I got out of the shower just now and heard Mark's parents downstairs talking with the rest of my family. Oy vey. I'm sure they're lovely people, and I have nothing against them or Mark or anyone else here, but I just don't want to deal with this right now. Oh, and did I mention that Mark's parents will be bedding in the loft just outside my bedroom?
All things being equal, chances are I'm not going to be doing much, if any, traveling outside the confines of my room for ... well, close to three weeks here. Granted, Mark's parents will be leaving the house this coming weekend for a motorcycle tour of Michigan (don't ask), and I would gladly leave here if Penny and I can work out a plan for me to visit with her during her break from classes, but still ... all I can say is it's a good thing I have so many books and video games to keep me occupied here.
Right now USA Network is re-running the "kidney donor" episode of SVU that NBC ran a couple of weeks ago. Granted, my love of this episode in particular may be influenced by my love of Marlee Matlin (come on, who doesn't love her?), but in terms of writing I can't recall a stronger episode of SVU off the top of my head. I realize they couldn't end the season with this episode since Mariska isn't in it, but I still think it would have served as a better closure to the season than last week's episode.
Anyway, I'm still trying to sort through things here. You'll notice the lack of diet log entries the past few days, for the simple reason that I have to turn to food as a coping mechanism right now because so many of my other coping mechanisms have failed me and I don't have anything else to turn to. Thankfully I've still got a strong distaste for fatty foods after the last time I was off-diet, so right now I'm mostly just drinking a lot of Sobe and other beverages. I'll still put on pounds since I can't exercise to burn off the extra carbs (I'm probably still a few days away from my ankle healing well enough to play DDR), but a little weight gain now is acceptable for me given the comfort the extra food is giving me. It's stupid, I know, but believe me, I wouldn't do this if I had anything else to turn to.
There's one step I know I have to take to make myself better, and since I know some people are reading this who can get the word out to other people, I'll just announce it here: Effective immediately, I will no longer be participating in Spectrum in any way, shape, or form. I want off the membership roll, I want off the e-mail list, and with the exception of a few people who probably know who they are already, I don't want anything to do with anyone in Spectrum. I would ask that all Spectrum members who currently own anything of mine (my keyboards, my videotapes, my other personal property) please bring those items up -- fully assembled -- to UT's English Department office (fifth floor of University Hall) so I can pick them up later.
I'll have more to write later, but for now I think I just need some more time alone here.
After my last post Thursday night, more things piled on top of me and I just got to the point where I seriously thought I was about to lose it. I barely slept at all for fear of the dreams I might have had like that.
These past couple of days I've basically just unplugged and disconnected from everything. I've given myself time to think about everything that was bothering me, and while I can't say that everything's been fixed, I've started working on fixing things.
I'll have more to say later, but for now I just wanted everyone to know I'm still here, still alive and in one piece. Oh, and my cell phone's working again, in case anyone's tried to call me this past week or so and hasn't been able to.
These past forty-eight hours or so have been ... well, look, they haven't been what most of you would call "bad," all right? I still have my house, I still have my family, I still have all my fingers and toes, and I'm grateful for that. But it just seems like every other little thing has been going wrong here, and my coping mechanisms are seriously starting to fail me.
Start with the fact that I'm probably off of DDR for a while now thanks to my ankle that refuses to heal itself. Don't forget I have a weigh-in early next week, and my main source of exercise (and unquestionably the most intense) has been cut off from me. Add to that the fact that I seem to have plateaued in my chess-playing ability at a level far below that I was expecting to plateau at, and now the whole game's just become one big frustration to me. I also haven't been getting anything checked off of my summer to-do list, and I can't get my schedule around so that I can go to Wildwood to read in the afternoons like I'd been hoping to.
Now on top of everything else, I'm just finding out today that my brother-in-law's parents are coming here on Monday and then staying with us for the next three weeks. Yeah. No one in this family ever bothers to tell me shit. Every time I go out grocery shopping, I always go around and see if anyone here needs anything (and if they do, I usually end up footing the bill for whatever I buy for them), but when anyone else makes a grocery run do they bother to ask me what I need? No, they don't, thanks for asking.
I know I shouldn't be complaining about anything right now. For the next three months or so I have no school, no job, and hardly any responsibilities at all. Most people my age would kill for an opportunity like this, and I have it, but all that seems to happen is that small stuff like this goes wrong, and I get super-upset about it. I'm not saying there aren't some other things going on here (lingering anger about school stuff, for one), but right now I just feel like shit and I don't know what to do.
The worst part is, I can feel myself slipping off-diet here. I haven't done anything to go off-diet yet, but every time I open the freezer downstairs (which I have to do a lot since I'm icing my bad ankle) I see my parents' ice cream and I have absolutely no idea what is stopping me from going down there right now and scarfing a whole bunch of it down.
Anyway, I'm done being emo for now, at least online. I figure when I get like this, it's better for me to just shut my big mouth and not say anything lest I get myself (or others) into any more trouble. Sorry if I inconvenienced you with this entry.
Well, I just had the most interesting nightmare about one of you. Well, not one of you in physical appearance, but based on the things I was saying in the nightmare it's clear it was a representation of one of you. My unconscious was trying to remind me yet again that it's really not good to avoid following through on something I know I need to do out of fear that it might shatter one of my precious little fantasies. I'm so hopeless, I know.
(Edited later to correct I-shouldn't-blog-when-I've-just-woken-up typos.)
Baton passed to me by Don "Cornelius" Becker ...
Total Volume Of Music On My Computer: According to Windows Explorer, my "My Music" folder has a whopping 105 MB of files on it. Sorry, I've never been much into MP3s.
The Last CD I Bought Was: David Lanz, Romantic
(You don't know how long I've waited to have a CD-quality copy of the orchestral version of "Madre de la Tierra," seriously.)
Song Playing Right Now: Nothing. Last night I think the last song I played was John Singer's "Sakura" as I was studying Japanese. (It's a legal MP3, go ahead and download it.)
Five Songs I Listen To A Lot, or Mean A Lot To Me:
Five People To Whom I Am Passing the Baton:
I am not feeling that well right now. That isn't to say I'm sick, because I'm not, but every 36-48 hours, all of a suddden I start producing a whole bunch of mucus that clogs up my nose and my bronchial tubes. It goes away after a few hours, but I can't find any cause for it; it happens morning or night, whether I'm inside or out, and whether or not I've been exposed to anything that could possibly cause this kind of reaction in me. I don't know what's causing it, but neither Benadryl nor Sudafed seem to help, and while at this point it's more annoying than anything else, it could cause me some big problems here.
Check that: it has already caused me big problems because I had a hard time getting to sleep last night when one of these attacks hit me out of the blue as I laid down to bed. It probably didn't help that I didn't exercise yesterday (I was resting my bad ankle) and, to be honest, I overate last night as I cleared all my non-diet food out of the house. It was stupid, and believe me, with as bad as I feel now I've got no cravings for fatty foods at this point. Hopefully now I've gotten all of that out of my system for a while and I can really go hardcore here on the diet for a while.
More to say, but Music from the Hearts of Space is about to come on, and I'd like to get some work done while it's on. I'll have more here later, and more about the diet over on the diet log (although I won't post there until late tonight since I won't be getting to DDR until after midnight tonight).
So far I don't think I'm doing as well of a job on my summer to-do list as I'd like. My room is a little cleaner, I've played a little Final Fantasy VII, I've spent some time scratching Skooter, but it doesn't feel like I've done much. I haven't even gotten to any of my reading yet, and that may be the highest priority of all here over break. (In fairness, I like to do my reading outside during the day -- like at Wildwood -- but my schedule's still a bit messed up from being at the lock-in last Saturday.)
One thing I have done well is start my Japanese lessons back up. I'm going kind of slow here, but I'm doing a little every day and I think I should be back at my old peak by the start of August. The only thing I wish is that I had more traditional Japanese music to listen to while studying, particularly solo shakuhachi or shakuhachi and koto. I've got a few MP3s I've downloaded (legally) from John Singer's Website, but I can only listen to the same three tracks for so long, and Media Play's foreign music selection isn't what it should be. Given that I need to buy some books for the methodology of the composition course I'll be teaching in the fall, I think I smell an Amazon order coming ...
One thing I've been doing a lot of that isn't on my to-do list is playing chess. I didn't get a chance to play too much over the end of the semester there, and quite honestly I do think that studying and playing chess increases my mental faculties. Over time I think I may join the USCF again (I was a member for a year during high school although I never actually played a rated match), but for now I think I'll be okay just playing on my XBox.
Another thing I've been thinking about doing is learning Visual Basic again so I can take the meal-planning software I created a while back, and move it from its proprietary format to something that anyone with a (Windows) computer can use. Then again, I know from experience how much of a burden programming can be, and that task may be too big for me to handle with everything else I have to do here. (Besides, I'd GPL anything I released anyway, so it's not like I could make any money off of it.)
In addition to all the papers I was working on at the end of the term, I also submitted an abstract for a conference on women in rock and the influence authors/books have had on them. Just now I got an e-mail saying that my abstract has been accepted, so this fall I'll be driving over to Wisconsin to give a paper on the influence Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye had on Björk, particularly her song "Hyperballad" (which seems the most obvious instance of Bataille influencing Björk). Sounds cool (especially since I know UT has a fund to help me with travel expenses and such), and things like this are supposed to be the ticket to me being able to pursue doctoral work and getting tenure and such.
Just keep in mind, getting a couple of my poems published and winning that fiction award were supposed to be the keys to me getting into grad school for creative writing, and we all remember how well that turned out.
Anyway, I'm really getting sick of how Internet Explorer keeps freezing up on me after I installed Norton Utilities a while ago. It's not like I can uninstall Norton, and I'm not ready to make the move to another browser yet. I'd still like to move to Linux here eventually, but for right now tasks involving school and my music are keeping me stuck with Windows. Soon, though, I will rid myself of all this Microsoft crap ... except for my XBox because of its DDR games and ... sigh, I'm not much of a rebel, am I? :(
Gee, last week when I was goofing off, it seemed like all I wanted to do was be responsible and get to the tasks I have for this summer. Now that I've started getting to those tasks, all I want to do now is lay here and be a lazy turd. I realize that people are made up of their contraries, but I think my contraries get to be pretty fucking ridiculous a whole lot of the time.
Just now I was going through some of my old cookbooks trying to find recipes for my diet that will help me incorporate more beans and veggies and stuff into my meals. Not only did I not find anything I think I can use directly (although I have inspiration now to try some combinations myself), but I've come to realize just how much I hate most cookbook authors. I hate those blurbs they put in about how much their nieces like this dish or how this dish is best served in the autumn and so on. I don't give a crap, just give me the damn recipe. Granted, some authors can write blurbs that don't incite these reactions in me (Emeril Lagasse, for one), but for the most part I just hate looking at cookbooks because of those insipid blurbs.
Anyway, I'm about to watch The Daily Show, then Japanese lessons and maybe a bit of songwriting. Wasn't I laying on my bed eating ice cream and playing mindless video games just a few days ago? Le sigh.
Lonely Students Show Weaker Immunity -- Yahoo! News
So that explains why I kept getting so sick these past couple of semesters ...
We're finally getting some good thunderstorms in here tonight. Even if a lightning strike was likely what caused the fire a few years ago, I still love thunderstorms -- the smells, the charged air, the crack and boom of thunder and lightning -- and it's been too long since we've had one. Unfortunately it may interfere with my plans to DDR tonight, after my delayed birthday dinner tonight. (I get Mancino's and don't even have to go out to get it.)
I've been taking care of all the food cravings I've had recently this past week. I've been having some pretty nasty stuff, but I've been having it in moderation. I've definitely put on a bit of weight here, but nothing too serious. I almost can't wait to get back on my diet here, to be honest.
Similarly, next week when I start working on my Japanese and my MA exam reading, I'm hoping that will help take my mind off of the things that have preoccupied me this last week. I tend to dwell on negative things in my life a lot to start with, but especially this past week when I've tried to give myself as much relaxation time as possible, it's just led to some real depressive spells for me. Some vacation, huh?
I just wanted to say this now because I'm sure he'll get confirmed here in a short while: Appointing John Bolton as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations is like appointing Marilyn Manson as the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. It's just too fucked-up an idea to even consider.
Anyway, being a lazy turd these past few days has been ... not as fulfilling as you'd think. I actually caught myself yesterday thinking that I wasn't doing a good enough job of squandering my time. I know, most of you rarely, if ever, get opportunities like this, and believe me, there are at least a couple of you I wish I could help out with now.
I really don't know what this summer is going to bring, what with all the reading I have to do and all. I just hope I do get to travel down south again here soon, because I do miss my friends down there real bad. Especially after what went down those last few weeks of school, I really don't have anyone here in town I can phone up and spend an evening with.
The plan to stay in bed today worked for all of about two hours. Then I realized that when I take things to that level of inactivity, I tend to dwell on some pretty damn depressing thoughts and I can't work my way around them by just laying down. So now I have to distract myself from my current state of relaxation by doing other things.
That's just fucked up.
Anyway, since my meeting with Christina and Milena came a day earlier than I'd planned, technically I could have stuck to my diet yesterday. I didn't, though, because the change in plans on Saturday caused me to miss going to Dairy Queen, and I wanted a cherry malt, damn it. Given that Friday and Saturday of this week are both going to be off-diet as well (Friday because of previous plans with my parents, Saturday because of the next lock-in), I'm really thinking about taking the whole week off the diet here. Given how little weight I've been losing recently, I'm not too eager to do something like that, but at the same time I have a lot of cravings that I know I won't be able to satisfy in just two days (IHOP, Wendy's Frosty, Papa Murphy's Pizza, Little Caesars Italian Cheese Bread). Especially since I'm going to be making more changes to my diet over the summer (incorporating more "whole foods" into my meals and so on), I wonder if I shouldn't just give myself a week here to try to get all those temptations satiated and then come at the diet all hardcore again starting Sunday. If you don't see any updates on the diet log this week, at least now you know why.
You know, Music from the Hearts of Space is so much more better when you're not using it as study music. Earlier today when I was at the arcade I was like, "I'd better hurry up and get my DDR in as quickly as possible because when I get home I have to ... oh that's right, I don't have to do anything! Ahhhhhahahahaha!"
While I was out today I picked up my end-of-semester present to myself: Sonic Mega Collection Plus for PS2. Gotta love the old classics. I should pick up the Mega Man collection here soon, too, although with In The Groove coming out later this week (according to GameFAQs), I guess that takes higher priority.
You know, I think I'm just going to lay in bed all day tomorrow and do absolutely nothing. I deserve it.
I wound up leaving the lock-in less than halfway through it after being there for two and a half hours and getting in a whopping *one* set of DDR. Apparently everyone in Bowling Green from the ages of six to twelve decided to show up at the lock-in, and everyone kept cutting in when I'd been waiting my turn at DDR for seemingly forever. It also didn't help that they ordered so little pizza that I never got any. Sigh.
All in all, though, I can't complain about today. Since Milena wasn't feeling well, she and Christina decided to come home from their trip to Put-in-Bay early, and it just so happened that they were only about ten minutes away from me when they called me (I was at Mancino's -- yum), so we got together and gabbed for about an hour. It's amazing how I can spend an hour with them and feel more fulfilled from that than I felt about the entire time I spent with my so-called "friends" from school this past year.
We did talk about the Spectrum situation some, and I think I know what I'm going to do about that now. I'm not going to say anything for now (because I know some people from there are still reading this), but I think I finally have a solution that will make things work out for everyone involved.
Oh, and again, Christina: Thank you for the present from your geocaching. (I'd mention what it was, but that'd spoil the surprise, since I asked Christina to give some of it to Penny ...)
Hoo. It's still hard to believe I got everything done. To think that from now until late August I don't have another class is just ... liberating. Really.
I've been thinking about it more, though, and I realize that I can easily expand the list of ten things I want/need to do this summer into twenty.
11. Go visit with Jessi somewhere where there's In The Groove. (Pinball Pete's in Ann Arbor?)
12. Setlle who would have won the Stanley Cup this year with Don.
13. Get more content on maloneysbaloney.org
14. Write more for Backwash.
15. Work out a rough lesson plan for the first-year composition course I'll be teaching in the fall.
16. Get my freaking room cleaned!
17. Get back to my Wicca studies.
18. Spend lots of time scratching cats.
19. Get a new computer desk for my room.
20. Go to at least one major league sports event -- either a Tigers game or a Shock game.
From now until the end of next week, though, all the "have to" items -- re-learning Japanese, reading books for the MA exam, and so on -- are on hold. I'm giving myself a week of pure sloth here, or at least as much sloth as is possible when I'm playing so much DDR, to recover from the hell of this past month.
That all starts today, as later this afternoon I'll be having Mancino's Pizza and Dairy Queen for the first time in several months, and then later tonight's the lock-in down at Bowling Green. Then I get to meet up with Christina and Milena for lunch tomorrow, and I'll have a lot to discuss with them. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to being a lazy turd here.
DONE. Holy shit, I am never putting myself through anything like that again. Next fall I'm finding out all the final paper topics ahead of time and getting all of them done before Thanksgiving Break. (Now everybody be sure to bookmark this entry and post it back at me next December when I'm talking about how rushed I am to complete my term-end papers then.)
Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm about to fall into a persistive vegetative state here now that I don't have 50% blood and 50% Red Bull pulsing through my veins.
Work on the final paper is not going that smoothly, so I'm giving myself a bit of a rest here to recharge and hopefully come back at things with a fresh eye in a few moments. So since I'm on vacation from now until mid-August once I get this paper done, I figured I should list all of things I want (or need) to do over the coming break.
1. Read books in preparation for UT's MA exam.
2. Get my Japanese back up to speed since I need to take another semester in the fall for my degree.
3. Get back into playing piano and songwriting.
4. Take more trips to Wildwood, whether for exercise, photography, or just for me.
5. Incorporate more whole foods (fruits, veggies, beans, etc.) into my diet.
6. Actually update the other sections of the .org with new content.
7. Play through Final Fantasy VII again.
8. Play through at least one of the RPGs I've bought over the past decade but never seriously played. (And believe me, there are a lot of those.)
9. Drive to Kentucky for more fun with Christina and Milena. :)
10. Drive to Springfield for DDR and Magic: the Gathering with Penny. :)
(No, Jessi, I didn't forget about you, but going up to see you is a half-hour drive whereas seeing my other friends takes around three hours, so I don't have to devise great big plans to go see you.)
Back to the paper now ... fifteen and a half hours until it's due. Time to crack open another Red Bull.
Paper two is done and turned in. (Thank Goddess for being able to e-mail papers in instead of running them all the way to school and back.) If there's one good thing about having a mind that likes to plan things out thirty steps in advance, it's that I can start with a blank Word document, have an outline ten minutes later and fill that outline out into a ten-page paper in less than five hours and actually have it be good. Must be because I've played so much chess all my life.
That leaves a little less than twenty-four hours for the fifteen-page paper, which normally wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, unlike the subject material for my last two papers (literary Marxism and Poppy Z. Brite), this last paper is way outside of my range of speciality, so I don't think my normal planning strategies are going to work on this paper. This one could require me to go all through the night to finish, but if that's the way it has to be, so be it. It's not like I have anyplace I have to be on Friday now that Jessi's not going to Westland.
However, I was pleased as punch to find out earlier today that Christina and Milena will be in my neck of the woods this weekend, so we'll be meeting up Sunday for lunch. I could really use some time with my real friends after all that's happened the past couple of weeks.
No report on the diet log today because one, I'm not going to have time to get in DDR, and two, I'm already off-diet with all the energy drinks I have lined up for the long night ahead. I guess Sunday will be off-diet as well because of lunch with Christina and Milena. Oh well, just more reason to work my ass off playing DDR next week.
Oh crap, I forgot the British elections were coming in just now. Those of you who have C-SPAN2, turn to it now. The British cover their elections on TV about a million times more interestingly (and a million times more informatively) than the US news networks cover US elections. (And of course they don't cover British elections at all because they think we're the only country on this planet that matters.)
Greetings from hell. The first paper and the take-home final have both been turned in. That's the good news. The bad news is that I've been trying like hell to get going on the second paper, and I just can't get started on it. Realistically I need to have it done by tomorrow afternoon at the latest if I'm going to finish the final paper by Friday.
The battle plan for now is that tomorrow, after doing any work on the second paper I don't finish tonight, I'm going on a mad photocopying spree getting articles pulled for the final paper. Unfortunately one of the key articles I need I'll have to copy down at BGSU's library, and while I would normally appreciate the excuse to play on the DDR machine down there (which I will), I don't need all that extra travel time when I'm already so pressed for time. Tomorrow will be a Red Bull-free day for me, and I'll sleep as long as my body needs so I'm fully recharged. Then, when I wake up Thursday, I charge straight forward on the final paper and I won't stop until I'm done. That may mean an all-nighter, which in turn would mean no Westland on Friday, but if that's the price I have to pay then so be it. I can always head up to Westland later; this paper can't wait any longer.
Just on a quick note, I did stop at Media Play on the way to campus today and picked up David Lanz' Romantic to listen to while I work on papers here. Now if only I could actually get to work on them ...
You know, when I said that a Marxist interpretation of Dancer in the Dark would write itself, I was pretty much right. The thing is, a well-written Marxist interpretation of Dancer in the Dark takes much, much longer to produce, as I am learning now. This is the first paper I have due -- Wednesday by 1700 -- and it's also the longest, clocking in at a minimum of eighteen pages. (The paper also includes a brief history and synopsis of Marxist literary criticism that takes up a few pages, which I've already gotten out of the way.)
Thankfully I think I can finish this paper up tonight, leaving me with Thursday's paper to do. That'll be the short one -- minimum of ten pages -- and I'm actually doing it on one of Poppy Z. Brite's short stories from Are You Loathsome Tonight?, so that hopefully won't take too long. I'll also have a take-home final for the same class, but that's just a two-hour thing that I can half-ass my way through and still get an A on.
The paper that's due Friday has to be at least fifteen pages, but only now am I starting to realize how much research the paper really requires, and I don't know if I can manage to get it done on time. Thursday night may turn into an all-nighter so I can get that paper done by Friday afternoon, in which case you can forget about me hitting Westland this week. I'm hoping that's not the case, though, and provided I can get in a couple of more good days here, I think I might get the paper e-mailed out Thursday night.
Well, that was entirely too long of a break. Back to the salt mines here ...
Night one of the great paper-writing run is in the books, and I have to say that if I can keep this pace up, I should just be able to have all my papers done and turned in by Friday.
Of next week.
Oh, this is not going to be pretty ... unfortunately the Red Bull's worn off for now, so I'm going to catch some Z's here and hopefully things will proceed much more smoothly tomorrow.
I'm about to go to bed here, and when I wake up tomorrow the final push to complete my end-of-term papers will be upon me. If I don't post much here for the next week, that's why. I was going to go to Media Play Saturday evening to get some more new age piano music to listen to while I work on stuff, but I didn't wind up having the time for that. Besides, I didn't leave the house in time to get my paycheque Friday. (I'll just wait until I've got a paper or two ready to turn in, then pick up my cheque then.)
I'll go into more detail on my summer plans here, but let's just say that despite having no classes and no job this summer, I'll be keeping plenty busy. In the short-term, though, I'm thinking of going up to Westland on Friday afternoon (provided I have my last paper done by then). Any cool DDR players gonna be up there around that time? :)