"If you did a Google search on the word 'scintillating,' you would find this song..." -- geekiest radio plug ever as heard on Minnesota Public Radio last night. It popped out all of a sudden in the middle of a classical music set, and I laughed, and laughed, and then laughed some more. Because the plug was dumb.

Friday afternoon, as I drove through Yankton in search of a high school, I was listening to Fresh Air on the radio. A few things John Powers said in his review of The Mothman Prophecies got me to thinking about the workings of the human mind, and I came to a conclusion that rang true over the course of the weekend:
Few things are more terrifying than realizing that one's mind is slipping into the depths of paranoia. Chief among them, however, is the realization that the fear and the terror were justified, well-developed reactions to extraordinary everyday life.
So it is that I managed to receive two parking tickets from two different universities in two different states in the span of twelve (and a half) hours. I let down my guard because I thought I was the crazy one, not the rest of the world, and it turns out that I was wrong. So lesson learned and all that... I'll pay the tickets, of course, if only in the hopes that one institution will leave me alone and that I might even a karmic debt to the other, a debt that accrues interest even as we speak and demands repayment.

Aside from parking tickets and radio shows, however, there is much else to speak of. The debate team of my alma matter, for instance, is much as it was. The same general roles are still being acted out, only now by different people. Even my role, one I thought was meaningless, is again being played--at present by a dark-humoured, vermilion-haired young girl with the most curiously shaped nose and that wonderful desperation of one who is very much alone, a hopeless solitude I thought was unique to my experience as a Lincoln-Douglas debater in our high-school's small forensics program. I learned much from the past weekend's experience, to be sure. I even learned something in writing about it: Vermillion, a small college town on the very southeastern tip of South Dakota, should more properly be spelled Vermilion. (The current spelling is admittedly acceptable, however; just not proper English.)

All in all, it was a good weekend, full of wonder and ice. Ire? No, ice. Minnesota is freaking cold, eh? Ja. I am very glad I went, despite my failures... and I made a little headway in the university collection of Schell's books.

Before I sign off this time, a couple more dread portents from the internet, namely one of a valiant death and one of... bigamy?