It’s weird: school started and I keep feeling like it started without me. I’m still on the brink, not really able to decide whether I’m going to go back this spring or next fall. My school e-mail is still active and I’m on all of the distribution lists and helping with the project, but at the same time, I just keep thinking about all of the time it requires and how much mental energy is consumed by more or less meaningless tasks. I mean, the driving is annoying (especially so, when gas is $4 a gallon and my car, which is 15 months old, has 32K miles on it already) but even if I were able to take classes in town, graduate work consumes an enormous amount of time. I mean, I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I’ve got maybe two loads of (fucking) laundry to do and I’m entirely caught up. My bedroom is spotless. My Netflix deliveries are getting watched in a timely manner and returned immediately. My little projects are in check. I spent the weekend painting the new backdoor to the garage (the one I can see from my desk) to match the other exterior doors, and I had to convince myself not to start scraping at the chipped paint around the windows on the potting shed because then I’d have to start priming them and there was a chance I wouldn’t finish before dark. If I were in school right now, I’d have spent at least part of the weekend trying to quickly read something, or perhaps researching things. I don’t know why this is so puzzling…Every time I had a paper due, I spent at least 20 hours on that paper, if not more. It’s just that the open space left by the missing schoolwork doesn’t seem relative. It’s absolutely CAVERNOUS. So yeah, I don’t know what to do there.
In other news, somewhere along the line (and WITHOUT MY EXPRESS WRITTEN CONSENT) autumn started to happen. Seriously, it’s damned unfair. Sure, I love this time of year most of all, the way that the sunlight shifts just a little bit to the left, the way that the crickets outside my window don’t just come out at night but rather cheep cheep all the blessed day long. The sun and I go to bed earlier, much to the frustration of Esteban. I went to bed at 9 pm on Friday night, causing Esteban to remark that the only adult who has ever in the history of the world gone to bed at 9 pm on a Friday was his grandmother.
Look, bucko, I wake up at 5 freaking AM and don’t have the leisurely opportunity to sleep until 7:59 and then stumble up the hall to my office, unlike SOME PEOPLE.
Also, I think that there is a conspiracy of spiders. There is the mother of all spiders outside our front door and I kid you not, the thorax on that thing is the size of a kidney bean. It’s HUGE! Also, there is currently a spider living inside the driver’s door mirror on my car. It makes a new web every day. Sometimes it comes out and then hangs on for dear life while I zip down the highway. I don’t bother taking down the web anymore because there will just be another one when I get back. I do know one thing though: I never leave my sunroof open when I’m running into a store anymore.
Also, outside my window at work, there’s Biggie Smalls, Not So Biggie and also Other One, our three adopted coworker spiders. Sometimes they wave at us while we sit in our cubicles. I suspect they are actually knocking on the window, asking to be let in. At least they are less distracting than Annoying Coworker, who continues to be annoying, but now that I’m no longer on her team, I think she no longer considers me an equal and therefore is not worrying about my “getting away with it”, whatever “it” is. Maybe. Regardless, she’s leaving me alone and focusing her ire on various members of her team, but she still eavesdrops and jumps into our conversations, the only bonus is that now there are more witnesses. Sometimes, it’s the little things that give the greatest satisfaction.
I don’t know if I mentioned this already, but I now officially am leading a team of a bunch of people on the other side of the planet. If you’re going to have to supervise a team of people who all hate you for being a hard ass, then it is optimal to do it from the other side of the planet, so you don’t have to worry that they will put poison in your Starbucks iced tea.
So, this week, I’m going on a gigantic trip! I’m very excited! First, Jen Wade is getting married, so next weekend will be full of friends and laughing and fantastic outfits and shoes and also, marital vows and schmoopiness. And on Tuesday, we’re going to have dinner at Chez Panisse, which is pretty much de rigeur to be considered a food snob. Alice Waters! Funky weird forced menu! Expensive wines! Yay! I still have to make it to French Laundry one of these trips, but that annoying 2 month reservation thing is usually the sticking point, and luckily I was able to get a table with only 4 weeks notice at Chez Panisse. Ridiculo! As for the rest of my agenta, at some point, I’m hoping to make it to Green Apple books and at some other point, I’m hoping to go out to the Mint, but those are all in the air. Oh, and there’s one other thing I’m doing for sure. And it is awesome.
I’m going on a great white shark cage dive expedition to the Farralon Islands.
I shit you not. Can you believe it? Can’t you just die? I almost died. It was expensive, so very very expensive, and I’m not even getting in a cage or anything, but just going along as a topside observer. However, this was the only expedition that has a practically infallible likelihood of seeing the Whites and while it’s certainly not a sure thing, if I’m going to blow an entire day on a 12 hour boat trip, I want some pretty incredible odds.
Anyway, if I don’t come back… chomp!
After that, I’m heading homeward, with a short stop in Utah to hang out with my bff and do… hopefully nothing but sit around and write and laugh and make fun of other people. That’s the plan, anyway.
And then I come back home and then it’s Esteban’s birthday and then it’s Halloween in Chicago, and then it’s fricking November. What the hell, autumn? Are you trying to kill me or something? Ah well. It’s a damned good thing that I’m not taking a class this semester, because I’d hate to be too busy to enjoy every minute of this.
