So my knees are back to normal. And my throat is almost back to normal. And I'm almost back to normal.

Still settling in to the new apartment. Though honestly I don't think I ever will be able to settle in. I'll always find something to complain about.

Thankfully the weather hasn't gone to hell yet. The days are getting shorter though which is never a good sign. After four winters here I'm still going to hate this new one. We should be like birds and migrate.

Thanks to the physical and mental discomfort of the move, I'm back to reading comics with a vengeance. Comics are my comfort food.

At work on a Sunday. But that's all right, I didn't have much to do anyway. I would have probably spent the day parked in front of the TV reading a comic book. Which sounds great, now that I think about it.

Yesterday, I was at State Street, and was infuriated with the number of parents roaming around with their freshmen children. Parents go home. Leave your kids be. State Street looks better that way.

I have to start going to the gym again, but am apprehensive thanks to the whole knee situation. I will go though. Probably start next weekend.

I'm off to lunch now. Please forgive the poor quality of prose in this post (all those damn "thanks to's"). I'm in no mood to fix it.

New apartment. Hectic moving day. Knee problems. Throat problems. Slight fever. Work deadlines. No time to blog :(

Here's the plot. If you could send one message back through time to your younger self, what would it be and would your younger self listen?

A few (two and a half) years ago I would have answered this question quite differently from how I'm going to answer it now.

Here's the resolution. I would ask my younger self to work a lot harder than he (I) will (did) during the first semester at Wisconsin and to switch from signal processing to image processing even earlier. How would I convince my younger self? Put something in the message which he (I) would recognize as something only I (he) know and would never possibly reveal to someone else even under torture.

Here's the twist. How will I answer this question in the future?

Everyone writes (reads) their own novel.

So after not buying the series when it was running, and not buying the hard-back graphic novel when it was released a couple of months ago, I finally picked up the soft-cover last weekend. I am talking of course, of Wanted written by Mark Millar with art by J. G. Jones and Paul Mounts. Instead of the usual rigmarole that I usually insert at this point, I guess I'm just going to quote a little (careful this stuff is rated R):

This is my best friend having sex with my girlfriend over an Ikea table I picked up for a really good price.

This is me meeting him for dinner two days later and pretending not to know about it as we enjoy some really nice Korean food together.

This is the office where I work as an assistant to the associate editor on Hypothyroidism Today, the third-biggest auto-immune periodical on the Eastern seaboard.

This is me taking shit from my African-American boss. As you can see, I'm smiling as she insults me but it's only because I'm embarrassed by the situation and more than a little afraid of the scary fucking bitch.

This is the sesame-crusted salmon over sourdough with mustard greens and wasabi mayonnaise I like to have for lunch just to prove I'm different from the herd.

Most weekdays, these semi-literate cholo fucks meet me off the bus and on the walk behind me hurling insults about my baggies or my old-skool pumas.

Most weeknights, I tell my girlfriend I'm finishing up some work, but spend a couple of hours browsing the net for new stress-related diseases I think I might have.

I'm not a bad person or anything. I'm just an ordinary guy in a bad situation. Doesn't everyone hate neighbors who exhibit a relentless cheery disposition? "Cheer up, Wesley. It might never happen, kiddo."

My name is Wesley Gibson and my dad walked out on my mom when I was eighteen weeks old.

Did he look into my baby-blues and realize that he'd just fathered one of the most insignificant assholes of the 21st century?

From here on things only get much much better. This is closest a comic book has ever come to Kill Bill. In some places this thing is even better.