. . . . . entries for 29.11.10 . . . . .
Oh, the writing challenge.
. . . . . entries for 28.11.10 . . . . .
And you: you are a good friend of mine, but you are only human, and I am human too. When I am busy, or when my door is closed, it means the same thing as when you are busy, or when your door is closed. It means, "respect me." I wish you would.
Fearless Leaders: sometimes I want to kill you. Or at least, I don't know, inflict serious pain on you in order to induce you to realize how bad you are at leading, fearlessly or otherwise.
You know, I just don't know how to feel: glowingly happy that I love my boyfriend so much and had such a phenomenal break with him, or incredibly frustrated with myself for failing to knuckle down, push everything else aside, and focus on my goddamn future. Our future, for that matter.
I don't know if I'm cut out for what I am trying to act like I'm cut out for - but then, if I thought of other things I might be cut out for (e.g., some sort of teaching, some sort of counseling), there would be problems with those too. So I just don't know. I just can't quite say.
. . . . . entries for 27.11.10 . . . . .
Yeeeeep, as always.
Your results:
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Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz
Thanksgiving was nice. I brought a Frank to my cousins' house and we met the newest, cutest member of our Thanksgiving brigade, whose name is Emma and who likes to dance, give high-fives, be around lots of laughing people, and tire out her very charming mother.
So now it's sort of officially The Holiday Season. If you are reading this blog I probably intend to get a present or presents for you. SO WHAT DO YOU WANT?
. . . . . entries for 24.11.10 . . . . .
When will I focus? What a question.
. . . . . entries for 23.11.10 . . . . .
Some people say "don't murder your unborn children" and I say "don't murder mine,
or my grandchildren's grandchildren,
or yours."
-
This wasn't important enough to make it to the house floor when the Democrats had a supermajority in both houses. No, it's not that it was voted down, it's not that it didn't make it out of committee: it's that it emerged from committee intact, and Pelosi just didn't think she had time for it. She tucked it away. She perhaps said "oh, maybe later," and perhaps said "never."
What about your grandchildren's grandchildren? What about all the ways we could protect them without incurring choruses of "cap and tax?"
No one could explain to her - maybe no one tried. But someone in that chain of hopefuls for H.R. 3247 failed and instead cut another strand that tied me to hope for help from our damnable federal government, hope for that change we were supposed to believe in, hope for someone saying "no, you don't have to do it on your own."
Well, I guess we do. So suit up, Rest of America: it's time to save your grandkids' grandkids. We aren't without allies, whether they be local governments, nonprofits, or mindblowingly keen-eyed corporate powers like Google. We can do it, with their help. We'll see if the feds want to hop on the bandwagon but if not, it's time to leave them behind.
. . . . . entries for 20.11.10 . . . . .
Reading the modcloth blog has increased my conviction that, in addition to the Princeton cocoa crawl (wherein Princetonians disinclined to the Prospect 10 drink cocoa at five or six different establishments in town in one night), the froomies and I will have to do some dire thrift store shopping before we leave. What kind of indie kids would we be otherwise?
. . . . . entries for 19.11.10 . . . . .
I don't think I've ever had a strong urge to sink into a hot tub before, but holy cow do I ever have one now.
. . . . . entries for 18.11.10 . . . . .
I'm afraid this thing where I alternate daily between enthusiasm and anxious stand-stillery is going to keep going.
You know what, even if I become a respectable person one day, this blog will never be respectable. I will password protect it and tuck it away from prying public eyes if need be, and get a webpage in clean colors, without an effusively bildungsroman-y years-old header graphic, to be respectable on. But hot damn, I've had this thing since I was 12. How could I ever act like an adult on it?
- and, I mean, the URL would never allow it either.
I was going to put this as a comment to another blog, but it's too much about me to go justifiably into someone else's space, so:
"ohne Heimweh, ohne Heimat" -Farin Urlaub
Maybe it would be easier, around this time of our lives, not to have a strong sense of what we want our eventual home to be like - or a place or feeling or person we call home already. For all the wise words purveyed about the journey of the undergraduate from the broad and exploratory intellect to the particular drive, we often aren't in the position to direct our fate the way the charming American dream narrative would suggest we may. Especially now, what with "the economy" and all.
But I'm sort of a nester, and can't help it. So as luck, destiny, or the weird whims of admissions committees and HR departments sort us all out, I'll just be crossing my fingers and asking whatever powers may be not to put me too far from home.
- and that, I add in retrospect, notwithstanding the fact that we do have some role to play in the mastery of our fates and captaining of our souls and et cetera. It's just that we don't have as big a part as we tend to believe. It certainly feels better to be able to say "well, I tried!" though - so I will.
Trying, being tried, acting as if.
I finally got up (after staying up until, I don't know, 4?) because I had a freakout moment that I'd signed one of my applications with the wrong date. I hadn't. I'm just super frazzled.
HRGL
A conservative fellow HUMorist of mine recommends this site. I don't know whether it's morbid curiosity, or wanting to know one's enemy, or what, but . . . I didn't want to lose the link, anyway.
Statements of purpose are intimidating.
. . . . . entries for 16.11.10 . . . . .
I don't wanna: reprise.
. . . . . entries for 15.11.10 . . . . .
Some people just seem completely incapable of listening.
. . . . . entries for 14.11.10 . . . . .
Families, eh?
Living for others is well and good, but no one lives at all if not, in large part, for themselves. And so live for yourself, and well, and I will do the same. Times are that will mean a long guilty ache for how I have not lived for you, or how I have missed you, or worst of all how you have given parts of me back to winds to find their way elsewhere, parts I meant for you to keep (but how could you, and how could I ask you to when I have just put my memories of you in drawers?).
And it really seems ridiculous to make it an either/or, to say "now I must devote myself to me and not to you," but I am an addict for the people and things that I love, and not for my own "self-interest rightly understood," or even wrongly understood. I am already being melodramatic and my inclination is to throw my head back and swoon "oh it's impossible! just impossible!" though it isn't. I wonder if it is still possible for me to be reasonable and pick an hour to call, whether or not anyone else can or wants to. Am I so obviously and unforgivably unreasonable already that it's a lost cause?
We in the West are awfully good at playing victim. We have been taught victim very well and thoroughly by our culture teachers. I dislike that about us. We are wimpy little first-worlders often so caught up in ourselves and in the urgency of Personal Achievement that those things overshadow others, or Others. We are the victims of our own expectations and neuroses, instead of survivors of ourselves.
I don't really know how to be different, but anyway, I'll try to get my head on straight enough to make the call, if you'll take it.
The things you do that are cruel, and you know it. The ways you try to make them seem kind.
. . . . . entries for 13.11.10 . . . . .
Today my procrastination method will be to edit my old stories from CWR for late and mildly (mildly, mildly) illegit submission to a certain lit mag. Better than Gaia?
Oh. And my propaganda group project might be completely borked. We'll see, I guess. Hrgl.
Well, I wanted to block Gaia, so I couldn't just tab over to it, but it looks like Chrome doesn't have a pre-packaged widget for that. So it's just me and my willpower.
And nothing is actually as hard or as overwhelming as I think it will be, once I do it. But it's still so hard to do it.
It seems like every couple of weeks I just break down. I don't know what I'm doing anymore and I can't make myself do it. Today was one of those days. I'm so bad at knowing how to be happy with myself, how to move forward without second guessing every step.
But, well, at least the planet isn't being invaded by fucking pod people, am I right?
. . . . . entries for 11.11.10 . . . . .
It's that time of year again, when SOME PEOPLE are asking what I want from Christmas. The things I want most (peace of mind re. grad school apps, a harmonious mental state, motivation and progress on my thesis, etc.) I have to get for myself, or at least no one can really get for me (good health for my friends and loved ones, good luck, hope for world peace and my theoretical grandkids not being underwater and on fire, etc.). From you, given that you are reading my blog, I hazard I mostly want snuggles. If you want to buy me a thing, here are some things I would not mind having.
-tapioca pearls for homemade bubble tea
-various and sundry internet T-shirts
-this: the "Advanced Dungeons and Discourse" print
-cute socks
-things that will remind me of you
-music you think I would like (including, e.g., Keane, Patrick Wolf, Sufjan Stevens, romantic composers, Louis XIV, Cake, that one new Regina Spektor album) or an iTunes gift card if you don't want to feed me some particular band's stuff
-neat organic/fair trade things (such as may be found here, among other places)
-good fantasy and perhaps sci fi novels to escape into/learn from
-pretty things to hang on my walls
-on the expensiveish side: a drawing tablet for my computer (like this)
. . . . . entries for 10.11.10 . . . . .
Oh, my sleep schedule is so very singularly borked, and it only took one night!
. . . . . entries for 9.11.10 . . . . .
On the one hand, he makes me seethe. On the other hand, I'd hate to lose track of him.
The title of this blog, according to blogger, is "power is good, but the power-hungry are evil." It's a holdout from these days:
It's not that they're evil, I think now. I am hard-pressed to call almost (almost) anything or anyone evil. But to think that getting more, more wealth, more power, more recognition, more influence, more prestige - to think that more of that is good, in and of itself, is so misled. To think that it will lead to happiness (and isn't that what you want, really? isn't it?) is wrong. To think that once you're there, if only you can get there, you can cease the mad striving and strive toward something different, toward something intrinsically good, well - it's like riding a bicycle over gravel to knock the ash off of a cigarette, as some witty someone-or-other once said. It's counterproductive laziness. It makes some kind of twisted sense, and it seems direct, a kind of path of least psychological resistance -
but listen.
You are not Atlas. Shrug if you need to, and you may, and that's fine. Count on those you love being there to take on the weight. And when you see someone struggling under a burden, be their shoulder. That is good. That is happiness, or what begets it, and what will keep it.
If you don't see it that way - if you would rather climb over your fellow man, rather than help him up - then I just don't know what to say to you. I don't think you're evil. But I do think you're wrong, and that if you keep living that way, and teaching your children that it's the way to live, your great-grandchildren are going to have an awfully rough time of it. Nevermind environmental sustainability - what about the sustainability of humanity, of community, of love? If love leaves us, there is nothing else to lean on, nothing to sustain or save us. "Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away."
. . . . . entries for 8.11.10 . . . . .
hell night hell night hell and IRB night
. . . . . entries for 7.11.10 . . . . .
Not that it helps: none of us has time for anything. But when someone is right there, with tears in his or her eyes, you make time. And it's infuriating to me, it's what drives my research, it's what burns me and makes me cry with joy or fear or hatred or sorrow - but me, too. I care most for what I'm closest to, in the most literal sense, and in the most actively behavioral sense of "care." So when I have to focus on me, have to, I pull away from the person who has leaned on me and whom I will support for the rest of my life. And when someone parts from me, even by accident, yes, it's true - out of sight, out of mind. Because there are so many other things to bustle into our minds, all the time.
I'm sorry.
Life update:
1. My boyfriend's father is in a medical situation from Hell - a slow, grating, suspenseful circle of Hell. If you are prayer-inclined, well, you know.
2. I have calc homework. Cause for facepalming at the absurd little not-funny insults of the universe. (Shoulda brought it to visit a certain someone who misses calc I guess. :P)
3. I have a presentation tomorrow, but it's a group presentation and I'm not doing the actual presenting, just answering questions afterwards, which could be good or bad. We'll see. I have a meeting for that imminently.
4. My IRB is due Wednesday. I have Quite A Lot Yet to Do with that, which I suppose I will worry about primarily tomorrow night, and maybe tonight if I plow through my calc homework with ruthless focus and fury. I have to get it to my advisor and grad student before it's actually due so they can tell me if I seriously fucked anything up.
5. I guess I'll probably take a grace week in social psych and not do much of the reading? maybe?
6. Visiting my boy was very nice. Just thought I'd throw that in there amongst all the horror and havoc. Even if I am not an especially graceful dance partner, I do like being one!
. . . . . entries for 2.11.10 . . . . .
As the country busily counts its if-not-damning-then-still-pretty-bleak votes today, I think: well, I'm applying to good grad programs, my thesis is funded, I have a beautiful and smart and kind boy, and I am endlessly, blissfully fortunate in the opportunities life has, through no virtue of my own, offered me. So in those respects I am happy.
But the world is not in a state to be happy with itself, and I am not the type to be untroubled by that.
There is an election being called tonight and I am observing results start to trickle in online and I am worried, worried, worried and mad, mad, mad at Democrats for dragging their feet and playing nice and just not having the goddamn backbone - why don't they have the goddamn backbone?
. . . . . entries for 1.11.10 . . . . .
So far I have a B in calc! So, um, that could be worse.
I'm in boy-visiting mode. We went waltzing two nights ago. It was neat, even if I am new to waltzing and therefore not especially graceful at it. :P
I am also in break mode, and by way of that in self-motivation-for-IRB-and-applications mode. Hrgl.
come home?
.:people:.
{ting}
she looks like the real thing
{mari}
out and about
[kelsey]
THIS IS AMERICA
{yianni}
stop being depressed
{alisa}
other
[shannon]
close and far
{frank}
islands where no islands should go
[cassie]
eating knowledge
{colin}
my dm
[emily]
shoulder to the wheel
[brian]
nostalgic for fantasy
[nicole]
industry insider
{elle}
angry enviro
[matt]
never heard of miyazaki
[pirate dan]
are you reading this?
[olga]
distracted
[messiah dan]
messiah/believer
{max}
approach focus
[natalie]
wait a minute
[susan]
solitude
{greg}
manbeargreg
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.:skin:.
turtles! turtles! by araglas
(heavily modified by yours truly)