Monday, December 29, 2003
This is a few days early, I know, but there's nothing wrong with jumping the gun on resolutions, and anyway, I've been declaring most all of these, along with my general intent to improve the quality of my life, as my plans since sometime shortly after I got done with the newspaper. So you may have heard them before. I'm still going to try, maybe:
To find a job. For next year, and to find an internship for this semester, and I swear, I will finish the essay for my Columbia application (not grad school--just a summer program) by the end of break. Methods for achieving this goal may or may not include making ritual sacraficial offers of desperation to the gods of employment, begging friends, relatives and random strangers on the street and if times get very, very tough, talking to the idiots in Career Services.
To go to the gym, at least three times a week. This includes visits to the weight room, where I will not be put off by the smarmy guys who like to make faces at themselves in the mirrors and watch themselves as they work to tone their muscles. This does not include trips to the food trucks located directly outside the gym.
To figure out what exactly I am doing with and what I want from a number of relationships in my life. Namely, slightly too-ambigious-to-be-comfortable ones and/or ones that cause me great stress and annoyances. Also, to avoid additional ambigious and/or annoying entanglements in the new year.
To learn how to cook something other than pasta, chicken nuggets, hot dogs and my "rice dish." (Note to the uninformed: "rice dish" IS a very easy, cheap and relatively tasty way to eat--just not several days of a week. Ingredients include one cup water, one cup salsa, two cups minute rice, maybe ground beef, chicken and/or taco powder if you're feeling very extravagant. Serve on flour tortilla with cheese and sour cream.)
To have fun. Like, really, really have fun--not in some half-ass crappy way. Repeating second semester last year would possibly be a good way of doing this.
Update more. Hahaha.
[01:28 PM EST] [4]
Friday, December 12, 2003
It's 11:49 p.m. I'm writing this from my former office—where they have replaced the name on my former mailbox with my successors' within the last 24 hours. I am sitting at her desk now, because it used to be mine, and as miserable as the five and a half months I spent sitting at it made me at times, it feels like home.
I came here to abuse the printer because mine would not work and all of the computers in the lab were taken. I know it's taking advantage of a former employer and it's sort of wrong, given that they're hardly well-off, but, well. I'm sorry. I had to.
I should be studying for a final. It's my only exam this semester, it's tomorrow at 8:30. (Another confession: I skipped more than a handful of the lectures and before this afternoon, had read less than a quarter of the required material for this class.)
But I kind of wanted to think out loud for a moment.
It's occured to me more than once that this site isn't what it once was—I no longer talk in great detail about my personal life, I no longer use specific names or even refer to specific incidents unless they're completely anecdotal trivia. I don't update even on a weekly basis most of the time. And it's kind of boring.
It's sort of a weird paradox: I started putting writing on the web because if I had some kind of audience, I felt compelled to not let them down; to keep writing. Except the audience had to be anonymous; or at least, partially so. (Ok, yet another confession: I really started it way, way back when because I wanted Dave to read about how much he'd hurt me, but that reasoning sort of dwindled within an entry or two.) But when the audience gets closer than few degrees of separation, I sort of freeze up and start talking in big, sweeping euphamisms that don't really make a lot of sense to anybody.
And it's sort of representative of one of the larger questions I keep asking myself tonight: why the hell is it that I can never find the words to say what it is I want to say out loud and to the people who actually need to hear them? I like to think of myself as someone reasonably good with communication—what the hell else have I been doing in this god-forsaken office all these semesters if not communicating? But when I want to say something, I mean, really say something, unless I am really, really mad and the situation is particularly dire, I find myself tripping over "I don't know's" and "I'm sorry's." (Another question: Why the hell do I feel the need to apologize profusely to people I'm trying to yell at?)
There aren't clear answers to these questions and more importantly, I know they're not going to be on my final tomorrow so maybe now isn't the time to go looking for some explanation (probably rooted in my childhood; something having to do with being a twin and how my father didn't love me enough and how I wasn't picked playing Duck-Duck-Goose in preschool—I don't know). But these are the issues that come to mind when I start looking for any excuse to escape from the library's flourescent lighting and my history book. And it's something I've been meaning to tell you, so there you have it.
[12:07 AM EST] [3]