The Birthday

The office baby has now turned 23...and still remains the office baby. Honestly, I find it hilarious every time someone re-realizes how young I am. I guess I'm just grown-up for my age? Or maybe at this point in life age lines are just starting to soften and blur. Twas a good birthday weekend and I got lots of cool stuff from family and friends including this:

Swanky, isn't it? I discovered The Sandman about four years ago in a DIY Scifi class in college. The class was run as a typical lecture/discussion format for a few weeks and then we all broke out into small groups to study an area of science fiction that we were interested in. One group looked at science fiction in comics and used an issue of The Sandman in their final presentation. I'm not sure that they actually cited who the writer had been, but I remembered the storyline and a while later when I found out that Neil Gaiman (the writer) had done a series of comics, I set out to read it. Lo and behold, a few issues in, I came across the issue from the scifi class again. Instant love!

If you haven't read anything by Neil Gaiman, I highly recommend it. My first venture into his work was coincidentally enough also in that DIY Scifi class, which I think may have been the best class I took at IC. (That and a more traditional format scifi class with the same professor, kathryn, who was one of the best teachers I encountered there). Gaiman has a way with weaving together all sorts of old myths and modern day that never ceases to fascinate. For the class, we read American Gods, as I was in the group taking a peek into the role that religion plays in science fiction novels. Although I don't consider myself to be very religious, its fascinating to see how religions morph in the hands of scifi writers.