Last night was a good night for technology in my house. I put together the Hackintosh, which booted nicely and I set up the ol’ BIOS. I still need to test whether Leopard will work on it, but if nothing else, I will have an uber powerful PC for gaming and media. If it does work, I should be able to dual boot Mac OS and Windows onto two different hard drives, which is something I’ve been wanting since about 1998.

I keep wondering if having such a beast of a device is actually a mistake. It makes me want to play around with it, or more colloquially DICK around with it. I would not be doing anything of lasting value, really. I would just open programs and try to make the computer balk at the work it’s doing. Considering the specs I used, it likely would not. My previous machine had no trouble coping with the loads I asked it to carry; this machine is HAL to an Atari 2600.

Lately, I have been dicking around quite a bit. I have purchased a lot of the little board game replicas on Xbox Live Arcade and then wasted time playing them. A typical night for me is to come home, eat something, then sit down and think for a little while about the projects I have open and what I could do that night to push them forward. Then, I’ll give up on that, play some casual games (I am no longer teh H4®dc0®3Z), realize I am wasting my night, give myself another hour of games, go work out late at night when my energy is low and I will be discouraged, come home too exhausted to work on anything, and play a couple more hours of little puzzle games.

It’s not a terrible existence, but I also do not want this habit to form. I have tried to mix up the timing of my workouts and that has helped some. But without the structure of theater — which seems a strange thing to say — I get bored easily and my time not being quite so valuable, I waste it. My friend Jeff would say that enjoying your time is not wasting it. He’s right, but I still feel a bit of a slug.

I have been relatively motivated at work, despite being defeated by the obstacles Typepad keeps throwing in my way. Occasionally, though, I find myself so inundated by all of my open projects, that I can’t do anything. Ever had so many things that you need to do at the same time that you become paralyzed and do nothing at all? I mean, you don’t even sit down and play a game or find a fun website to waste time. You just bounce from thought to thought, accomplishing and enjoying nothing.

I get in that place a lot. I can attribute it partially to my inability to deny requests for freelance web work (mostly for free, sadly) and partially to my indecisive nature. But, it seems that when I am in a show, I manage to still get a lot done. Possibly, because I feel the urgency of my time slipping away. “I have ten hours of things to do outside of my job and my hobby this week and only six hours of free time to acccomplish it.” And instead of adopting an indifferent attitude, I become a gung ho marine of efficiency. I want to be able to tap into that more often.

If I do go back to college*, I hope to. With years of experience and discipline, I know that I will take it more seriously. If nothing else, I understand where my money goes, even if I don’t care much more than I used to. I am not naive any longer and that will make me a better student. I am still, in essence, a slacker. But I see college as something that I can get through handily. I just want it to be done.

* The major barrier to this, by the way, is the bureaucracy involved. I cannot just go into the school on one day and talk to some people and BAM I’m on the registration lists. No, it will be months of ridiculous red tape that I despise in a deep, philosophical and psychotic way. It is the same reason that I don’t have my new driver’s license. I feel like I will end up making more than one trip to the DMV and that level of paperwork and needless obstacle is simply intolerable.

Wow, I am really having a hard time writing more here. Last night I had some dream about hedgehogs and I meant to tell Clare the advice that my dream self had given me. I decided to wait and tell her when we were both more awake and it faded entirely, as dreams do. Clare would have been amused, though, I know it.

Tonight, I intend to finally get a workout in focused around leg strength. I start teaching stage combat next week and I need to set a good example for my students in the area of fitness and strength. Despite my entrenched chubbiness, I have managed in the last few months to increase those two attributes. I think my employers may have been a little put off by my mentioning how I value fitness in my students, considering they both exuded a healthier vibe than me. But I bet I can do more pull-ups.