventful. As always, there’s some busywork I can attend to, but it’s busywork. The human soul shrivels when it has nothing productive to do.

I had a good weekend, though. I took my truck in for its mid-life tune-up at the local Firestone shop, met a really nice guy there who reads science fiction, and received the truck back the next day. It was a fantastic turn-around time, though it cost me about a thousand bucks. Still, the truck purrs like a kitten, and I have confidence that it won’t collapse halfway through a long trip.

That’s my most important concern about motor vehicles — I don’t want to think about them, so I have to think about them. More accurately, I want a vehicle that I know will always work, so I feel it’s important to keep it well maintained by getting it serviced regularly.

I also bought more anime (surprise, surprise) — Full Metal Panic, His and Her Circumstances volume 3, Rune Soldier volume 2, and a wonderful new OVA called Read Or Die.

R.O.D. is almost undescribably enjoyable; to use the ridiculous modern parlance of pointless combination, “It’s like James Bond for bookworms!” Or perhaps “Cowboy Bebop for bibliophiles.” It’s the story of a bookish young woman (thankfully, for anime, an actual young woman — she’s post-college) who’s a special agent for the British Library; books have magical powers, apparently, and she has a neat little superpower: total control over paper. She can form it into any shape, or make it hard as steel. This may sound silly, but it works.

The series is an action-oriented, tightly-plotted, funny, well-written adventure. Moreover, the ending is strongly character-driven, and it hurts. It’s everything that an anime OVA should be, really.