2007-01-30 - 6:31 p.m.

...sleep and news stories that attract your morbid curiosity in the same manner as a train wreck would....

Eegads I came home early today and crashed SLAM into bed. I fell asleep on the skytrain on my way home, and fortunately woke up in time to drag my body up the street to my house. Into my bed. Into a sleep coma with two cats thrilled by the prospect of getting to steal the bed away from someone.

Guess I don't need to mention that I didn't go for a run as planned. sigh.

I guess the teaching is still exhausting me, even though I'm not actually preparing lectures right now. Well, I am doing a LOT of individual, hour-long meetings with students to help them with their literature searches. But I hardly see that as a reason for feeling so beat. So I'm puzzled.

**

So, yesterday evening I came home and started leafing through the weekly news magazine - the one that my mother sends to me every Christmas - and I came across a photo of a famous pizza parlor that was about a mile from my house when I grew up. Not FAMOUS, really, but I drove past this pizza parlor almost every day, and here it is in newsweek magazine. And it turns out that it employs a guy who has just been apprehended for kidnapping and abusing two boys. Yes, that big famous story that was in the new a few weeks ago.

I'm normally not one to read these trainwreck kind of stories, but the pizza parlor sucked me in. This monster who kidnapped the boys is close enough to my age that we could have overlapped in high school. And he was already working in that very same pizza parlor when I lived there. That was kind of freaky.

Of course, it didn't take much for me to discover that this little pizza place has since become a massive chain and is all over the city, and not just the one or two little stores that I knew as a kid.