On the up side, I haven't seen any cockroaches at all today. So maybe yesterday's swarm was just some weird anomaly. The neighbors' cockroaches on vacation, or something. That's probably too much to hope for, but dammit all, I'm going to hope for it anyway.

On the down side, I am falling badly behind on the comic book work I promised to do for SCIC. An hour of free time a night is just not enough time to make significant progress on this project, especially if I want to retain even the barest semblance of a life. Which I do.

On the up side, I've somehow managed to gracefully wriggle out of doing any work at all for the school newspaper during my co-op term. So yay me.

On the reading about science on the bus for lack of anything better to do side, I find it really interesting that Einstein's model of space-time has come to be known as the theory of relativity, despite the fact that Einstein himself thought it should be called the invariance theory, a name which has pretty much exactly the opposite connotations. Perhaps this is because at the time the theory was being popularized, English-speaking society was more interested in moral and artistic relativity than in unshakable absolutes and invariant laws? I don't know. In fact I don't even know when it was that said theory first started being widely popularized,or whether it's only called theory of relativity in English, or any of that history of science stuff, so I'm basically just making stuff up here. Still, it's kind of a neat disconnect.

After work today I went for a walk around Markham's downtown. Well, I'm guessing it was the downtown, at least; Toronto and its suburbs have a disconcerting habit of sprouting clusters of imposing high rise buildings more or less at random, so it's hard to be sure. All the buildings in this pseudo-downtown area -- office buildings and apartments alike -- had a glossy, corporate shine to them. Close-packed and elegantly organic, they reminded me of a coral reef made of glass and steel. Everything there was astonishingly clean, almost antiseptic. Beautiful and at the same time subliminally repellent, like a city caught in the uncanny valley between reality and disneyworld.

I sometimes feel a little bit the same way about my new workplace. It's gorgeous and fun and loaded with interesting perks and clever people, but at the same time it's also so very, very corporate that it hardly feels real. It's simultaneously a marvelous playground and the strictest, most adult place I've ever worked. I think it may be trying to steal my soul. I think it may be succeeding.

Adding to the unreality of the whole experience is the fact that, weekends aside, I've only seen sunlight through the windows of the office building where I work. It's dark when I arrive and dark when I leave. I feel like I've gone nocturnal, though of course the exact opposite is true.

I don't know if I would want to work in a job like this for more than a handful of months at a time. I don't know if I could. But for now it's shaping up to be a very interesting co-op term indeed.

I promised various people that I would post the all juicy details of my first day of work this evening. But frankly, I'm just too exhausted, and I've got to get to bed 5 minutes ago if I'm going to get my full eight hours' sleep. Which I dearly, dearly need. Tomorrow should be slightly less insane, though, and best of all, it's followed by a Saturday. I should be able to post then, no problem.

There may be some real truth to the joke aphorism "If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards." Or at least "If at first you don't succeed, try something you're actually good at instead." This Technical Communication program I'm enrolled in has just been one cheap ego-boost after another, and, shallow as it may be, I'm loving it.

Most recently, I managed to score the co-op position I've been craving from the program's first orientation session: technical writer for IBM's Toronto branch. Specifically I'll be documenting the upcoming new versions of IBM's C++ and Fortran compilers. And I am so, so psyched about it. From everything I've heard about IBM, it sounds like a sweet place to work, and my coworkers sound like really excellent people too. January can't come fast enough! (Except thant I'm looking forward to spending winter break with family and friends even more. The future is just far too full of wonderful things to anticipate.)

First I have to survive the rest of this term, though. Not that I'm terribly overburdened with work -- far from it -- but I am far too often overwhelmed by hedonistic distractions. Case in point: Lost. After successfully avoiding this oh-so-terribly addictive TV show for a year and a half and counting, I've finally fallen off the wagon again. I am now in the midst of devouring the third season at what would be record time for any reasonable person. (Being a distinctly unreasonable individual myself, my current record involves watching a full season of Buffy in a single 24 hour period, ending ~ 7 A.M., a feat I'm unlikely to repeat any time soon.) The main three characters have all become kind of boring, but Locke and Ben interest me enough to keep me watching indefinitely.