So, I took today and cleaned a bit around my apartment.  I figure this is a necessary first step to packing for the new house.  Plus, as I mentioned previously, my place was kind of a wreck.  Well, it’s still a wreck, but it’s less of one.  I have yet to do my dishes or scrub the bathroom clean, but after that my place’ll be clean enough that I wouldn’t mind having guests (hint, hint).

In the meantime, I’m just trying to force myself to blog a bit more.  Real creativity can’t be forced, but the pipes through which my creative juices flow have been somewhat clogged, and I think they need to be blown out.  It’ll be an arduous process, but hopefully a worthwhile one.

The Baltimore Marathon was today.  I stood outside and watched people running (and eventually walking) by; apparently my neighborhood was at mile 23 of 26.  I watched this for 3 hours.  I was informed there were over 20,000 people signed up to punish themselves.  At first I had to imagine it was for some noble cause, but apparently the cause was “running until your shirt chafes your nipples off and you bleed down your torso.”  Seriously, that shit is gross.

In addition, these people would not stop for an ambulance that was headed to the hospital up the street.  They kept flowing around it, adding to the clusterfuck of the lone police officer attempting to shepherd it through, clearing out the cars (who’d been waiting for upwards of an hour and a half at the light).  All in all, it was pretty retarded.  Later runners, who were presumably later because they were less willing to run all that distance, actually let the next two ambulances through without much fuss.  I have to wonder if the upswing in ambulances was due to people passing the hell out after running so far.

All in all, it was a fairly interesting day, dull though it sounds when typed out.  I talked to a couple complete strangers, made some single-serving friends.  I used to do that every so often, but it’s been years.  It’s best to think of this as baby steps, small movements towards waking myself up from the self-induced intellectual coma in which I’ve found myself.