Having been almost a week since I've worked (the public schools get a four day weekend for President's day), the following thought occured to me today:

You know that you have too much time on your hands when you catch yourself thinking, "OK, one more game of PacMan, then I have to to go downstairs and watch Buffy."

In any case, I've also been browsing aroudn stuff up for the Strange Horizon's reader's choice award ("Inside the Tower" and "A Field Guide to Ugly Places" are shoe-ins, but you can pick up to five) and I read A Coffee Cup/Alien Invasion Story by Douglas Lain, which is the best short story I've read in a long, long time...it's got to be one of my new favorite examples of an extremely non-traditional format that really, really works...the story itself is interspersed with long, non-fiction digressions from the perspective of the actual author, like "this story is a metaphor for the 'new normal' post-9/11" and "this is what has been described as a coffee cup/New Yorker format of a story, where not much happens, but..." that really work and are of course integral to the whole project.

Actually, out of non-traditional, non-linear writing style things I think this is my second favorite, right next to Robert Anton Wilson's psuedo-pulp lyrical-psychadelic tour d'force "Masks of the Illuminati" (if you haven't read it, I honestly don't know how to describe it, but it's a thing of beauty...again, that's "Masks of the Illuminati", not to be confused with the more famous "The Illuminatus Trilogy.") Anyway, "A Coffee Cup/Alien Invasion Story" is very short, readable and extremely entertaining.