Notes on yesterday

I had every intention of posting in here yesterday, but as you'll discover, I had a busy day:

I went into Lowell with my mom, in the morning: I had a couple print jobs to take care of at the CyberCafe... The night before, I'd been sadly thinking to myself that the "A.I." fandom was growing dormant, since hardly anyone has posted any new fics recently, and since the fanfiction group I co-moderate has been spammed twice in the past week... we tend to get spammed whenever it's been very quiet on the board... But as I was poking around ff.n, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a new "A.I." fanfic! And it's from a fan in Brazil... And it's in Portuguese... thank heaven for Babelfish: I ran the page through their online translator, which produced a literal translation... I'm currently revising it a little to make it more idiomatic, and I'm planning on posting the revised translation on the AIFFOA, where I've already linked up the untranslated version.

( Grocery store rant )

Fairly Productive day off

Ahhhh... nothing like a day off after a looong shift the day before... I finished tinkering with the translation of the "A.I." fanfic in Portuguese and just posted that to the fanfic group. I also wrote the turning-point scene in "A Little Child Shall Lead Him": the Merv attempts to enter the Source... with some unsettling results....

I picked up my paycheck: and I bought the little stuffed toy wolf that had been watching me from on top of the register all Monday afternoon with this "Take me home..." look in his yellow eyes.

And Merry the parakeet chewed through his wooden swing. For the fourth time. My dad replaced it tonight, but he also got a little bit of payback: he took Merry out of the cage, in his hand, and got Merry to sit on his finger! We tried getting the little guy to sit on my finger, but he decided he'd had enough and went to see what Oskar the cockatiel was up to: and promptly annoyed the heck out of Oz!

My mom and I also had one of our semi-weekly (bi-weekly? tri-weekly??) Bible study sessions, just reading from the Gospels and talking about it, no major exegetical ramblings... We're reading the Gospel According to Luke right now, specifically the infancy of Christ; which caused me to have classical Christmas music playing in my head, specifically "There Were Shepherds Abiding in the Fields" from Handel's "Messiah" and 'The Shepherds' Farewell" from Berlioz's "L'Enfance du Christ"... And of course, my "Matrix" obsession kicked in as well. Earlier today, I was reading the article "Finding God in the 'Matrix'" in "Taking the Red Pill", and part of that article found paralells, not just between Christ and Neo, or Judas Iscariot and Cypher (the most obvious) but other Biblical paralells with some of the "Matrix" characters: Morpheus is similar to John the Baptizer, the herald of the Messiah; Trinity is similar to Mary Magdalen, the woman who loved Christ; Tank is similar to St. Peter ("Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Most High" = "He's the ONE!!"). I thought of another one: Councillor Hammann, in "Reloaded" is somewhat similar to Simeon, the old man who had asked God to let him live to see the face of the Messiah. So... and some people might consider this blasphemous, but it really isn't: the Wachowskis borrowed a line from Isaiah and used it in the script, Morpheus's "I dreamed a dream, and now that dream is taken from me". ... I'm taking Simeon's "Now Thou canst dismiss Thy servant..." speech in the second chapter of Luke and adapting it into a very short "Matrix" fic, Hammann's thoughts when the war with the machines is resolved... I think it's quite clever!