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.