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.

mojn

it occurs to me that i did recently do something fun that i can share with you here. there were several films at the film festival this year that i wanted to see, although i only made it to two. i think i chose correctly, though, cuz the two i went to were magnificent.

the first, whose greatness i think erstwhile and hyperbolic will also attest to, was a town called panic. this movie turned out to be everything i wanted it to be: ridiculous and whimsical. there's really no way to explain the movie other than to say that if the trailer makes you think "omigod i need to see that movie it looks AWESOME" then you will most definitely love it. if it doesn't, well, you probably lost track of your soul a long time ago and there's no use trying to get it back now.

[speaking of stop action animation, i also recently started watching creature comforts (via netflix instant streaming), and it is hilarious.]

the second movie, terribly happy, was also good, although in a completely different way. apparently denmark has a reputation for coen-y type dark comedies, and if this one is at all representative of that tradition, then i think i'll go ahead and jump on that bandwagon (you know, after prelims).

since i'm here and talking about film festival whatnot, i might as well mention another film that i saw years ago at the spokane film festival that has stuck with me and is still probably in my top ten favorite comedies: go for zucker. this trailer doesn't really do it justice, but believe me, this movie is hilarious with a capital z. (haha, get it?) anyway, you should totally watch it.

here it comes

i suck at blogging. or maybe i suck at life, since my lack of blogging is usually due to a lack of having anything interesting to say. or maybe i just talk too much--every time i think of something to blog about, i immediately remember that i've already told everyone i know, so what the fuck is the point of blogging about it? (i guess i could pretend like a have an unknown following on the internets. ha.) at any rate, i don't feel like reading right now, and i've exhausted all of my go-to internet procrastinatory sites, so i guess that means i should blog.

i'm both super excited for and kind of dreading the start of the summer. i really am looking forward to reading the stuff on my list (well, a lot of it at least), and i'm definitely ready to start shifting my energy toward developing ideas that actually interest me (rather than, say, writing on a 400-page poem about plants). i am dreading, however, the impending weariness that i know will begin building on or around the middle of may. i really, genuinely want to do well on this thing, but i also know that i am not the kind of person who can sustain a 40-60 hour a week reading schedule. and even if i could, i still wouldn't get everything done. i know, i know. no one gets everything read (well, no one who is sane, that is). but that doesn't really make my 159-item list seem any less overwhelming.

but whatever. i'm boring myself now, so i can only imagine that you've probably already stopped reading. and if you are still here, i'll just mention one more thing (which you probably already know, cuz i bitch about it all the time): i fucking hate having crazy shitty dreams all night long. they have at least started to involve a little bit less of me-doing-shitty-and-or-inappropriate-things, and more just general wtf-ery, but the whole business is still extemely annoying and it makes me feel like i'm not really getting good sleep in addition to feeling guilty/scared/bewildered/sad/etc. every morning.

but i'm feeling a lot less holyshitijustwannaripmyskinoff these days, so i guess that's good.