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From now on, you can preface any of my posts with instead of doing work.
So I’ve been working on my family tree. It’s been a massive undertaking, but enormously rewarding. My little world has swelled to 138 relatives, and it hasn’t stopped growing yet. It really is something that you can work on for your entire life, because familes never stop growing.
(Instead of doing work)I just watched Babel, and I’m onto Apocalypse Now. Babel was pretty good. I enjoy Cate Blanchett, even if she didn’t play the most humongous part. I enjoy actors expressing pain. It’s human. Apocalypse Now seems like it is endlessly quotable. It’s refreshing to see all of these older actors immortalized in their youthful forms.
Still trapped.
My bowling class is full of campus celebrities. I am going to do my best not to ogle them, but their egos are so large one has no choice but to enter their thralldom.
I so desparately want to be out of here. I’ve found myself hoping that I lapse into a coma for the next four months, and having some sympathetic soul do all of my work for me. Maryland, what have you done to me?
Back in Maryland, officially bringing the cold back with me.
I sleep on airplanes like it is my job. My body wakes me up when it senses flight attendants peddling the little snack mix and a beverage from seat to seat. Though, I fear I snore. Sorry everyone.
…
For the past month, I have had this 5:30 PM dip in my circadian rhythm. No matter what I do, my body does its best to find a way for me to get some snoozin’ in. I fall asleep on the bus, I semi-consciously close my office door and hit my desk so I can squeeze in a precious thirty minutes (read: one hour thirty minutes) — I have no control over it. If I am at home, then I can only stay up for about an hour more, and then I am completely out.
All I am sayin’ is this better not be what the next seventy years of life resembles. I don’t even have kids yet. If this keeps up during the school year — I’ll have no choice but to live in the library. I’ll wake up and guiltily sneak in little periods of productivity before my head caroms off the keyboard (again).
Maybe I’m only malnourished.
Just so everyone knows, and I know you’ve been wondering — when a former president dies, the flags are flown at half mast for thirty days. So we’ve still got awhile. I’m always confronted by a strange photographic itch whenever I see flags at half mast. I like the idea of bunch of people mourning someone they’ve never known, someone they may have voted against (or never voted for) because the federal government mandates it.
Continuing my partially Minnesotan themed posts — it was cold last night. And up here, it’s cold frequently, so what intelligent city planners have done (next to astronauts, city planners are my favorite people) is design a skywalk system. The system in downtown Minneapolis is large, over seventy-five buildings are connected over fifty-two city blocks. Needless to say, I did not walk all fifty-two blocks, that would take all day. Hundreds of stores are connected! If I only had hundreds of dollars (give me hundreds of dollars).
Had I been here over the holiday break, I would have done a much better job with gift finding and the whole game of wrapping them and finally actually giving them to their recipients. It’s just that I hate having to drive to each store. Few things disgust me more than driving, and 95% of the things that bother me more than driving are finding parking, caring for a car, traffic, and paying for car insurance. All which are at extremely high levels during the holiday season.
I do public transportation, enormous parking lots/garages next to those Pleasantville/Fairview mall mills with make me ill, when people fellate themselves when gasoline prices fall, my head aches.
For the rest of my life, I am resolving to do all I can do to never own a car. If I am forced to live and raise my family in an urban jungle so be it. Minneapolis is not the most ideal place to run with this idea of not having a car, but it’s doable. I am almost certainly thinking of northeastern locales, or maybe something on the order of leaving the country. This is probably just a natural rejection of my suburban rearing. But it’s strong enough to make some solid plans about where I really want to live.
I am back in Minnesota, and it’s nice to be back in a place that’s familiar and unfamiliar, so much different than Maryland, so much the same as Maryland, and cold. I missed winter. All the same faces are here, although hairier and paler because of the effects of the season. People here seem to be sick as well, a phenomenon I forgot about, what with Maryland’s global warmed 70 degree January days.
One thing that I do like I have realized — being in places for short amount of time. There is a since of purpose to each day. Semesters are too long for me now, I find it hard to focus from time to time, let’s be honest — all the time.
Every time I use dashes in my writing like the paragraph above, I wonder why the fuck I am using dashes. I have been raised to not use them in my writing, but I am painfully aware that I used them in my medical school applications. I’m not even sure if I am using them correctly, but my writing is imitating my speech more and more.
I haven’t speaking very much lately. I heard on NPR that men speak 7,000 words a day and women speak 20,000. I would say that when school ends I average around 3,000. With the combination of being enrolled in spanish, my grammar has gone out the window. When I speak I sound like someone who learned English at age 20, or maybe closer to some kind of special education student. It’s not working to my benefit.
I have been revealing a reviled secret to my friends and family — I do indeed, hate college football. College basketball is up there too, but having played competitive basketball at some points in my life I understand what the players are going through a lot better.
My reasons for hating college sports run deep, but with college football, they generally run around the fact that there is no true playoff to determine a true champion, just a bunch of teams playing a lineup of endless of bowl games. I fucking hate this time of year. College sports are bad in general because the games are more or less, amateur hour. I do not want to watch these self-besotted athletes who are only okay at their sport be involved in such strangely lopsided contests. I like parity.
On the flip side, I always come back down to earth when I’m reminded that they are kids my age playing. I was in a College Park bar yesterday, and the Notre Dame/LSU game was on. One of the players on the LSU side made a tremendous play, and then all of a sudden I was overcome with jealousy. To do something well on the football field, to have the more than 72,000 human beings in attendance and millions watching on television gasp in awe, love you, want to have your babies, be shocked, say “wow” — must be the ultimate drug. Nothing can come close to the adrenaline rush one must feel when that happens. That is fucking entertainment, and I now envy the entertainers.
Hello,
Don’t really have any new year’s resolutions. They more resemble pats on the back from escaping from the fucking fer de lance of last year. I survived, however beaten and battered I may seem, and that can only make 2007 better. Yes, I have high expectations for 2007.
2006 was a strange year for me, I consciously manipulated my priorities, so instead of having everything being top priority, there were levels of prioridades. This ended in partial disaster. It was part of the gameplan for 2006, and I stuck to it, but it did not work for the whole year. Very much like a season of your favorite sport. You can’t stay the course.
So if I am going to do one thing in 2007 it’s going to be to go with the flow, and not stay the course. Everyday I will look at the mistakes that I’ve made in the first 7,800 days of my life — and try to avoid repeating them.
Prolifico 