damnit, Jim, I'm a blogger, not a clock.

so, it's been how many weeks? sorry, future self. weeks of memories are going to be forgotten because we are so goddamn inconsistent in everything we undertake. If my life is ever made into a movie about me losing my memory and relying solely on this blog to put the pieces back together (gods, let it not be true), then the following paragraph is a 30-second fast-forward screech/montage with hectic voiceover and lots of blurry bits and it goes like this:

spend too much time out of the house at the hookah bar and meeting new yet young and possibly moronic people who you prefer all of a sudden to spend time with. join a punk band and drum like your futile life depends on it. question purpose of nearly complete degree in light of seemingly utter apathy about everything except feeling alive. become disenchanted with academia, let grades suffer preposterously but because of aforementioned apathy care very very little in a quite uncharacteristic manner. upset everybody. get through exams, get Bs and Cs and thank the gods you even passed. keep up with new Doctor Who episodes more religiously than you've ever done anything in your life. Decide to buy a hookah bar with husband. fast forward to learning what phrases like "limited liability" and "Z report" mean. Worry slightly about commitment issues, and especially about continued apathy in the academic department. Drink too much, try to learn how booking schedules and sound equipment and alcohol licenses work. Still spend too much time away from home, but be happy about it because husband is just as invested in this new toy as you are. Revel, but with apprehension. Play first live show of your life, quickly and frantically, and in a dress with make-up and done-up hair. Try to figure out how to be a personable small business owner in a town in which you seem to have accidentally and very suddenly put down roots. End.

That brings us to tonight, and husband and I rolling through silent films and anything else in the public domain that we can get our hands on in anticipation of B-movie night at the new hookah spot, and noticing together how well and how creepily the silent film version of The Wizard of Oz goes with Aphex Twins.

Good Night.

There is an end to all things

And hallelujah, by god, sweet monkey ancestors, i'm almost to the end of this semester. Sitting at the tea house, both exams done and behind me, for better or for worse, and 2 piddly assignments to go before i can call scene and throw this whole four months of memories away in one sweet drunken blaze.

i've felt a lot like a little kid the last month or so, sitting in the middle of all of the shit that i was supposed to be doing, just squeezing my eyes shut and wishing the future would fast-forward to get here. the adult me, when not drinking, would tell kid-me to stop sweating and it would be over soon and stop fucking whining. kid-me did not stop whining, except maybe a little. now kid-me's got through it and is jumping up and down about the end of the semester like not since high school.

summer is here. we're about to ring it in with the traditional geology end of semester blow-out, and then it's a stretch of field work and travel and sleeping in straight through to august.

honestly, i'm already starting to feel a bit preemptively guilty about how lazy i'm going to be. i'm gonna go home, dye my hair, and clean the fuck out of the house.

all hail summer.

this is how much we use the guest bedroom.

so i'm in a panic because i just remembered that tomorrow is liz's birthday, on top of everything else. i did what i normally do in these situations, which is to go up to the neglected and somewhat smelly guest bedroom that gets used maybe 3 times a year, but which is where i keep all of my treasures that i don't like to think about very much because i like to be surprised sometimes when i wander up there. it's also the room with the inappropriately dubbed "crafts closet" which is where fabric and remnants and yarn tangles and thread and all the associated pointy instruments go to die. maybe twice a year someone worth cleaning up for comes to stay, and i try to shove/organize/destroy the amorphous pointy mass that it has become, the result of countless drunken or hurried frenzies of inspiration and related rummaging. "i know it's here somewhere -- i just saw it last year" type diggings occur on a fairly regular basis and it just gets worse and worse and the pile spreads out until it looks like an art installation about mass wasting and the slope stability of the mind.

so i go up there, and i'm looking around, half thinking of liz, half thumbing through boxes of old art and being nostalgic and trying to remember who painted what, when i look at the closet.

there, on the top shelf, it appears that something has been growing. a cloddy mass of moss is protruding from a tangle of white cotton remnants that haven't been touched since halloween. i edge over to it, half driven by that lovely what-the-fuck? flavor of curiosity, half worried that my slovenliness has given some horrifying swamp moss creature the perfect environment to evolve in. i reach up and tug at the cotton, which has been swirled around and seems to be holding the mossy clump in the vortex of its folds, and as i swing it around a bit more, it hits me.

birds have been nesting in the crafts closet.

i guess bo opened all the windows in the house at some point without me knowing, probably when the weather had that weird nice streak somewhere in january. i've been a little confused about the fact that the air conditioning hasn't been penetrating the upstairs, but i figured it was just another one of those things that sucks about this house. nope. open window. happy little bird family, safe in the comfort of jesus-costume-castoff cotton, building the coolest damn nest i've seen in a long time. i don't know if they've gone -- there're no eggshell bits in there. probably just some little avian bachelor pad that had a resident until i started keeping the door open in there and the dogs scared it off.

maybe liz's present is a birds nest.

pretty little time suck

hair, meet the future. future, hair.

i'm off to the earth day celebration at the tea house. probably no prizes for best fucking hair, but who knows. today i'm feeling spiky and optimistic.

and frankly, kind of bad-ass.

Later that night....


The show was great. awesome to see the tea house blossoming into this regular venue... awesome to be a regular somewhere again. hair was met with much enthusiasm and delight, and it was fun to play the "no, we've met" game with a few people who i'd only seen once or twice before.

feeling like a colorful, whole person. it's amazing what a radical cut and dye job can do, sometimes. i had forgotten this feeling, though i don't think i ever embraced it with so much gusto when i was a kid. i feel unexpected again, changeable, intense. in a word, spiky.

i also feel like my stomach's about to implode. bo decided to come out, but at the last minute, and on the condition that he be allowed to get shitty instead of me. that was cool, except that i drank about a dozen coffees and didn't really eat much of anything. driving wired and shaky on a saturday night is almost as bad as driving with a slight buzz. the paranoia has a different tone, but it's definitely there. DDing fucking sucks.

now bo's passed out, and i'm completely wired. ran through all of Coupling yesterday, and I keep falling asleep halfway through Buffy episodes and I'm in the last season so instead of missing something I keep rewatching the same episodes over and over. I'm about to go watch half of "Never Leave Me" for the third time.

the coffee tension in my neck is giving me the weird sensation that my head is going to fall off.

it's definitely time for bed.

right before head falls off and stomach implodes
friends don't let friends DD.

and yet later...


okay. i went 6 hours without thinking about all of the work on my plate. fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. combination coffee stomach plus bedtime epiphany anxiety means that despite snagging the late shift at the WATR table at the street fair tomorrow, i'm probably not getting any fucking sleep tonight. i can't keep doing this. the lack of decent sleep on a regular basis is probably going to drive me completely insane soon. this is not hyperbole.

god, why did i drink so much coffee? why do i wait until i'm finally falling asleep to start thinking about how badly i'm failing at doing school properly this semester? why in fucking fuck do i volunteer to do things for the department on my weekends?

why aren't there any fucking sleeping pills in this house?

ugh.


WELL into the next day at this point:


exhaustion, jitteriness, irritability and lopsided body pain are all jockeying for loudest fucking sensation ever at the same time, all in the fuck-you-world sensory area of my brain. this is the most crowded, cacophonous, annoying bed on earth (and i'm not even referring to bo snoring and/or farting here).

i think my ankles are taking turns being broken, i'm having sympathy pains from some poor unknown bastard who is somewhere being stabbed in the kidney right now, and i might have invisible lice. all of these things are extremely unlikely, but i haven't really convinced myself that they're impossible and not all happening to me right now.

apparently i am a very weird bird when i am this tired and stressed out and cannot cannot cannot fall asleep. i told you that going completely insane soon thing wasn't hyperbole.

i hope to god that this has been an entertaining read.
also i hope to god that i'm done writing it.

likely not.


last time.


i am batshit fucking insane. that is all.

this is how it goes.

feel like life may be returning to normal. this is a good thing, except that it comes just in time for me to freak out in earnest about the amount of work that i have to do to finish up this semester. right now, that involves writing a paper and studying for a test in geophysics, both tuesday deadlines, both probably going to have the residual suck. at least it's cheryl's class, and she seems to have some understanding of how close to the edge i've been lately. not that she's going to view that as an excuse, but i definitely have daddy issues in the don't-let-down-your-academic-superiors camp... "disappointing" is probably the worst word in the world to me... especially in light of/in the aftermath of receiving a pretty damned impressive award this week.

i don't know. it feels like the light is starting to shine again. i spent hours cleaning the house today, something that i haven't done in months (literally). i'm cooking dinner, i'm talking to bo about normal logistical things that wouldn't have been possible for me to talk about even yesterday. i've lost the acute yearning to be any place but here.

this all probably seems a little sudden, and it is, and because yesterday was the first time that i really vocalized any of this in a post, it probably seems like i've just been overreacting to something finite and insignificant, but this last month has been a real struggle for me. i've been waiting for the clouds to part, and i guess it did get darkest before the sun started to rise. so fuck you, audience, if you think that this was minor, and fuck me, future self, if you read this years from now and you've forgotten. march and april sucked. most of this semester sucked. this is the closest i've ever been to the edge, and i hope to god that it's followed by a period of feeling lighter and happier than i've ever been in my life.

if not, i'm sure we'll all be hearing about it soon.

Edit: fucking fuck fuck fuck. burned dinner. i guess this is normalcy, after all. luckily there were porkchops in the freezer. luckily bo rallied and made dinner. lucky lucky girl that i am. dinner was fucking delicious.

all of that grey matter

it might be because i was raised by hippies, but i've never really bought the idea that depression could solely be linked to chemical imbalances in the brain. stress? yes. generally being unsatisfied with your life? sure. could these things cause chemical imbalances in the brain? fuck, i'm not a neurologist, but it seems like it would make sense. so when i finally realized this morning that i'm depressed, i didn't go straight for the "drug me up and knock me out of my misery" approach. i am closer than i ever have been to considering getting therapy and taking drugs, but i really, really don't trust doctors and medicine, and the thing is, i know that i've been depressed before. i know that i was depressed because shit sucked, and when things eventually changed, i got better. this has happened over, and over, and over in my life. it usually doesn't last this long, but it always feels this bad.

the problem is that i can't really change anything right now without changing everything. the problem is that it's not just depression caused by stress -- it's that the depression is preventing me from conquering the things that are stressing me out. if i make it to the end of this semester, and somehow finish all of the work that's before me, things will start to feel better. but part of me isn't really convinced that it's just the stress.

depression is a damned tricky beast, because you can't tell what's a symptom and what's a cause. it's all just one crushing block of fear and anxiety, and you can't tell which demons came before you were feeling trapped, and which ones are just shadows. they all feel real, and the fear just builds.


my mom has borderline personality disorder. her solution to feeling shitty was always to upend everything that she had and start over from scratch in a sad, manic manner that ruined everything for her and eventually left her without any real connections. this week, this month, i've been feeling like burning bridges and running away, because that's how i've seen this coped with before -- it's the only example i have. but today, after i broke down to cheryl and excused myself from what's probably shaping up to be an amazing petrology field trip, i came home and i did some research and i started to feel better. i don't have to run away, i just have to fix the things that i want to run away from. if i get sane and i still want to jet, then so be it -- that was a real monster. getting out from under this mountain of sadness is going to take a lot of epiphanies like that, and they may be slow in coming, and i may miss the point, and i may fuck up a lot more stuff before i accomplish what i need to.

that's just the way it has to be. all these smarts i was gifted with aren't doing me much good right now -- in fact, i'm pretty sure that it's their fault that i feel this way at all.

alone.

do it again, and again, and again,

and never, ever stop.

last night before raleigh. i don't care. it falls somewhere between a chore and a homework assignment, and i haven't been much motivated about either of those things since somewhere around thanksgiving. 

is this all it is? working my ass off, getting pretty, traveling, explaining things to people who don't understand and probably wouldn't do anything different if they did? and am i supposed to like it? i can't tell; no one seems to be able to explain what the whole point is. everyone can't possibly feel like this all of the time, this isn't alaska.

i don't know if this is senioritis, or wanderlust, or SADD, or what. i wish the house were clean. i wish i still lived out of a backpack. i wish that tonight there was another concert to go to. i wish my new boots were broken in. i wish i lived in a city walled in by water, steeped in the filth of the centuries, sweltering, freezing, all cold grey edges and breathing brick. i wish i could walk forever on these feet. i wish i could live on air.

some day soon, i'm gonna cut all my hair off. 

the title of the blog entry

the bile and the stress have subsided, slightly. there's still a mountain of work, still a packed schedule full of driving and dressing and smiling and talking, but this morning it's not scary. right now it all feels do-able. granted, i'm putting off working on a couple of assignments that have looming deadlines to write about this, but that's okay too.

when i walked out the door this morning a wall of warmth and humidity hit me, and i was sweating within instants, smiling, at home. i needed coffee, and i had to drive to get it. that made me a bit sad. wished i could have just hopped on the old bike to go grab it, sit down, enjoy it and be productive. couldn't. miss living in railroad square, sometimes -- waking up at 7 because it was already 85 degrees in the warehouse loft, slumping down the makeshift wooden stairs, padding across the cool concrete floor, opening the garage door and blinking in the sunlight. those were good days. days like today when the wet in the air just pulls all of the spring smells right into your nose and softens the sounds in the distance give me such as strong sensory memory that if i closed my eyes i'd swear i was back at the lake. except the coffee at black dog is better than what i'm drinking now, and the breeze has a brighter quality than these mountain hollow wisps. it's still, and muggy, and just below 80 degrees. this weather stops time.

i hope this feeling lasts forever. i can deal with anything on days like today. maybe some of this calm is due to the fact that i have a new suit case, which really shouldn't put a dent in the stress scale, but there's something really comforting about leather heirlooms with sturdy zippers and proper handles. now i don't have to live out of the amorphous umbro-teal duffel with mysterious stains and dubious origin when i travel.  the suitcase is solid, clean, smells slightly of starch and has a fly little stripe down the front which says "i am not samsonite. i am together, but cool. look at my owner's shoes -- does this look like a cookie cutter professional to you? no. my owner is a quiet genius, composed, but stylish." i love you, suitcase. you hold everything i need you to.

2 shows tonight, to mark the middle of the cultural part of the last little while. my neck is still sore from the pogo and the dance at gogol bordello thursday night, and i don't know if i'll ever take off the new shirt i got there, and my pants are ripped in new places from all of the movement. the blisters i got in wilmington have new baby blisters underneath, my sides are sore and my driving muscles hurt.

i feel so good.

fuck you, asheville.

i thought i would miss this place when i left. not that i went far, but i've only made the ~1 hour drive a couple dozen times in the two years since i've been gone.

asheville may be the hub of culture in western north carolina, but it is also the mecca of asshat hippies and scene idiots, possibly the only one like it in the world. if shows didn't come here, neither would i.

and there are plenty of shows this week. destroyer last night, which left me wanting a sledge hammer and a megaphone to pummel and yell at almost everyone in the house with. since then, i've had maybe 4 hours of sleep, 5 hours in the field, 2 hours TAing, and 2.5 hours driving, plus or minus whatever i've forgotten, because lack of sleep seems to have shorted my memory a bit, which is not a comfy thing to realize when you're driving through asheville rush-hour traffic and can't remember how you got there. i should be asleep right now, but i'm not; i'm blogging disjointedly about why i hate asheville because it's important that i don't forget.

must never forget the hatred of the drunken dancing girl and her glaze-blue eyes. such a terrible waste of a body. also hugh jackman man. what the drunken hell were those sideburns about? also soft-spoken guy who wanted to hit on me but was too shy. he'll probably end up with some batshit scene girl with poor self esteem who treats him like shit daily. i hate girls. all girls. double dollops of hatred for asheville girls.

***

so we're probably going to move back to asheville in december.

i need to go to sleep so i don't think about that again for a while. luckily i will forget thinking it, because i am so unbelievably tired that i don't even care to spellcheck this motherfucker.

gogol bordello in 3 hours.

hyperstition

when i was a kid i was probably certifiably depressed and definitely edging on paranoid. fortunately for my track record i'm also pretty smart, and i've always been good at covering up my tracks, and playing reasonably aloof. the last weeks of overwhelmaent and school stress have certainly got me in a funk, and i'm remembering what it was like to be 14, but i'm all growed up now so i'm going to try to find something positive about that.

of the things i've been remembering, (happily) just short of reliving, the sub-sane set of rules and superstitions that i lived my young, weird life by are probably the most colorful. i can't remember all of them, but here is the short list of favorites that used to govern my days:

1) when walking late at night, stick to the middle of the road. the patten and color of the lines will guide and elevate your thought process and get you farther in life.

2) never wear any article of clothing backwards or turned inside out. ever ever ever ever. if you do, the fae will fuck up your day at the very least, and may get pissed off enough to shut off your sight forever. yes, this includes socks, and yes, this one i still stick to. it's that deeply ingrained.

3) don't touch iron objects. see fae reaction from number 2. also, avoid running water from pipes (this second one definitely makes hygiene a tricky and confusing issue).

4) don't step on clovers with your boots. i got this one from tyggwr, and didn't understand it well, but it stuck to the point that i still apologize under my breath sometimes to the ground.

5) four leaf clovers are very potent magics, but most people don't believe this because it's only true under the strictest of circumstances:
          - the picker of the clover must not be spotted by the local guardians. you may need to wear a disguise, and you will definitely have to run.
          - the magic only works once the object has been forgotten. so it has to be placed somewhere stable, out of sight, for a long time.
          - giving it as a gift reverses the luck, but only if the recipient knows they've got it. see hiding it above.

6) dusk is magic. but, you should never make decisions at dusk while within earshot of running water or a fountain of any sort.

7) if you listen closely, the trees will talk to you. this is really fucking terrifying, actually, and it sounds crazier than all the other shit above, but there are places i simply would not go growing up because i knew the trees there were pissed off. on the flip, though, there are some trees which will forever feel like family to me. you know how sometimes you have nightmares about family members dying and you wake up and have to call them just to make sure they're okay? i have those nightmares about these trees, but they're all in florida, so i just have to check the news and make sure nobody's done anything they would regret to my tree people. holy fuck that is crazier than all of the rest of this shit.

8) video games will absolutely suck the soul out of you and deplete all of your stored up magical energy. tv does this too, and movies, to a lesser extent. the longer you immerse yourself into someone else's world through a screen, the longer it takes to recover your self and more and more life energy is lost.

That's the wrap-up of the short list -- the tried truths. there were a thousand other little things that would govern my life for a few hours or maybe days at a time, but if they didn't prove out, then they didn't stick around.

looking back over this list, i'm amazed that no one had me committed. of course, this is probably the first time i've ever said any of this in any detail to anyone, much less all of it together in one big burst of crazy. like i said, i'm good at covering my tracks, and the older i get the more pissed off my expression tends to be, so probably nobody thinks that things like this are rolling around in my head. most people are really insecure, and assume that i hate them and leave it at that -- which isn't too far from the truth, but it's certainly not what's fixing a sour expression on my face. granted, it's not the trees anymore, either -- if a tree talks to me these days, i'm more likely to break down and cry. it's just been that kind of month.

i'm never getting out in front again

well, it took two and a half weeks, but it finally happened: the blog that was supposed to be about all the cool shit i do to distract myself from the sisyphean feat of finishing up school and being an adult has turned into a depressing trudge through all of the shit i'm trying to push up the hill and turn into a degree.

now all i gots is lots of downers. yaahhh! well fuck you, you keep reading, cause you love me and even my shittiest days are at least kind of interesting, and what were you gonna do with that five minutes, anyway?

* * *

basically, the beef today is that i'm realizing i'm a) not getting out of this semester without at least one shitty grade, which is a suck for the GPA, a suck for this delusion i've been carrying around about me being able to finish things with the same gusto that starts them up, a suck because the bitch of it is that i've been working my ass off harder than i ever have in my life, and b) it's going to be like this forever.

i'm never going to be out in front of the to-do list again. i am now slave to the list that grows in almost unbelievable heaps and mounds daily.

fml.

i was going to draw a picture for this post to redeem some of the suck, but i can't. this thing just needs to sink.

The rest of it

Right. Back to Thursday, cause I'd rather just not think about this week at all quite yet.

Edit: as it turns out, this is a pretty boiler-plate "what i did on my summer vacation" type post, because i'm writing more out of a need to have a record more than anything else. i'm so drained and overwhelmed that i don't have much more in me right now. Not my best work.

So. Thor'sday:

Wake up, set feet on ground, and regret it immediately. look down to confirm worst suspicions about bloody lumpy state of blistered feet. resolve not to give a shit about foot pain for at least three days, hobble to convention.

Field various hydrology questions, curse water, and feet. catch some interesting lectures by hatcher and steltenpohl, try not to look too excited when "friendly" argument breaks out over orientation over such-and-such fault. make mental note to be utterly certain and meticulous in future research efforts in order to avoid ever being on the losing end of such a debate.

Drink a bit and run around town defiantly denying growing foot death during lunch break, return, catch some more talks, make for dinner with the crowd, have enlightening though somewhat depressing conversation with teachers and usgs folk about the current calibre of grunt-level survey "geologists," take some pretty pictures against brilliant sunset with liz and ashley.

brilliant.

head to hotel, drink two or three warm trunk beers in rapid succession, stumble back to town for exciting after dark ghost walk of old wilmington (yess, the website is terrrible). have to say i was excited about this all day, having found a flier for it walking around by myself the previous day, then spending many conversations trying to rope folks into going with me. like i may have said, i was determined to be a good tourist this time around, and things like ghost walks just fall into that category so well. i was pumped.

and it was awesome. there's nothing like walking around a proper historic district on a dark and windy night and being told ghost stories. the guide was cool enough that ashmac and i deemed him drinkworthy, and after the tour we did more of wilmington after dark. good tourists indeed! if i were a better writer, this is where i would have told you all about the sound of water lapping under the river walk, and rooftop bars with magnificent twinkling views of old wilmington, and ancient theaters, alive, empty and lonesome with long shadows and groaning creaks, and frightening old architecture, roofs caved in with trees growing up to the sky outside, and the way the city seems unwilling to let anything go, inhabiting every haunted or hallowed corner, writing new stories between the crumbling lines of lurid and violent history.

if i were a better writer, that's what i would write about. but i forget so much. it's 5 nights later now, and so many of the details of this trip have faded already that i'm really beginning to understand the merits of carrying around a pen and viable paper at all time.

friday morning was for being tired and deciding that all of the sessions that day were just too wet for my liking, and so after a short recoup/curse my feet session, the rest of friday was all about walking in insane patterns around old town, just me and my headphones and my feet, just the way it used to be -- just the way i love it. if there's one thing i miss about tallahassee, it's being able to walk across town in the middle of the night, for whatever reason. just having that simple option makes me feel so free and light, that i can walk all night without noticing the pain.

saturday i left.

now i've been home for four days. it feels like four hours. it's been a blur. i was home alone sat and sun nights, a surreal experience after the last hypersocial week. basically all i did was watch doctor who, try not to walk, and try not to think about the amount of work on my plate. if at any point the distractions faded, a sinking and lonely case of post-trip sadness would sink in the cracks.

i've always been a sad sack after trips, or holidays, or deadlines, or after anything that i've spent a long time looking forward to or working for ends.. but now, just like every day for the last month, i've got too much work on my plate to wallow. i'll probably be out in front of it again just in time for the next bout of insane scheduling to set in. it goes: april 6th, 7th, 10th: concerts in asheville. all school nights. april 11th-12th: research in the capitol presentations and probably more touristing. april 13th: awards dinner cause i'm so. fucking. cool. april 15th-17th: petrology field trip to mount rogers.

if i've got this much underlying post-trip sadness now, what am i going to feel like when it's all actually over? probably fucking freaked out cause it's finals and presentations right after that.

the work is never going to end.

long live wilmington.

official first rss feeder.

the award goes to micah T, the most addictedest member of the interneb yet. YAY MICAH! glad to join your reading list full of kitteh pictures. this one's for you.

Drop that veil

2:21 a.m.

first official blog-check in of the trip. i meant to do better than this. though, if this blog is all about the things that distract me from living a normal life, then i suppose i get a few mulligans in the field of consistency.

i feel like the only person from western that's actually interested in academic and professional advancement at this meeting. that was a grammatically terrible sentence. so was that. fuck it.

i also, as it happens, feel like a fucking narc, because of my drunk friends who also like to smoke pot in hotel rooms paid for with federal grants. yeeah. i am the responsible party. the very bitchy, very tired, responsible party.

i am also, apparently, a terrible wife. missed like 6 calls from bo and made him worry. terrible.

here's the 2:32 a.m. recap of the last 3 days:

tuesday:

wake up late. do not proctor, or even attend, historical geology. get there so late that no one is around to conveniently let you into the lab to get your poster tube. find that poster tube is too small for poster since stupid undergrad research expo required goddamn velcro strips. curse undergrad expo and honors college generally, RIC especially, and scrunch poster tighter to fit. grab core sample for petrology homework that you will almost certainly not do. say farewell to the few lingering staff, saunter off with much self-importance to very exciting solo road trip.

reach asheville. eat sushi with husband and all of husband's geeky buddies. feel self-important for understanding half of their techy jokes. say farewell to husband, head for wilmington.

stop once on the way to wilmington. feel self-important for making good time and missing rush hour in charlotte. curse hwy 74 for going through so many goddamn towns. watch sun set. reach lonely boredom point that moves you to put on the pop station. smoke too many cigarettes. wish you had a beer. pass under first proper live oak of the whole trip -- almost crash the car in excitement. jump up and down in your seat for an hour, wishing you had left earlier so that you could see all the glorious coastal trees.

find motel. check into motel. border on harassing hotel clerk with conversation because you have been so starved for human interaction for so many hours. give self hair-cut. feel self-important because it looks so damn good. take shower in front of unfortunately placed mirror. feel self-importance deflate. fast forward to next morning (rest is just neurotic ironing and hardcore pawn marathon).

Wednesday.

Awake in panic at 6, 7, 8, pull self out of bed at 9. stuff pockets with continental breakfast, prepare to be homeless from 11 to 8 by frantically searching out any destinations worth seeing. regret being too neurotic to do this last night, thereby forestalling current panic at prospect of boredom. boredom is desperate and suspicious, and must be avoided. settle on aquarium, beach and back itinerary.

drive to beach, second-guess directions, loop around, almost get pulled over, ask directions, proceed ahead. say hello to ocean, text friends about being at beach, but secretly don't really enjoy it, just like always. kick off sand, head to aquarium. become suspicious of directions, loop around, eventually backtrack and persist. spend 2 hours wandering around sketching fish, revel in enjoyment of marine biology like not since the age of 11. start to panic about the time, head back to town.

park downtown, have to pee desperately since consuming 2 liters of diet cola on the ride back. find coffee shop on main drag, steal wireless, pee relentlessly. give 25 cents worth of chocolate espresso beans to random crying girl on street, scowl at college students through fly new aviators.

wander aimlessly, in one direction, hoping to find record shop. fail. walk towards river. begin to panic about the time again, force self to walk back up the river towards hotel at leisurely, definitely cool pace.

reach car. eat banana, try to act nonchalant and definitely not temporarily homeless, as advisor and her husband arrive. receive news that will have to check into convention and assemble poster solo. panic inwardly in very real way. realize that you are actually here to be impressive professional, and that this fate can no longer be forgotten in moray eels and espresso beans. cry inwardly for half a second, then proceed with practiced air of importance.

set up poster, and advisor's booth, field some preliminary questions from early birds about hydrology which is really not the focus of the poster, sweat profusely, hope that it is accordingly warm in the convention center to excuse damp behaviour. blame genetics for excessive sweat. curse academia generally.

stand by poster, do excellently, mingle, eat free food, drink free beer, mingle more, relish in the number of contacts that are in the room.

finish poster session, drink more, eventually end up back at hotel room.

Thursday.

that's for tomorrow. it's 3:02 a.m. and my ass is tired. i was planning to sleep until 9 tomorrow, which seemed luxurious, but now that's only 6 hours. yayyy drama.

an honor. an honor? another honor.

DISCLAIMER: i'm drunk and tired. i didn't spell check this. deal with it.

today was another day full of dread. most of it was dampened, however, by a sharply stabbing proud feeling that budded when i was called into the dept head's office -- not to be reprimanded (indeed!) but to be given an envelope with some serious nervously proud overtones attached to it. i started with the "congratulations, [jim]," and quickly decided that i was being given some honor, but didn't know the name of it, so i smiled at the dept head and said, in my best sally field impression: "you LIKE me! you REALLY LIKE ME!" at which point he tried to pull the door to his office to with him on the other side muttering something about "when she's done in there..."

anyway, i briskly sidestepped his efforts to conceal the newly bristling-with-pride me and jumped out into Anna's office exclaiming my excellence and worthiness. Apparently, i am worthy of being awarded the Dean's Outstanding Scholar award for the geosciences department. I beat out something like 30 of my peers, some of whom are frighteningly esteem-worthy. drunken neighbor blames it on the knee-high boots. i recounted that it was more likely my possession of boobs (in a sardonic manner), but he was too drunk to get the point and so that conversation descended into a sexiness ranking of the various types of hermaphrodites, somehow. i'm really going to miss neighbor when he moves.

at any rate, people are apparently noticing that i am fucking awesome, which is a real head-rush. i spent a large part of the day shirking my academic duties and running up and down the halls asking people "what has two thumbs and wins at everything?" (spoiler: the answer is "this guy.") but enough about my glory.

the undergrad expo went surprisingly well, and not just because they had surprise free food. i only had to spend about 10 minutes listening to douchers in bowties drone on, and even though husband was too busy fishing to show his support, a lot of friends came out and were really enthusiastic about my awesome poster, which made me feel great, but i also got to rap with the dept head and dan jones the mineral man about the poster. it's always good to get input -- i think i'll be starving for it in about 24 hours, sitting alone in a puddle of panic in a hotel room.

that brings me to now. the bags are packed, i had only a brief moment of utter doubt about my packing choices -- a briefness aided by an abundance of alcohol in the system (thank you neighbor!), and though i'll probably wake up in a cold sweat around first light tomorrow, i'm looking forward to the solo drive, scouting out a good pizza joint in walking distance of my hotel, and soaking for a long damn time and trying not to think at all about my impending academic fate.

this post is getting as tired as i am. it's almost 1. getting up at 9. driving for 7 hours...

i feel like it's christmas eve, and i'm eagerly anticipating unwrapping my academic awesomeness.

fuck yeah.

fresh panic, idiocy, determination ... alcohol.

tomorrow i stand up in front of my shiny new poster and (hopefully) smile in a friendly manner to passers-by who will be politely inquisitive about my work. i am horrified.

and that's only the best-case scenario. other versions include me packing in a flask and drinking from it in between hyperventilation sessions in one of the womens' stalls in the UC, or coming off like a complete bumbling fool next to stillwagon who surely will rake in more glory and attention than me. who pays attention to lady geologists, anyway? it is a well-known fact that our vaginas are hidden behind unruly hygiene and rumpled field clothing. i have it on good authority that the lady chemists are far more attractive, despite their chemical-scarred hands and stunted personalities.

fuck. i am overthinking this. that's probably because the much scarier beast is three days away, separated by a day's solo drive to the coast and a lonely night in a hotel, all of which i am certain will be steeped in fear and gin. well, maybe not gin for the drive. that might be a bad game-plan. definitely. wow, i'm glad i think these things out ahead of time.

some of the SEGSA panic was staved off this afternoon when i packed my bag. it's the typical assemblage: too many shirts, not enough pants, a fresh pack of socks that i had to buy because i am to disorganized a person to keep up with matching pairs of black tube socks, jewelry for every occasion, which is a laugh, because i don't really even wear jewelry, and even make-up, for gods' sake. what fresh hell am i imagining for myself in which i wear make-up? in front of people? people i don't even know?!


ugh. even though i felt better after packing, an act of definition which constrains the limits and predictability of this trip, now i am second-guessing myself and my aims, and i have a feeling tomorrow night's activities will involve unpacking, laying everything out on the bed, and chewing my lip between sips of tequila and wondering whether geology was the right discipline for me after all. fuck.

the bitch of all of this is, that if only my fucking sewing machine wasn't on the fritz, i would be knee-deep in some wonderful art project that would serve its purpose in distracting me from the reality of this very scary situation. if only. i got the thing to work, after a year and a half on the shelf, by simply twisting *one* knob. i'm trying not to get too down on myself about not thinking about twisting that particular knob 2 years ago before i decided all hope was lost and it would be happier in it's box in the back of the guest room closet. it doesn't help that somewhere in between deciding stupidly that it was broken and boxing it up, i completely lost the foot for it, the thing that makes it a sewing machine in the first place.

brilliant. so. blunders in organization and keeping track of things aside, i'm now left with nothing to distract me from the utter and complete black hole of panic that i'm sitting in. the alcohol isn't even helping. well, maybe it is. oh, gods. i shudder to think about the state i'd be in if i weren't drunk right now.

is that bad?

yup.

oh well. i'm gonna go dig through the unruly heap that is the guest room "crafts" closet. in the end i'll probably end up stabbing myself with the needle, which is still attached to the missing foot. yep. this is my life.

Edit: I am complete idiot. fixed the damn machine, about to plunge into this project like there's no tomorrow. this probably involves drinking like there's no tomorrow, too, which... unfortunately... there is.

figure drawing

pretty decent at it, except for the extremities. enjoy doing it, anyhow.

and that is that. i'm off to pass out watching Buffy.

the countdown is making me edgy. why is relaxing so hard?

spent most of my waking hours today sipping whiskey and playing around with illustrator and photoshop. at least, in some way, today was a productive day.

god only knows whether anyone will actually use this for anything, but i think i'll shoot a copy of it to the department head so he can have it if need be. really, though, this is what a wcu geology banner ought to read like:

... a far more accurate depiction of what goes on in the department, especially around field trip time. i'm looking forward to drinking with the people i've been working alongside in a very sober, professional capacity with at SEGSA. .... in three days. holy christ, this is beginning to get scary. i think the panic is setting back in, in part because in 72 hours i'll be standing in front of my poster defending my work to a bunch of, yep, drunk geologists who know wayyyy more about any of this than i do. probably i should bring a little liquid courage.

took a short jaunt into photoshop today, too, wanted to fuck around with making stencils, so i followed the directions at melissa evan's stencil making tutorial with good results. here goes liz:

badass bitch. even if she does like hippie music.

whatever. that was my day. watching the sun set now and wondering how much drunker i'm going to get. one more day of weekend before it's back to the working and the slaving and the blah blah blah. i am so looking forward to gawking at the liveoaks in wilmington.

leave for the coast in 66 hours!

death, forays into graphic design, and bad (but pretty) film

george died last night. i got the call from dad at 1 a.m. It wasn't unexpected, but that didn't stop me sleeping all day as is my mourning wont. I had dreams about the house he retired in -- my childhood grandparents' home, and him barbecuing shish-kebabs. Dad had dreams about G teaching him the proper way to do a push-up in the gym. We all have our baggage.

I decided it would be a good idea to take in a mindless movie for two hours and forget my life for a bit. The payoff was good, Red Riding Hood didn't exactly suck, but the concept of Teutons having crocheted shawls did irk me the entire time. fuck it, whatever, it was pretty. I came out of the theater with that dizzy feeling that comes of spending two hours in a dark room having camera angles thrust at you while sitting down, and the mini bottle of Makers probably didn't help, but it's still a nice sort of disorientation. There's nothing like sitting in a theater.

Also, I finally resolved my problem of feeling unpurposeful after the megadeadline was defeated yesterday. Blair's asked me to do the logo for SEGSA 2012, which will be held in asheville and which I hope to have a major behind-the-scenes part in organizing, just to know how these things are done. I think my odds are good; if i show up, knock the logo out of the ballpark and am generally a willing warm body on the ground, I should get to play a pretty big part in the grunt-work of organizing a conference --  holy fuck.

All i need now is a better working knowledge of illustrator, some balls, and a little free time. luckily, i've got at least half of all three of those things.

Big leagues, here I come.

someone must defend me from these impulses

i get wildly irresponsible and irrational urges to up and drive to tallahassee when the weather starts getting warmer. i've been trying to go every year, to let some of this steam off because i'm afraid that if i leave it too long i'll do something really terrible like move back there.

you can't help but miss where you come from, especially if you spent as much time in the hippie wilderness as i have (talkin about asheville here). but it changes me.

weather-triggered urges should probably be avoided. maybe the solo drive to wilmington and back next week will sate some of these cravings. the vents must be opened, and ocean air let in.

this amount of relief is unnerving.

the deadline has been met. well, stretched to breaking, then slapped in the face. at any rate, all of the build up and hustle i've been killing myself over for the last month finally ended at 4:25 this afternoon.

g-l-o-r-i-a.

now i don't know what to do with myself. i find myself sitting at the tea house, working on a very late second guinness, and not being able to carry on a conversation with everyone because my mind has got the mental bends from coming up from under all of that work so suddenly. what am i supposed to do with myself now that i don't have an endless heap of work on my to-do list? i find myself wanting to write about the work. i guess it wouldn't be a terrible idea to start the roughs on the thesis, but i think i might raise some eyebrows from the husband and other close friends if i don't at least pretend to take a break for a couple of days.

i leave for wilmington on tuesday, right after proctoring the historical exam for blair. poor little freshies, they have no idea what's ahead of them. i remember looking at the outgoing seniors last year, at the amount of work they were doing and the stresses that they were under, and being at least a sort-of forward looking person, i could feel the seeds of panic settle in. i feel like i've had a steadily building ringing in my ears for a year and a half. i feel like a david lynch score that's just gone silent after 2 discordant hours. i feel like something very strange is about to happen; the panic has taken on a paranoid tone, with nothing to grasp on to.

but enough with the neurosis. what a fucking downer. right now, i'm sitting at the tea house, by myself, on my second guinness, and the guy with the guitar just started playing 'feeling groovy.' ...

nevermind, i'm not shaking this surreal feeling any time soon. might as well drown it in drink and wake up tomorrow with blind shame.

wonder what liz is up to.

at least it didn't feel like 14 hours.

month. from. hell.

but i'm a little sadistic. i'm certainly a workaholic, overachiever, perfectionist. this month just hasn't had time to let the usual fuck-ups and distractions in, and i can feel it. my shoulders are a little straighter, i can finally talk to the department head at length about my thesis because i finally have a fucking clue about what's actually going on, and goddamn if i'm not going to a professional conference next week.

i realized today that the section i'm presenting in at SEGSA is basically a glorified science fair for almost-grown-ups, but fuck them, i'm the boss of the science fair. i win that shit. i will have my day -- two of them, actually.

so here's what i spent 8 hours on today and yesterday:

it's a lovingly crafted, nearly accurate depiction of my thesis study area. the cores are deep (200-600 ft) groundwater wells that NCDENR cared enough about to preserve and box up, but not enough to actually keep tabs on, so about 60% of the cores they took are missing now, stolen by rednecks or badgers or lost to who-knows-what, so there's a few thousand tax dollars down the drain. i'm not complaining -- too much -- because even with the 40% we could recover I was in over my head with this project. i'm about halfway done now, and i'm presenting my so-far conclusions at the southeast GSA conference next week.

i should probably be horrified, but right now, i'm just relieved to have the presentation prep be done tomorrow. the last three weeks are a haze of long workdays and little sleep. i've been edging up on spending more time on campus than i do at home. i definitely spend more time there than i do sleeping. nobody else that i know works as hard as i have this month.

this is why i win.

This shit is just like open diary, right? God, how old am I?

Either I'm much less self-absorbed than I used to be, or I'm a hell of a lot less self-assured that my problems and musings are of any interest to anyone. Maybe blog overload makes everyone seem less important. Probably, though, my problem is that I never finish anything, so the prospect of having a blog, a thing that never ends, is at once horrifying and freeing. There is no deadline, so there's nothing to fuck up. And if this becomes another of those abandoned little corners of the internet, collecting cyber dust, then I am assured that at least I did my part to contribute to the evidence of the anemic nature of 99% of the creativity on earth.

Shit, I guess I am still really self-absorbed.

The solution can only be blogging.

This is really just a fresh stab at chronicling my life, something I was once really good at but have for years forgotten how to do properly, and if you tally up all of the drinking and academic bullshit that I've crammed into my head, there's no room for a long-term personal memory. So this is for me, so that I stop forgetting what I've done and where I've been. If you enjoy it, then great.