What Have You Done for Me Lately?

So in case you're wondering to yourself, "You know, Raelist hasn't been blogging much, lately.  I wonder what he's up to?" the answer is, not a whole heckuva lot.  Recent accomplishments include:

- Surviving the holidays, mostly.  In the sense that I've survived thus far, but with both the E-i-C's birthday and Valentine's Day coming up, I can only say that the holidays are mostly over.

- New job.  I'm still working at the same place, but I have a new position.  It's new both in the sense that it's new for me, and in that I will be the first person to hold this position at our agency, ever.  So I'm sort of making it up as I go along.  Wish me luck.

- Returning to Japanese class.  This starts again in two days.  I'm taking it easy (hopefully) the first go-round by re-taking Intermediate 4, which is where I left off a year ago. I need to get back in the swing of things, though.  I already feel that I'm losing what I had.

- My gnome mage hit level 70 last night.  19 days, 23 hours, 32 minutes play time.  I'm going to clear out some quests in Netherstorm, then grind Consortium rep to get the Elemental Seaforium Charge schematic, so I can build a flying machine.  If you don't WoW, this achievement means nothing to you.  But let me explain that the above "play time" stat means 479.5 solid hours of computer gaming.

- Reading the Gormenghast novels by Mervyn Peake.  I've almost finished the second book, Gormenghast.  I've been intrigued by this world since a friend lent me the BBC miniseries DVDs.  The prose is amazing, and kind of weird.  The vocabulary is enormous - although I confess I usually just guess from context, if I were carrying a dictionary with me when reading (on the train, at lunch), I'd be looking up about a word a chapter (short chapters).  Examples include "pranked" (not in the jokester sense), "prate," "hawser," "equipoise," and on and on.  And the intricacies of the sentences can be truly exquisite.  To wit:

"To Titus they seemed curiously alive, these copses.  For each copse appeared singularly unlike any other one, though they were about equal in size and were exclusively a blend of ash and sycamore.

"But it was plain to see that whereas the nearest of these groups to Titus was in an irritable state, not one of the trees having anything to do with his neighbour, their heads turned away from one another, their shoulders shrugged, yet not a hundred feet away another spinney was in a condition of suspended excitement, as with the heads of its trees bowed together above some green and susurrous secret."

See what I mean?  What is more odd is that Peake will spring an unusual word on you, two hundred pages into the book, to describe something that's been omnipresent throughout the story... and then use the same word in the same sense two pages later.  He did this with "umbrageous," in the sense of "shadowy," which I assure you is an exceedingly common description in the story.  I can't tell if this was intentional, in the sort of way that a poem repeats a rhyme or theme, or if it was accidental and the result of poor editing.  The prose is so elaborate that it's difficult to believe the latter.