At least it feels that way from the nature of the projects I'm doing. My workplace required me to pick up Flash to do some projects for the state of Virginia, or at least a small part of it. The following day, the expertise I had obtained after non-intensive study was sufficient for the project involved, and apparently also enough for me to be able to help a client.
And I haven't even touched on actionscript yet, so on the whole this stuff is softcore. It does mean that I am now dangerous enough to make obnoxious swfs, like the one that tells you how to make Flash.
Spoiler: you make it in Flash.

I never have a lot to say on days like this, and it does bother me that I had taken so long since the last time that my homepage here is mucked up with musings about rock concerts.
And speaking of rock concerts, Juan came over last night with Rock Band and I sung just about every song on that thing that I can stand doing. I also managed to get the drums for a song that I would never yet sing, which I forget the name of and the band is Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives. Juan should still be there now-ish, though I'm here at work for the day.

I'll be going back soon enough.

Today would have been a particular day, but I'm pretty sure it really is not any particular day that I can savvy. I'll buy some socks, maybe. I may even do my taxes. But then those would also make this a particular day that it isn't.

And I swear if I have guarded my words this carefully for no purpose, then I will fight the man who made it so.

So instead of talking about what a particular day this isn't, I can take the space to ramble about a topic I've been meaning to ramble about since before I could speak, I believe. That of courage. And today a specific part of courage that is the ability to gut your friends or to destroy beautiful things. There exists a spiritual greatness akin to the courage that you may commonly think of whose concern is the doing of unwelcome tasks. It is closer still, but not memechose with the courage of a paladin wading through a legion of the undead, his sworn charge to slay. I have little use of righteous courage, whose common function today is to summon forth vitriol and venom in confused children, and make people stand on platitudes and chairs. Indeed I try to corral that kind of courage when I see it, though courage it is.
For today, I will call it grit that I mean to say; that part of courage whose concern is the doing of unwelcome tasks. But still finer, a specific kind of unwelcome task. The tragic kind. The kind you would really rather just leave alone and hope for the best. The kind that makes you take a gun to Old Yeller. The kind that makes you break ties, fight friends, start emo punk bands (no one really wants to do this), or take out stinky trash.
Grit is I think the kind of courage I have the most of, and the kind that is never really characterized as courage. So while I'm characterizing myself in a favorable light, perhaps I could go on a tangent or twelve about how great I am. Grit, though, is what President Harding lacked that led him to his famous quote about his friends and enemies, which I suppose I should send you off to see for yourself now that I've mentioned it. If you're in touch with the Starcraft storyline, there was a helluva lot of grit flying around in space in that story, and in particular in an exchange between Admiral DuGalle and Alexi Stukov. Even if you can't feel grit's presence, you should be able to behold the physical evidence if you're keen to the clues.

Which reminds me of the grander, more general point about what I do. Almost all spiritual exchange has corporeal evidence. A change in one world reflect by a change in another. Ancient witch doctors were concerned with the spirits of the wind and the stones, but modernly I am only keenly concerned about the spirits of the living, and for their sake I observe the physical evidence of the spirit at work.
In the case of grit, you may see a gnashing of teeth in extreme cases, but mostly just careful prep breathing, other kinds of careful breathing, pauses while considering friends at times when automatic aquiesence would be more appropriate or at least more expected. That pause is getting through the grit.

And of course, after all of this, I have a powerful hankering for some good buttery grits. True grits.

I never could resist a good fool's joke a day late. Not even since before I was born.

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