dec 15: i hate dust bunnies

I do, I hate them.

The name gives one the erroneous impression that these are endearing accumulations of fuzz and dust, instead of what they are – hairy parasites that cling to hard-to-reach corners and edges of your luggage boxes. Unacceptable.

I remember learning at some point in my earlier years that dust was in fact 90% skin cells. As I observe the bunnies in my trashcan, I find myself increasingly more skeptical of this statistic, for my skin is neither grey nor fuzzy. With that said, if I woke up one day to find instead beige clumps around my room…

ew.

nov 25: revelations at night

1. Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen computer science to be my ‘fun’ fourth class.

2. I’m actually torn about whether I would’ve voted for Gore 2000 if I could time travel backwards and be eligible to vote. Then Obama might never have happened…

3. I’m discovering that a frightening number of my close friends don’t think it’s normal to brush their teeth twice a day. AHHHHHHHHH!

This traveling salesperson can just…ugh.

 

“Minimum travel distance is obtained by getting his ass fired for complaining about walking around too much.” Hmph, lazy workers…

nov 15:

Saturday night was so much fun, despite having to inhale a lot of spicy and delicious Indian food in ten minutes. Mmm, curry eating contest…wait, ick. Lessons learned about dinner reservations – make them earlier than the day of. Personally I wouldn’t have minded getting pizza in our formalwear, but there is something to be said about being well-dressed in a sit-down kind of restaurant. It seems to make the food taste better.

The eXp dance show was fantastic. A few words that pop into my head to describe it – Limber. Fluid. Together. Crisp. Deep. Juggle! Hee, that last one was a shoutout to one of our friends who was guest performing with the Juggling Club.

“Whooooo! Go juggling!”

“Yeah juggling club!”
“Yeah, juggling!!!!!”

…

“Yeah, juggle!!!!!!!”

“Dude, ‘juggle’s not a noun.”

 

Great weekend. Still a crapload of work to do. Such is life – indeed.

 

Also, I hate ordering pizzas over the phone.

Senior year, thus far.

What makes senior year, senior year?

1. Commiserating looks from your peers when you’re rushing off to somewhere

2. The automatic cringe response elicited whenever you talk about your thesis

3. People saying “We should really hang out sometime. No, like seriously!” – with the unspoken before we graduate and never see each other again.

4. Peers in denial of the fact that it is senior year.

oct 19: unhappy medium

Reading about Obama makes me realize how much I identify with him. Is that pretentious to say? That I identify with possibly the most charismatic president of my generation?

“F.D.R. asked to be judged by the enemies he had made. But what of a president who strives to keep everyone in some vague middle ground of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, without ever offending anyone?

- NYTimes

Obama, don’t be afraid to piss people off! We elected you president because you had good ideas, but like Little Texas said,

“Yeah you got to kick a little and be tough
You got to let ‘em know you’ve had enough
Remember that unless you want to finish last
You’ve got to kick a little”

(You’re welcome.)

Compromising is great in many situations, but constantly trying to find middle ground means you’ll never get to Point B. I used to value compromise as a means to most ends. And then I realized that it actually kind of leaves both parties a little bit worse for the wear.

A little more on a tangent – of all the things I didn’t question about myself during my high school years, it did occur to me at some point that I didn’t have a straight-up, no-buts-about-it “enemy.” This may be the aphorism that couldn’t, but I think you can measure what you’ve done by the number of enemies you have. If you don’t do something huge, chances are, people probably won’t care enough to get ticked off.

Call me crazy, but I always thought it’d be satisfying to actually hate someone. So far, no such luck. Hate is a pretty strong word, so the closest I’ve come to is probably an intense level of dislike. Right now though, I have bigger fish to fry. Like two midterms. And a paper I’m working on right now. Which is why my room is so clean.

oct 17: WANTED – hot ball of gas, visible. And at a safe distance from me.

What’s grey and ugly and makes me frown?

Midterms + this weather we’re having. I can feel the clammy breath of Seasonal Affective Disorder on the back of my neck. Breathing in. Breathing out. Twisted meditation, fi I ever saw it. Alas, where has the week gone? I was being present, gosh darnit, and yet I still find myself suddenly, on a late Saturday afternoon, wishing it were the morning again. I want sun. Now.

Two of my classes had “sympathetic” profs who thought they’d be doing a favor by lessening the number of midterms we had during the actual midterm week by bumping them up to this week. Thanks, guys. Your coordination was both perfect and perfectly awful. Alternately, you could have canceled the normal problem sets that would be due next week! I am full of good ideas, you should’ve asked. I’m somewhat glad I don’t have a pile of papers to write, but my current to-do list seems equally daunting.

Okay, now I just need to remind myself that I like these classes and that this is just another…opportunity for me to…practice my….knowledge. Or something like that.

oct 14: what’s in a name? everything, duh.

Some names just have a presence. If my last name were Ramachandran, I feel like people would just naturally take me more seriously. As it is, I am someone who got stuck with a ridiculously short last name which will as a result prevent me from coming up with the [insert last name here] Law of…Life, or the ___ Constant. Oh to be a Boltzmann or Schrodinger. Actually, I’m glad I wasn’t a Schrodinger. Then I’d have had a lot of explaining to do growing up considering I don’t look very Austrian/Dutch/German.

Ramachandran came up because he’s actually coming on campus to talk about how neurology can affect human nature. Yes, this is a pet interest of mine, so I’m pretty excited. But more than that, who would turn down any speaker with a name like that? Possibly, everyone else but me. I’m entranced.

Okay, enough dwelling. I’m staring at a tiger shark.

And I still left my camera in the room.

oct 13: what happens on hump day.

I need to remember to bring a camera every day. My current plan is to set aside some time to go around campus collecting the most colorful leaves I can find, make a trip to a craft store, and decoupage the heck out of my Moleskine notebooks. Or anything else that strikes my fancy.

The weather here couldn’t be more fickle. Yesterday I woke up and it was 40 degrees. Today it’s supposed to get up to 65 and go down to 37. We always complain about erratic weather patterns, but shouldn’t expected fluctuations at some point start taking us less by surprise? Honestly, I think we’re all in the same boat – it’s nice to moan and groan about things we can’t change, especially when it can be so easily solved by something so simple as bringing an extra jacket.

It is an absolutely gorgeous Tuesday. I’m sitting on the lawn behind our student center as I type this. The sun’s been going in and out of clouds, which has created a cycle of being blinded by my white Macbook and finding it so dim I can barely see the screen.

Is it possible that senior year will be the one in which I get the most amount of sleep? Hard to believe. I suppose it’s still a while before thesis-panic sets in. Right, my goal is not to get to that point. But so far, I’ve been able to look at the clock, and realize that trying to keep my eyes open for that extra thirty minutes at night is so much better spent lying in bed, sleeping soundly to thoughts of finished problem sets and space travel.

I took a brief detour today to the basement of our music building, where the practice rooms are. Seeing as it was still the middle of the day, I figured most of them would be empty, so I could go down and find an open Steinway (heart!) and pound out the opening lines of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique. As I went down the steps I heard instead the familiar noise of tuning, warm-up arpeggios, and passages being played over and over again. And, I guess there really isn’t too much deviation in the way of practice room layouts, but for just a moment it was like getting ready for band, or All-State, or summer camp, or…even my first years learning piano. I remember I lived in campus housing then, Ole Miss. We couldn’t afford a piano, so my mom would walk with me to the university practice rooms every day. Thinking of that makes me wonder what I looked like, no, what we looked like.

Growing up must be a hard thing for parents to see.

dark and bitter.

I didn’t drink enough coffee in Europe. I should have made a point of drinking coffee in a street-side cafe at least twice in every city. To be alone with such a soothing yet upbeat aroma, gazing at the the speed of life around us. The natural rhythms of people walking, stopping, turning, thinking…and they said this heightening of the senses was only a byproduct of cannabis. That one afternoon in Porto, the day I missed my flight…was well worth the trouble, or so the not-yet-penniless me says. Fresh surroundings. Hard to come by on campus, but I’m trying to make do with exploring different nooks in our campus center, which hopefully will lead to making my way to the coffee shops on the adjacent street(s).

oct 12: a sign came and almost killed me.

Not to worry, I was in no physical danger. But god, the irony.