it's not fair

isn't sleep supposed to involve some level of repose? isn't it not supposed to make me wake up feeling more mentally and emotionally exhausted than i did before i fell asleep? fucking prozac.

rest stops and eucalyptus leaves

and kerns nectar. and swimming in november. and grapenuts in styrofoam bowls. and saltine crackers topped with canned tuna. and dried mangoes. and starting my period in a safeway bathroom. and wanting so badly to shave my legs. and bathing suits made for pregnant women. and 5.2 acres of fenced-in desert (but not with barbed wire, as they said). and scorpions and rattlesnakes and black widows. and don't speak i know just what you're thinking. and motorcycles that make him feel invincible. and rainbows that are supposed to mean something (but looked like regular rainbows to me). and cleaning up after her because she could never do it right. and adam carolla and dr. drew. and a blue license plate that didn't match. and wigs and $32 and a quick stop at jack-in-the-box. and cargo shorts and a denim vest.

but before that there was rollerblading and playing in the rain. and hot lava monster. and bus rides downtown. and dollar stores. and emergency trips to uwajimaya. and the toy aisle at bartell's. and boysenberry yogurt. and playing frisbee in ravenna park. and free cookies at albertson's. and blue canvas shoes. and riding down hills in the back of toy dump trucks. and bike rides on the burke-gilman to gasworks park. and writing poems. and crying every time he went somewhere. and basketball courts and knee braces. and futons and fold-out beds. and tree swings. and nancy drew. and costco-sized boxes of tropical mr. freeze. and a name change that foreshadowed too many changes.

i'm not embarrassed to admit it. okay maybe a little.

you know you listened to a little too much staind when you were 15 when "it's been a while" comes on the radio and you remember not only all the lyrics, but also every single vocal inflection and all your favorite harmonies.

oops.

sailors and submarines

you thought i'd gone forever, didn't you?

well at any rate i'm here now, so you should stop complaining. sadly for you, though, i feel almost as if i have less to say now than usual, despite the fact that so much life-changing shit has happened in the last few weeks.

but if you don't already know about things-that-have-happened-lately, i'm certainly not telling you here.

so all you can have right now are whatever inanities are floating around in my brain at the moment. like how fucking sick i am of humidity. seriously, who invented this shit? as someone i know put it recently, it's like breathing wet cotton. running in it has been awful. my pace yesterday was slower than it's been in i can't even remember how long. slower even than when i try to run with a brutal chest cold. not that i care about pace that much, but this humidity bullshit makes it almost unbearable just to get 5 miles done. forget about trying to do a long run.

and of course there's prelims. i am really starting to freak about the fact that i have less than a month before the take-home portion begins. (and by "freak" i mean "care just a tad more than not at all," cuz that's what prozac does to me. seriously, this shit is a very blunt double-edged sword. i still can't tell which is better--feeling so anxious that i want to rip off my skin, or feeling so apathetic that the fact that i'm on the verge of failing my running class is not nearly enough motivation to get me up in time most mornings?) but i'm still trudging along. slowly. and i have no intentions of postponing the exam. i feel like i can do it, and the worst that could happen is i fail and have to take it again in january, which i would have had to do anyway if i postponed. so i'm just going to try to suck it up for the next month and see what that gets me.

i am, though, really starting to feel like i'm honing in on stuff that really interests me. (like dirt. and poverty. and dirt-and-poverty.) this is kind of exciting, because for the first time i can actually envision myself writing a dissertation. not that writing a dissertation is exciting, but it's nice to finally be able to see myself in the next stage, and to feel like there might be things i can say that are both interesting to me and not (totally) redundant.