Down for the Count

The end is in sight:

10 days until everything is due

7 more classes to go to

3 more days of school

2.5 papers to write

1 book to read

…and then that’s it! Whatever happens after that is out of my control, and that’s a great feeling!

24

Two big things have happened in the last 24 hours:

1. My productivity has ground to a screaching halt (due in part to my extreme annoyance)

2. I received a box including penguin soap my dad made

That’s right, it’s penguin soap and it’s awesome!

If I don’t turn in any papers at least I’ll be squeaky clean!

Gobble Gobble

Good freinds+bad movies+mediocre food=the best Thanksgiving I’ve had in years!

Happy Black Friday everyone, let the madness begin!

Why I Want to Move

Diana: (flinging my bedroom door open) We should swim today! I must exercise or I cannot write.

Me: (from the floor where I’m furiously typing a paper) I’m going running, you can come if you want.  I don’t feel like swimming though.

Diana: (looking insulted) Oh. Well. Let me know.

Me: Right. Sorry, I’m just really busy here. I’m trying to get this theory paper done.

Diana: I’m on fifth page. How are you?

Me: Still compiling my notes.

Diana: I’m further than you.

Me: Yes, I see that.

(several minutes pass before I walk to the kitchen to make tea)

Diana: (stamping on the floor with her feet) I have too much to do! There is just too much! How am I supposed to get it all done! It is impossible! Just impossible!

Me: (walking to the kitchen, unconcerned) You’ll get it done.

Diana: (grabbing the dolphin poster off her wall and throwing it across the room) No! Too much! Just too much! Just imagine, so much!

Me: (shielding my mug from debris, closing my bedroom door, and trying not to laugh) You’ll be fine.

Anyone have a spare couch? Apparently I’m living in an insane asylum.

The Creative Process at Work…Ahem.

I’ve officially hit my end-of-semester groove; I’ve finally started my papers!  And by “started my papers” I mean that I’ve cleaned my room and have clothes in the dryer and am now contemplating cleaning my bathroom.  Oh, I’ve highlighted a bunch of stuff too.  Eventually this will give way to scrubbing, and finally writing.

This gives me faith though, this is how I work.  First I clean anything and everything I can get my hands on.  Then I start organizing, first my closet and desk, slowly working my way towards my notes.  Then I color-code everything.  And finally, I drink my weight in coffee and stay up for two days straight writing.

My professors have always begrudged me my inability to make outlines, but I think it’s because they are never privy to this process.  Because really, if they could see the vacuum tracks in my carpet, they would totally get it.

C’est Vrai

The semester is nearly at a close.  I’m up to my ears in theory, papers, reading, and work.

It’s Thanksgiving break for me this week. It’s not a break as much as it is quality work/study time.

I’ve started running again.  I have amazing friends.  I drink too much.  I spend too much time goofing off.  I’m continually late for class.  I lost 5 pounds and dropped a jeans size.  I just bought super cute boots on super sale.  I try to read my Bible every morning.  I play with my cat every evening.  I can’t find my bedroom floor because I’ve stopped being a neat freak.  I made chili today and it was awesome.  Even though it hurts to breathe cold weather makes me happy.  I stay up all night making collages more often than I stay up all night studying.  I love really dumb TV shows and bad pop lit but have exceptional taste in music.  I’m ok with being mildly over-dramatic and slightly eccentric.

I guess what I’m saying is…I’m happy.

It’s true.

800 Miles

Katharine: (turning up her TV) Can you hear this?

Me: (pressing the phone to my ear) Wait. Hold on.

Katharine: Are we on?

Me: Checking…Yes! It’s perfect!!

Katharine: (reading from her TV screen) “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2″

Me: (happy sigh) Yay.

Katharine: Ok, let’s just sit back and watch a movie together.

Me: I heart you! (pause) We’ve really got to move to the same state…

The Million Dollar Question

Girl on TV: Why I did it? How the hell I’m supposed to know why I did it? Not like I sit here and analyze myself like some kinna freak.

Nick: How does she not?! I wish I was that lucky.

It’s the million dollar question, my dear.  I wish I could be that lucky for a day, too.

Four A.M.

The hour between night and day.

The hour between toss and turn.

The hour of thirty-year-olds.

The hour swept clean for rooster’s crowing.

The hour when the earth takes back its warm embrace.

The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars.

The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace.

Empty hour.

Hollow. Vain.

Rock bottom of all the other hours.

No one feels fine at four a.m.

If ants feel fine at four a.m.,

we’re happy for the ants.  And let five a.m. come

if we’ve got to go on living.

Wisława Szymborska

Not a Pretty Sight

Apparently our house is a little more addicted to the internet than I thought.  We didn’t have internet/phone/cable from Friday-Monday because of an error, and it was not a pretty sight.

The scary thing? I still didn’t do any homework in that time.

Ow.

My birthday ended up being really awesome.

Didn’t really sleep much though, and spent a lot of today recovering.

Thanks, everyone :)

Winter

I should know who I am by now
I walk the record stand somehow
Thinkin’ of winter
The name is the splinter inside me
While I wait

And I remember the sound
Of your November downtown
And I remember the truth
A warm December with you

But I don’t have to make this mistake
And I don’t have to stay this way
If only I would wake

The walk has all been cleared by now
Your voice is all I hear somehow
Calling out winter
Your voice is the splinter inside me
While I wait

And I remember the sound
Of your November downtown
And I remember the truth
A warm December with you
But I don’t have to make this mistake
And I don’t have to stay this way
If only I would wake

I could have lost myself
In rough blue waters in your eyes
And I miss you still

Oh I remember the sound
Of your November downtown
And I remember the truth
A warm December with you
But I don’t have to make this mistake
And I don’t have to stay this way
If only I would wake

Joshua Radin

Early Bird Gets the Nightmare

I’ve been falling asleep in the early hours of the morning and waking up at the crack of dawn all week.  And not even because I’m being super productive. It’s 8:15 on a Friday morning, I don’t have to be to work until 11:00, and Jovie Cat and I have been up since 6:00 because I can’t stop having nightmares.  The worst part of them isn’t that B and E are in them, but that no matter what I do I can’t make them stop.

Needless to say this put me in an awesome mood.  Today I have to go to buyback training at the bookstore, meet my mom for lunch, and go out for dinner and drinks.  Which apparently means I have to fit a nap in there somewhere so I’m not super bitchy or out after 2 drinks. Oh yeah? Did I mention it’s my birthday?

Hurrah. Happy freaking birthday, Jocelyn.

Shroud

“I ask what I have asked already: what did it benefit me to take on his identity?  It must be, simply, that it was not so much that I wanted to be him–although I did, I did want to be him–but that I wanted so much more not to be me.  That is to say, i desired to escape my own individuality, the hereness of my self, not the thereness of my world…Yet I have lived as him fo so long I can scarcely remember what it was like to be the one that I once was…I pause in uncertainty, losing my way in this welter of personal, impersonal, impersonating, pronouns.”

“If, as I believe, as I insist, there is no essential, singular self, what is it exactly I am supposed to have escaped by pretending to be [him]?”

“To be someone else is to be one thing, and one thing only.  I think of an actor in the ancient world…The crowd knows him but cannot remember his name…He has a mask, he has had it for years; it is his talisman…Increasingly, indeed, he thinks the mask is more like his face than his face is.  At the end of a performance when he takes it off he wonders if the other actors can see him at all, or if he is just a head with a blank front…”

John Banville.

There are times when our own words are simply not enough.  Finding the words of others  makes us feel less alone, reminds us we are not the only ones who struggle.  My words are jumbled, they have no coherent meaning.  They are a sporadic Scrabble game played with a dyslexic, a crossword puzzle in a foreign language.  Even I don’t know what I mean anymore.  I want a break from words, but they haunt me.  They follow me around, springing up in my head in the middle of the night, while I drive, in the shower; my words appear in others’ books, they spill into essays, show up on the sides of buildings and Coke cans.  They find me on sidewalks, crosswalks, overpasses, bridges, trains, parking lots, posters, textbooks, novels, films, stores.  They never leave.

No matter where I go, words find me.  And so I leave a breadcrumb trail of crumpled papers smeared with potentially incomprehensible haikus.

Someday, they will all come together and create something beautiful.  In this alone I have faith.

Crystal Ball

Who is the man I see
Where I’m supposed to be?
I lost my heart, I buried it too deep
Under the iron sea

Oh, crystal ball, crystal ball
Save us all, tell me life is beautiful
Mirror, mirror on the wall

Lines ever more unclear
Not sure I’m even here
The more I look the more I think that I’m
Starting to disappear

Oh, crystal ball, crystal ball
Save us all, tell me life is beautiful
Mirror, mirror on the wall
Oh, crystal ball, hear my song
I’m fading out, everything I know is wrong
So put me where I belong

I don’t know where I am
And I don’t really care
I look myself in the eye
There’s no-one there
I fall upon the earth
I call upon the air
But all I get is the same old vacant stare

Oh, crystal ball, crystal ball
Save us all, tell me life is beautiful
Mirror, mirror on the wall
Oh, crystal ball, hear my song
I’m fading out, everything I know is wrong
So put me where I belong

Keane

This is getting old, I’m more than ready for it to just be over.

Oh, and about the obsessive amount of lyrics lately…it’s how I deal.