back in the high life, again.

i haven't been able to come up for air very much this month. for instance, i barely even realized that i turned 33 at some point, and that was weeks ago! today is the first day where i can actually just sit still for a minute, and not be pressed by some impending due date or doom, or whatever... i started to clean the apartment, which i have sorta noticed over the last few weeks has become overrun with cat hair tumbleweeds and the little tufts of carpet that the cats pull out when they are doing their manic scratching routines(often). it is also covered in a significant layer of dust, which is inevitable when you live in new york city and have your windows open for any length of time. especially on a street like first ave, where it is buses and trucks all day and night.

anyhow, now that i have a minute to sit and reflect on the happenings of the past month or so, i have become aware of the fact that cw and i developed a pretty serious habit over the past few weeks, one that has actually served us quite well: chili.

that is, chili in the crock pot, which cw has been making about once a week. it usually lasts a few days, which has helped in the midst of the chaos surrounding my academic life most of the time. it is nice to just have a whole meal ready to go in one bowl. and a delicious one at that. it's not even that bad for my points count!

that's the really interesting part: over the past month, aside from being terribly hectic, and eating a lot of chili, cw and i joined the gym, and i started counting points on weight watchers. i always avoided ww cause it seemed like it would be a pain in the ass, but it is actually totally awesome. it's a great help to have a guideline in my head as far as where i am in my daily eating, and i have found that it is not hard at all to stay under my points total, even eating mad chili and pizza and all sorts of other stuff you would think would be totally off-limits. i sound like fucking valerie bertenelli, i know, but for real, it's pretty awesome.

anyhow, the final aspect of the discoveries i am making about our habits this month has been this: we all know that we are in the middle of a giant "clusterfuck to the poorhouse" as jon stewart puts it, so we have to be mindful of our spending. i have one word for you:

presidente.

hilarious.

surely you can't be serious.

you know how in movies and television shows there are always these crazy scenarios that arise where someone does a shit-ton of work on the computer, only to lose it in an instant due to some weird, inexplicable computer glitch, endlessly fucking them for all eternity?

that just happened to me!

i can't believe it, actually, because it is just way too cliche, but i literally spent about three hours today putting together what was to be the final draft of my "professional goals statement" so that i could mail this godforsaken application out this afternoon. now three hours was just the home stretch, folks. i have written about fifteen drafts of this thing, and that's not counting how many times the sentences in those drafts have been re-written and moved around and shit. this has been going on for weeks, literally.

but then today, when i swear to you i was approaching the moment(and the word count) where i was going to say "okay. that's it." and print the fucking thing out and be done with it, in an act of epic stupidity, i decided to do something epically stupid. worse, it was something that i would normally NEVER DO. i just keep asking myself why... why?

i selected all, copied the text, opened a new document and pasted it. now here's where things went wrong. instead of saving that document first, i went back to the other one and closed it, clicking "no" when it asked me if i wanted to save the changes. i did this because there was a sentence from one of the earlier iterations that i wanted to use, and i figured that by not saving the changes, i would get the old draft back. which was true, but unfortunately, as i went back to the brand new, UNSAVED document, to add the sentence, name it something like "FINAL FINAL DRAFT, FOREVER HOLDING ITS PEACE" and save it, the computer did something wonky and all of a sudden that dreaded "Word Has Encountered an Error and Needs to Close" screen came up.

WHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTTT? an error? what error? why now? no, don't close... wait! not yet, why... what... how... FUCK!

I scrambled to figure out how to do something, but it was already asking me politely if I would like to send an error report to Microsoft. no comment there, dudes.

i am speechless.

so, to sum up: my very-close-to-finished draft of the piece which has been plaguing me day and night for weeks is in the ether. the draft i do have is one that was saved about 600 revisions ago, and upon looking at it, i have realized that, boy, did i change this shit A LOT in three hours.

no more today. i can't deal. i may try again tomorrow, although i can't imagine anything i would like to do (or am equipped to do for that matter)less at this point. fuck.

don't worry!

i'm fine, just needed to vent a little yesterday. somewhere along the line i seem to have lost sight of the fact that being accepted for (even more) school does actually not hold my entire life in the balance, should i not, let's say, get in... there are plenty of other options, many of which i was planning to go with quite happily up until about a week ago when the grad school application fever took me and i became hysterical.

all better now. i took the evil GRE, and screw it. screw standardized testing. it's balls.

amusing side note: in the prep book i was using by Kaplan(you know, the people you can pay an arm and a leg to so they can teach you the "secrets" of the test?) there is actually a section designed to beat down any rebellious feelings one might have against the idea of the GRE, claiming that it doesn't really do any good to "rail against standardized tests" so you might as well just suck it up and get good at the damn thing. i see their point, in some regards, but i also disagree with it wholeheartedly, on an ideological basis. why not "rail against standardized tests"? somebody should, or we are just gonna have to keep sitting for the fucking things, and nobody wants to do that! i say, go! rebellious GRE dissenter! run free from the test center and tell your graduate school to go screw itself!

now if you will, just mail my scores to....

"when it's all the little things, so overwhelming to me..."

like seeing it through, paying my bills, showin' up for work early... blah blah blah.


sing it, girl. it's times like these that i feel that song the most. i just lost my school id(a bit more precious than your average school id, since it is also my work id for two different jobs) and for the ten minutes until i found it, the world started to close in on me like one of those rooms that batman would always get stuck in with the shrinking walls. was that even batman? i don't know. if it isn't on the GRE or something i need to know for teaching English 210, i don't know it right now. i don't really know much about those two things either. blankness.

speaking of, when this is all over, i plan to re-up my addiction to "Making the Band 4" that will make everything seem okay, because as long as I am not any of the dudes or chicks on that show, i think i be doing alllllriiiiiight. not really, though. at least they have puffy makin' sure they eat. fuck.

oh, and i also plan to find out what is making the popping sound in my kitchen, cause it is DRIVING ME FUCKING CRAZY.

that is all.

The Writer is President of the United States...

Barack Obama's Op-Ed for the Washington Post, Feb. 5th, 2009

I know it's terribly idealistic of me, but I am totally head over heels for this guy! I think he is doing a hell of a job! I think writing to the American people in the frickin' Washington Post is brilliant and wonderful! Go Obama.