Dogs come when they’re called; cats take a message and get back to you later.

I am sitting on a bed with a cat who is lying completely upside down. His ears angle over the side of the bed and his tummy is entirely exposed. In addition to his being completely upside down, both of his furry little arms are sticking straight out over the side of the bed. If he were standing upright, I think it'd look like he was implying that a football team just scored. His little arms are almost hyper extended. Complete and utter amusing catness.

Sorry, just thought I'd share that

To Beth Who Noticed My Lack of Blogs

I don't know why I haven't blogged in a long time. I think it has something to do with the fact that I know if I start talking about the things that are bothering me I won't stop. It's really kept me from journaling altogether of late. I have this really nice new notebook that I've been carrying around with me for a few weeks now that I haven't even cracked. Maybe I'm broken. Kirstin who used to write all over everything has stopped. Deanna can feel free to interpret that as she likes.

Now I feel like I should have something deep and insightful to discuss. Or at least something weird.

Oh, here's something weird. My sink geysers! Yeah, like Old Faithful. If I rinse out a dish in my sink. then in maybe five or six minutes my sink will start to make gurgling noises and then nasty brown bubbling sewage type water will shoot up from the drain. Sometimes it even sprays on the floor. Very much of the disturbing ilk. I don't even know what else to say about that.

Well now that I know that I have at least one reader out there I'll definitely try to be better about blogging. I make it my pledge to ye my faithful reader to blog when I'm not busy (which is surprisingly quite regularly at this point).

My Nose Knows

I kneed myself in the nose, hard. I swung my leg up to get off the couch and slammed my knee into my face. My nose is swelling. I think it's just the cartiledge, but if I even touch my nose it feels really bruised. No fun.

Welcome to My World

Welcome to my world

I acquired three new bookcases for my new apartment, and they're already full. These cases are big, taller than I am types and I can't fit more books on them. What am I supposed to do once the semester starts? Where are all of my future books going to go? Every time I locate another book in a box I have to shift all of those on the shelves I have to make room. It's like I'm working at the bookstore again except that that one extra book absolutely has to make it onto the shelf and there's no such thing as back stock. Sigh.

If and when my father comes to visit I'm going to have him deliver another bookcase. The packaging makes it way too big to fit in my tiny car so it'll have to be imported via SUV as this town is lacking in a Crate & Barrel. I swear I never truly appreciated the number of good stores back home until I left.

I need more pictures, and a coffee table. My feet lack in coffee table sitting. How do people not have coffee tables? They seem so vital to my existance at the moment.

Contact Novelties

-changing shirts without having to take off my glasses
-buying sunglasses from a department store not the optometrist
-not spending $300+ for said sunglasses
-knowing that if I should ride a roller coaster in the near future I could actually see where I was going
-seeing my feet when I take a shower
-not having to huff on and wipe off my glasses frequently
-seeing my reflection in the mirror without glasses
-lack of light reflections in my eyes
-not having to wipe off my glasses after going out in the rain
-dumping boiling water out and not having my glasses getting steamed up

This Bipolar World

I seem to live in a world of extreme opposites. When things are good they are very very good and when they are bad they are horrid. Dammit. It's like my head is bouncing backwards and forwards between tennis rackets.

Have a car. poof! badness

Have a degree. poof! badness

Have a big check. poof! badness

I don't know how much more of this I can take. Will someone just sort out the mess that has become of my life for me? I don't have the energy or desire to deal with it anymore. There are too many things to do and no motivation to do any of them. It's like I don't deserve to be happy for more than five seconds. "Oh look, Kirstin's marginally contented, well, we'll just take care of that then won't we"

Ahhh

A Free Day

When was the last time I had a totally free day, a day with neither work nor school nor many papers to write? I honestly can't remember. It's been at least a year, really. Is that pathetic? I'm thinking yes.

Today was my first free day thanks to a class cancellation. I was still relatively productive, writing out possible answers for an exam I'm going to take tomorrow and such, but largely I just did loungy things, and can I just say how lovely it was. I had the opportunity to just sit and breathe a little bit, read something fun, play on my laptop. It's a relief. I'm sure it won't happen again for another year so I'll enjoy it while I can. Soaking in this single stress free day.

I'm sure I'll get to be stressed tomorrow when I get the comments on my thesis draft back. I'm just choosing not to think about it right now because I could surely start freaking out about it. I choose not to stress, I'll do it tomorrow and through the weekend if absolutely necessary, but now I'll basque in the calm.

Awards

Can I start every day by winning $100? I woke up this morning to an email saying that I'd won some award for a history paper I wrote last fall. I didn't even know I was nominated for this award.
I gotta say though, it's nice to start the day with more money than when you went to bed the night before

Paper

What is it about having things on paper that make them seem more real? I can deal with things more easily when they're just up on the computer screen looking at me through a hazy glow and be fine, but the second it's on real paper it seems like more.

I think it's a tangible thing, something about having a physical form that I can put my hand on rather than something I can click on and have disappear when I don't want to think about it.

I printed off what I'm going to submit to my thesis advisor a few minutes ago and now my stomach feels like it's spinning in circles--tilt-a-whirl style. I want to be done with this more than anyone could possibly know. Am at the point where I think I'd be okay with never writing anything about Joyce again. I don't think I could tolerate not reading Ulysses again, or Finnegans Wake is that bizarre? Probably. I really am an English major through and through, aren't I?

Maybe I'll just drive up to class now and drop it off, out of sight out of mind. My class isn't until 1:00, but I know my thesis advisor is there at 10:00. I'm sure I can find something to work on for two to three hours. My next paper perhaps.

I have this extraordinary feeling that this is never going to end for me. But there's really nothing that I'd rather be doing. sigh

A Sea of Books

I am wading in a sea of books. As I type, two books press against my left arm and another tome grazes my right. Below the three books nearest me there are other volumes. Those not in piles have arranged themselves in a U around my legs stretching from my reclining position to the farthest reaches beyond my feet. As a surprise to no one I'm sure, these volumes all bear a certain name on them either as author or subject, and that would be James Joyce.
Beyond my sea of literature, stretching onto the floor dwell many more tomes resembling the effects of a nuclear bomb on a library. The volumes littered across the floor are largely those that have fallen from the couch and have proven to either not be necessary for the remainder of my paper or simply too far away to reach. I prefer to think that they are unnecessary to my research because I'm not going back through them to look. Several of the floor volumes have found themselves opened to random pages or lying splayed at odd angles. I suppose if there were a nuclear blast there'd be loose pages floating around, but fortunately I haven't been reduced to shreading any texts yet.
I used to have more respect for books. As a child I was raised to respect books, to put them on their proper shelves, never to throw them, and certainly never to write in them. What happened to that? Some of my volumes have an equal number of printed lines and notes scribbled in the margins. I ask again, what happened to my respect for books? I would like to think that studying literature this much would make me treat books with infinitely more respect, but not so much. I look all across my room and see volumes here and there, some sitting under glasses, others lying on chairs, some piled horizontally against a vertically aligned bookshelf. I have far too many books I dare say. But then I ask, is that a possibility? Can I have too many books? Too many for anyone or too many for me? I don't know I don't know I don't know.

From here to there

Okay, I went to the library this morning and my internet connection on my laptop worked. The little bubble popped up to say that there was a wireless network in the library that I could connect to if I wanted. I didn't. I take my laptop home and there is no connection at all. No wireless, no wired for that matter. The rest of my house has internet. I can connect from other computers but not my own. Why?!? Apparently in the journey from the library to the house, a whopping seven or eight minute trek the drivers for internet vanished. Where'd they go? How'd they go?
I'm blaming _Finnegans Wake_. It has decided that I'm crazy and therefore unworthy of internet. Or perhaps I'm unworthy of _Finnegans Wake_, who knows.
Okay, I'm hostile, I'm bitter, what you gonna do about it?
Will somebody go to this dinner tomorrow night for me. I really really don't want to go sit there and listen to somebody talk about nothing for several hours. Not what I have in mind for a Wednesday evening that could otherwise be spent I don't know, doing homework, sitting on my rear end, reading _Special Topics in Calamity Physics_ I don't know. Bollocks!

Graduation

I remember when I graduated from high school that I didn't really feel like I was done, that there were more things I could learn at that level to prepare myself for college. I really don't feel like that as I'm finishing my undergrad. I keep being told by professors that there are no comments that they can make on my papers to help me improve on them at the undergraduate, 500, level. It's terribly frustrating. What's the point of all of these exercises if I don't receive any constructive criticism? I literally sighed out loud when I got an A+ on my last paper. There were no comments, just an A+ from a professor who used to give me more comments than anyone else. No comma corrections, no "you could do this better," no "when you go to grad school, you might want to try X"
I'm really ready to be done, I must say. At least a year after high school I still missed being there, but I don't feel that with college and I don't really like it. I verified with my advisor again today that all of my paperwork was in order for graduation, hallelujah. I have this fear in my head of being finished and not being allowed to graduate for whatever reason for not filling out my forms properly or something. Now all I've got to do is finish my thesis work and I'll be done with it all.
I hope I'm not let down by grad school. I really want to work hard and be challenged. I wouldn't continue to choose the work that I do if I weren't concerned with being challenged. If I wanted to coast through school I'd write on Austen or the Brontes or Mark Twain, I'm reading Joyce and Woolf and Pynchon because their writing is really hard! I want to work at it more than anything.
Okay, that was my rant for the next few months. If you made it to the end of this, thanks for your patience with my insanity.

My laptop

I was just commenting to someone earlier today about how I have about 70 television episodes and movies on my laptop and how I didn't even have to move to change a DVD if I wanted to watch hours and hours of TV. Alas, I spoke too soon. I've had this laptop since just after Christmas, so what is that, three months? I successfully managed to run a 100 gig hard drive down to about 700 mg. Oops.
I just deleted all fourteen episodes of Firefly from my hard drive (I do have them on my external though) :( That brought me up to about 4 gigs of space. I might have to resort to deleting more shows as need be, but I'm going to hang onto my BSGs for as long as I can.
I'm trying to decide what else I can delete. Sigh.
Now I'm running a backup. I'm not waiting until 3am for it to be done though. Who waits until 11:45 to run a backup though? Me, that's who.

ice cream

Anybody ever notice that ice cream tastes better when you eat it with a plastic spoon? Maybe it has something to do with it being more pliable. Hmm

grad school

I think I'm the only person alive who'd think a call directly from the director of English graduate admissions at a university could be a bad thing. I was completely horrified, and somehow I managed to convince myself that she was calling to tell me my application was missing something or that there was a problem with my records, as if the director of admissions had nothing better to do than call applicants about missing files and so on. Sigh.
Well, I'm still pretty shocked about the whole thing. The idea of getting to go to grad school, let alone getting to be a GTA with a decent amount of money, is pretty surprising to me.
I haven't made any final decisions yet, I'm still waiting to hear what other schools are offering me. I feel oddly like a high school athlete being recruited by major universities. It's weird to think people actually want me, me personally to go to their school. I don't quite know what to make of it.

vehicles vs. the snow

So, this morning I go over to my father's house because the weather has been kind of bad and I figured I'd take my stepmother's SUV to work since it's bigger and theoretically less likely to slide; a rather logical plan. I grab the SUV, pull out of the driveway and go up the big driveway hill. Right at the edge of the street I stop the car so I can grab the newspaper and the car manages to slide about twenty feet backwards down the hill into a snow bank. I notice a little yellow light pop up on the dashboard which I'm sure means something horrible so I look it up in the manual in the glove box. The manual says the light means "slide." Is it not clear that I'm sliding? Can I not tell that I'm sliding? Apparently not, the dashboard has to tell me. Ahhh!
Anyway, I spend a good twenty minutes or so digging the car out with a shovel and my hands, reving the engine and so on trying to dig myself out, to no avail. Of course, I'm supposed to be at work when all of this is occuring. I call the store and explain the situation while my boss laughs in amusement at my situation. Next I call AAA and after about a half hour of listening to their lovely advertisement based audio recording (why do they advertise to people who are already AAA members, hello, captive audience!!!)I speak to a real live human being who tells me it can be up to four hours before they can get there. Sigh.
At this point the SUV is stuck at a point where it's not blocking the driveway or the neighbors' driveway so I go grab my car and figure I'll take that to work. I back out of the lousy parking space I'd chosen and manage to back into another snow bank right behind me. The driveway is ridiculously narrow and it's thus unavoidable. I manage to get my car really stuck there too, redo the whole shoveling bit, no such luck. I'm somewhere between hysterical laughter and screaming obscenities around now.
I go back inside the house and walk around with my shoes off hoping to regain some feeling in my toes. Eventually (far less than four hours later) the tow truck guy arrives, and in the process of pulling the SUV out of the snow bank the tow truck gets stuck. Again, hysterical laughter meets screaming obscenities. After about half an hour he calls a tow truck which manages to pull him free and eventually they get the SUV out onto the road. I ask if he can get my car out of the snowbank closer to the house and he tells me it's far too trecherous for him to go down there since he already got stuck close to the house, in his words, he says to "wait it out" or in short, wait until the snow melts and then drive my car out. It's freaking February, that could be months and I'm blocking the entire driveway.
I opt to take the SUV to work which I'm already two hours late for and call my father on the way. He doesn't care at all about my emotional well-being, or that I've just spent a couple hours outside digging and am now exhausted. He's concerned about the case of wine in the trunk of the SUV that could potentially freeze, and demands that I find a way to move my car so he can get his car in the garage when he returns from his vacation tomorrow. Ahhh!
Anyway, I go to work and after a few hours the manager sends three guys to help me push my car out of the snow bank. It took surprisingly little time to get it out and I left the SUV behind and now am using my car. So that has been much of my day. Tada! Reason 732 why I need a vacation.
This has been another absurd tale from my absurd life. Proving once again that reality is far more amusing than fiction. Thank you very much.

My thesis is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake

I feel like I've said the same thing seventy five times, but I haven't said it at all. For my literature review I have five categories, but everything seems like it could go in every category. How is this possible. When do I get to write my own thoughts? When do I get to say something I think instead of trying to write out what has already been said for the last eighty years? Now I know why people like to analyze new books, there aren't that many people to cite. Or maybe I should pick someone really old who isn't popular, so not popular that nobody has said anything on it. But would anyone care then? I've got to find somebody really old that is great and then I can inform the world. I need to make friends with a literary archeologist, then I could get access to an old manuscript and teach the world. What I need is a new (old) Chaucer, or Cardenio, I need someone to find Cardenio and give it to me. Can someone arrange that?

What happened to global warming?

Didn't Al Gore go on and on about Global Warming in An Inconvenient Truth? This doesn't look like Global Warming to me. It looks like freaking ridiculous snow crap.

This isn't even good snowman snow. It's all powdery, not packable, snow. Bah.

Now, nobody respond to this explaining what global warming is to me. I know what it is. I'm just bitter, bitter cold at least. I'm so not driving to class tomorrow if it's still like this. I recant all statements about being willing to drive in any weather that I made yesterday. It'll take two years to get to class and I haven't the energy.