Sad

So it appears that even if I imbibe in the barest minimum of alcohol, even if I stay up long enough that I feel fine and sober before I go to bed (and even though I can hold my liquor just fine besides), I will still get hungover the day after, no matter what. 

I don't understand why my body is such a delicate flower in this fashion, but I guess it's just another drop in the bucket of the whole having-the-constitution-of-an-octogenarian thing.

Anyhoo, even though I am 95% sure of the classes (YAY) I will be taking this semester, I'm going to go ogle my new course catalogue (YAY). It's so pretty! I can't wait to superfluously highlight more course descriptions.

  

HOW have I not watched 30 Rock until now?

I'm in love with Tina Fey. And finally, there are some goddamn female names in the top creative roles--the first two (edit: er, actually, three!) executive producers are women! Joy! Not surprising for a show that actually portrays its female characters as real people rather than plot devices or decoration, but incredibly and disappointingly rare in television overall. This is seriously awesome.

I have been doing other things with my time besides watching TV, but the implementation of my own personal productivity system (I finally read Getting Things Done) is not nearly so captivating as Liz Lemon et al.

And oh, yeah: I quit my job (FREEDOOOOOOOOOOOM). I've been checked out mentally for quite awhile, though, so contra my repeated listening of Think, I didn't get that much of a visceral thrill out of finally leaving. And even with the start of graduate school circling vulturelike over my psyche, I'm just not that wound up about it yet. Could be that the anti-anxiety meds are working, who knows. I'm sure I'll have a psychological breakdown soon enough, because even though I'll largely be doing the same everyday activities that I've been doing for the past year (going to classes and workshops, reading academic papers, etc. etc.), the implications for my entire life are vastly different now. (I can feel my heart rate rising as I type that.)

Well, no need to rush along the panic attack, when it'll take care of itself in its own time. Until now I'll do what I do best, and just not think about it!

Delinquency

Greetings. The past few weeks have been unusually pleasant and social for summertime (I absolutely hate summer, at least when without climate control, but at least we only have a month or so of it left), and thus my absence. I'm checking in not because I have anything special to say at the moment (I've mostly been watching a lot of Golden Girls on DVD, via Netflix), but to ensure those of you who may guess otherwise that no, I am still not dead.

Not dead, and I start grad school in less than a month! Insert perfunctory "eek" here, even though I'm not that eek-y right now--mostly tired and dusty.

Anyway, quite enough of my little ramble. Time to go watch Rose deal with her disabled sister Lily.

I don't understand

how it is that over the course of my recent caffeine detox, downgrading from energy drinks to Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee produced fewer headaches than downgrading the iced coffee from a large to a medium.

Help me I am uninteresting

Seriously, ridiculously boring over here. The heat does not help, as it induces further lethargy and uninterestingness.

Here are a few of the uninteresting things I have been doing lately:

• Getting paid for being neurotic! Or rather, will be getting paid a cool $50.00, after I complete the second part of a psych study for the self-identified anxiety-ridden. I love living by a research university; I've accumulated at least $400 just doing medical/psych studies like this one.
• Finally trying out Pandora. It's all right, any given channel gets repetitive fairly quickly, but I've found some good stuff so far, like Madeleine Peyroux and Adele. And it offers me a greater variety of Bonnie Raitt than I've found on YouTube.
• Procrastinating about my RA write-ups. Adviser Guy doesn't nudge me at all, which is sorta terrible, since I'm a person who needs to be nudged. I'm doing the research, just not the formal reporting on it, as I'm a class A perfectionist and am horribly afraid of the suckfulness that will emerge as I try to write the reports.
  
• Finally getting dinner and catching up with a friend who lives literally less than a block from me. She's been there almost a year, and I'd never seen her apartment. We commiserated about how transient our friend groups are, affectionately mocked local activist politics, and made tentative plans to get together and be friends more often.
• Drinking beer at 2 in the afternoon because it is the coldest beverage in the house amidst all of this horrible, horrible heat. It does make me more sleepy, though.

...And with that I am off to watch the last few AbFab episodes on this disc before I return it to Netflix.

Clean house, maturity angst

Gifted with an empty apartment this weekend, I took it upon myself to do some major clean-up.

Why? A friend and former roommate visited last Friday, as he was in town to conduct his own apartment/condo hunt. He's a wonderful guy and a great roommate; we're not living together again because the lease was up last month, and at that time he was planning to move a few states over, having been stuck in waiting list purgatory at one of BTU's professional schools. Happily, a few weeks ago he got notice that he's in off the waiting list (huzzah!). Since he's doing a joint professional degree/PhD program at BTU, he's going to be living here about as long as I am. I.e., we get to hang out for forever!

So, he was crashing at my place while he looked at a few apartments, and we got to talking about what kind of spaces we'd like to live in as we continue our studies and as our twenties gradually slip away from us. After this year he's going to give some thought to buying an apartment/condo, which took me by surprise. It seems like such a grown-up move.

This naturally induced me to become vocal about my maturity insecurity, and from there we discussed the distinct post-graduate feel of my current/his former domicile. It's sort of a mess, with a bunch of kitschy accents left over from previous tenants (like the beaded curtain in the living room) as well as our own personal touches added in a like-minded spirit of whimsy over the past year (like the holiday garland draped over the inflatable alligator head) (no, really). And it's dusty and slapdash--our auxiliary TV/internet devices sit on a dining room chair because we don't have a proper stand. And the cords and duct tape. Everywhere!

So, on Saturday, after my old roomie left, I impulsively got to work. I had two discs of 90s sitcom "Living Single" to keep me company as I got to cleaning every damn thing in the living room, in addition to doing several loads of laundry, washing dishes, and going through old clothes I've been meaning to toss out. The living room was the primary focus, though, and, if I do say so myself, the results were spectacular. The floor is so shiny, and the cords are so pretty and orderly, and the dead plants have been cleaned out and their pots cleaned up. Having a respectable-looking space makes me feel much more like a real person.

We're keeping the alligator head, though.

Indecision 2008

I gchatted (is that a verb? it is now. woo branding) with one of my college friends a few days ago. He's worked a really awesome-sounding non-evil consulting gig for the past year but has been making eyes at law school for as long as I can remember. He took the LSAT last month and got an appropriately fantastic score for a guy who made it his mission to be an overachiever among overachievers in college. And I know from Type A--the two of us actually "met" online the summer before freshman year via the circle-jerk that is the Princeton Review college admissions boards. (My tool roots run deep.)

Anyway, given said fantastic score and fantastic college GPA, he has as good a shot as anyone at getting in to one or more of the top law schools. When we chatted it turns out I caught him on a day that he, glowing with the shallow yet undeniably warm and pleasant affirmation bestowed by a decent standardized test score, was slacking at work in favor of looking up the strengths and weaknesses of various law schools. I contributed what I know, since I briefly considered law school though did not end up taking the dread LSAT. Hearing him so excited and excited in particular about programs with a strong social justice/social responsibility orientation, well--it didn't make me jealous, exactly, but it did sorta make me want to run off and buy an LSAT prep book and start reading law school guides and plan to audit a law school class or two this semester. To keep my options open. Or something.

I'm having the occasional moment, particularly after conversations with friends like the aforementioned, when I think of how, with very little real-world experience, I'm embarking on a commitment of upwards of six years with few employment options aside from the professoriate waiting for me on the other side (that is, if I can get a job, knock wood)--and it makes me feel like I'm looking into the abyss. Law school seems so much more practical, and a shorter commitment with more options at the end if I turn out to really despise it. And I may not despise it! How do I know! I could just love it to pieces and I'm not giving myself the chance to find out! Fool!!

And then I think of the debt, and I'm back to thinking the doctorate isn't such a bad idea, after all.

Anyway. I doubt this feeling will ever go away completely, at least until I take and subsequently hate a law school class. And I sort of doubt I'll be doing that any time soon. I know it's my natural impulse to want to learn everything about every potential life path before I commit to anything, and of course that's impossible. But still, it seems like graduate school is a particularly harsh mistress in terms of what you give of yourself and what you potentially get back, or where you can turn if you end up not liking it or if you don't get a steady job. Maybe that's just how it looks from inside the fishbowl, or rather, when you're getting ready to dive into the fishbowl.

Given that I will be second-guessing myself no matter what I do, it seems that the best way to go from here is to just shut up the doomsaying voices for awhile and keep my eyes and ears open. I have a tendency to live anywhere but the present, and I'm not going to learn anything about myself or what I want unless I commit to experiencing the situation first. Maybe then I'll start thinking about law school again. But maybe I won't.