evening, unindicated

I am below ground again. I am below ground often. Reading En Attendant Godot I have a special appreciation for the timelessness of the situation. It might be summer, it might be winter but it is fall and it is 7 pm.

I read two articlettes about Beckette, both of which quoted Robbe-Grillet. Alain, the man who taught me to read. I have Le Voyeur sitting lonely on my shelves, three quarters of the pages still waiting for a paper knife. Maybe winter will come with the luxury of reading a difficult book. Difficult because it's in French, and because it's new or whatever.

I've been rereading the Belgariad, if that gives you a sense of my capacity for intellectual stimulation. For those of you who don't know me, which is all of you, I have read those thousand or more pages more than thirty times, I think. I lived and breathed that book in Switzerland. My first love was a character in that book, if anyone is my first love. Reading it is like throwing a blanket over the toes of my brain. It is so safe. I read it so quickly; half-memorized sentences fly through my filters before I can question the style or vocabulary or questionably racist political structures.

My officemate is back and so I won't be able to write much more. I never feel like there is a time or a space that is big enough for me to write. I'm thinking about renting a cabin on the coast in december.

Back to physics.

OH WAIT incredible discovery: Alain Robbe-Grillet was trained as an agricultural engineer which gives me a perverse hope that I will find what I'm looking for one day.

concrete cubicles

Sound leaks into my thesis office, wrapped in echoes. We're the kind of underground that you expect not to be bombproof, but you'd still come here first if there was an emergency. Not only because there's a pie and a half in the fridge, but because something about the white, pockmarked walls says "survival."

I work here sometimes. Those times are a blur of furrowed brows and scratching pens against gridded paper. Sometimes, I turn off the lights and curl up in my office-mate's chair and watch movies alone in the silence. Those times are little doses of total relaxation. I see the darkness in high definition. The cold floors shine sharply, reflecting the crack in the door.

Coming back to school after fall break has been strange. I've been cutting myself slack: breath here-sleep there. I forgot how to stop myself from feeling doomed at the beginning of the week, looking down the barrel at all of the homework that was ready to shoot me in the eye. Now it's Wednesday, and I'm ready to aim and fire. My job will be the only thing that falls by the wayside.

So. Okay. That's all.

National Coming Out Day: Because Your Feelings Aren't Valid Until You Label Them

I know that there are totally legitimate reasons for National Coming Out day, but I feel like the same show of support could be made in a context with less pressure. There are way better reasons to hate National Coming Out Day than because you feel like labels are doomed to be lies. Obviously it's naive to treat coming out as just a matter of courage when it's usually a matter of safety. I also get that some people feel like a label makes all of the confusion go away.

a hypocrite in the sunset

I took adderall and did work today. I bitch and moan about how people take study drugs to do work, and how it's dishonorable because it makes me feel like I owe it to my studies to eat amphetamines. Well, I didn't take it out of guilt, or panic, or any sort of necessity. And now, 8 hours in, I don't feel guilty or satisfied or anything in particular. It helps that I wasn't actually much more productive than usual. My reading speed was about the same, except that I didn't skip a single word. That was pretty thrilling. When I started doing thesis reading, though, I couldn't do it unless I took notes on every important thing, whereas usually I feel like I can just underline or write in margins. On the one hand, it meant that I spent almost 4 hours on a 15 page paper, but it wasn't wasted.

The most important thing was that the initial rush reminded me of the hunger for knowledge and the joy of doing research. That's a feeling that the stress and the drama and the physics department help me forget. I was impatient, packing my books in my thesis office, because I wanted to get back to reading. I know that I have that feeling, I had it even when I was in Hell sophomore year. Junior year, not so much. A little bit on the final paper for J-Lab.

I want all of my work to have that feeling. I think I need to seek it. I need to remind myself why I'm working. I need to tell myself that it's a joy, not a chore. That's what adderall gave me for a few hours: the investment. Not at all what I expected. I thought it would be pure efficiency. Nothing is pure.

It's been a pretty solitary day. Isabella studied with me for a while. I told her that it bothered me that she and Elaine were hooking up. Whatever.

Last night was my first beer garden. It was kind of a blur. I got way too drunk, but Liana and Neal and I had a blast. I woke up at 5 am on our couch and went up to bed.

At 5 in the morning it was pouring rain. Walking to school at 10 I saw that the first leaves had been kicked out of the trees by the rain. Now I'm sitting on the front lawn while the sun sets. The perfect temperature of the afternoon has become a little less-so with the evening dawning.

My thoughts get lost. Paragraphs get shorter.

Il faut se lever plus tot le matin, pour voir le monde sans couleurs.

Grad School

I'm flip flopping on grad school so hard. Some days it seems like it's exactly what I want and I'm overqualified, other days it seems like I'd be miserable and I barely make the grade.

And I can't think of anything I'd rather do.