Gah, wtf

If I'm still retaining even the smallest shred of sanity this time 48 hours from now, I will be thoroughly impressed. So far, I have accomplished very little tonight... at least in the area of actual academic progress. I've actually done a lot otherwise. Including discovering a whole plethora of unexplored character motivations, now that someone's got a little obsession with his apparent unavoidable fate (why didn't I see it before??). Oh, how I missed this sort of plotting, even if it was almost always later foiled. Oh, and I realized why none of the characters I was stalking at another rp were posting anymore. Silly random splits (though this increases the likelihood of me picking someone up over there once summer actually hits, since all the serious people that I liked ran off to one side of things).

Paper-wise? I have managed to write about three pages in the past... seven hours. I was not counting on this paper being so enirely difficult to write. I was like "oh, this one matters less and I have an actual thesis, plus pages of notes, it'll be easier"... turns out I overlooked the fact that not having anything to quote sort of puts a damper on your options for padding the paper. I don't rely much on quotes, but in the end, even if you're using them sparingly, they probably add an extra half-page. When you're still sitting just short of four out of seven, that starts to look like an awful lot.

I'm trying not to think about the fact that I'm going to have to pack tomorrow night so I'll be able to send things home on Thursday (because if I don't send them on Thursdsay, I'm sort of screwed. I've already accepted that I'm going to have to have other people take some of my stuff to storage for me, because there's no way I'm going to get everything packed before midnight Thursday.) The offer still stands for anyone willing to come to Chicago and pack for me. I'll pay you. And, if you don't mind the couch, there's free room in it for you. Though you're also obligated to listen to me plot out the rest of my pirate story. Speaking of which, if anyone happens to be bored and wouldn't mind, I'd love you if you read over it and told me where it needs improvement, or possibly hint at where on earth it should go, since I'm kind of at a loss. It's still over here.

Bugs...

So, apparently sometime last night, or possibly this morning, when I was not on the watch (probably while innocently napping on the couch between 6 and 10), a bunch of bugs got together and decided that expiring en masse under my lamp was a good idea. Er, thanks guys. That was, um... very inspiring this morning.

Packing stuff

I think it's a fact of life that packing = bizarre nostalgia. For some reason, I still have a notebook I kept as a journal in 8th grade. I only ever read through it when I'm moving things. So that means I pick it up about twice a year. Once when I move out, once when I move back in. It follows me everywhere, and I'm still not entirely sure why. And now really isn't the time for nostalgia, because I still have a lot of writing to get finished, but I also need to be mostly packed in less than 24 hours if I want to get my things sent home, so...

It's especially odd this year, reading through the notebook. Usually I can manage a sort of detached embarrassed amusement at it and get a good laugh. I mean, the first line is "the light is low and dim, it matches my mood." Somehow, nearly eight years after I started writing it (9-24-98 at 8:38pm is the first entry in it), this is the first time the total self-confidence-lacking 8th grader has come through... and been me, too. With a bit less variation in sentence structure, and a bit lacking in proper spelling, and embarrassingly much on the middle school crushes and desire to write rather Sueish fanfiction (one plot for an Animorphs series starring my friends and me, though I had the strength to avoid giving myself Jake's position as leader, and another starring three Andalite girls, whose names I believe I culled from lists of obscure Indian tribes who became Warrior-Princesses. Yep)... but it's still me. And now I'm all "aww, I've always been a dork like this!" It sort of reaffirmsentry for the my existence despite the countless existential crises I've had this year. I mean, the entry for the 3rd of October starts "Okay, dilemma time. I want to write ANIMORPHS [inexplicably in all caps and printed, the rest is in a larger, neater version of my standard cursive] fan-fic [sic] and post it on Chee's message board, but I'm pretty much out of ideas. I've got one I think will work, about how the female Andalites feel. I need a good name for it though, something Chronicles or trilogy..." Once a fannish, writer-y dork, always a fannish, writer-y dork, I guess. I won't even go into the school-related stuff in here, though. I just can't believe how I appear to have been just as stressed about things in 8th grade as I am now. That's just... it was 8th grade. I'm not even sure I actually had homework! I guess I just take everything overly seriously. Or not seriously enough.

So, moving on from that particular yearly boobytrap I set for myself, I decided that sorting my books wasn't the biggest problem, because whether those ended up in storage or at home wouldn't matter too much, so I moved into the bedroom to clean things out under my bed. Where I discovered the un-read copies of people's comments. I skimmed over them, and they were mostly positive, telling me things I already knew were wrong. Then I hit one that pointed out that the second line of the second paragraph accidentally rhymed. Thrice. And I went "hmm, interesting that you noticed that." The actual response contained this paragraph, which for right now is my favourite thing anyone's said about my writing this quarter, and in addition to amusing me greatly, it's made me think:

( Fantasy is useless, but you're better than some people... )

Edit of Random Nostalgianess 1 [8:08]: So, I've made it through 2/3 of my desk drawers... I got to the second drawer down, and for once had no qualms about throwing away the old syllabi and such. Then I saw the Stack of Notebooks. I am a packrat when it comes to notebooks. And I decided "All right, I'm doing good... I'll finally throw these away. They take up a lot of space." And naturally, as all notebooks are able to force me to do, I opened them. Discovering therein a plethora of senior-year physics quizzes full of ridiculous puns and overemphasized punctuation (and one with a post-it from the prof making fun of my principal). An in-depth sountrack I'd made for my last year of high school. The evolution of my college-level margin doodles/ramblings from my junior year of high school on. I think I've got a horrible thing for written nostalgia in the form of notebooks. They are my weakness! I don't know if I've just taken increasingly disorganized notes over the years, or less in classes has seemed important, or if I've just had a tendency to take more and more disorganized classes. I have the oddest feeling it's the latter, though, just by virtue of the fact that most of the earlier ones were in math and science, and now I'm an English major. Figures, don't it?