Going home before midnight can I get a hell ya?

So.
Some good things happened.

Today I brought up not being sure about continuing next semester as a student consultant, and my boss held me back and said that my partner was really impressed with my work and would want to work with me again.

I went to my thesis meeting with all of my work freshly erased by my computer, and my advisor didn't give a shit and just talked about getting ready for mini-orals and writing.

I cut my hair two days ago and thought it was a disaster but it's actually fucking cool.

Still not getting laid, still not eating well, but I played squash with a friend outside of PE class so I'm exercising!

And I've seen two cool lectures this week, one by Junot Diaz that probably changed my life and one by Mia McKenzie which was pretty good too.

Ok Ok if this is life I can work with it.

the brain!!!

I hope that I remember thursday november 13th doing whippits in the pitch dark thesis office with Not I playing on a computer 10 feet away and dissociating from my body and crying out as I returned to it

okay, call it a night.

limerence

I just woke up from my third dream about him in two weeks. I guess that doesn't sound like a lot, but I've been dreaming very intensely, colorfully, dramatically-what do they call that-vividly.

And I learned a new word today: limerence. The Wikipedia page put me a little at ease, because I always feel so dirty when I'm in that zone, but it used words like unbidden, involuntary, compulsive, and they all take the blame off of me. It's nice. I try to be good.

~okay this one goes before sambeckett but it didn't post?~

Sammie Beckett puts it in perspeckett

dawg beckett is so good at writing.
ugh he is magic
dude i was not even that taken by godot
like not all of it
but winnie man
winnie is it
un petit malheur
encore un
sans remede
something like that
which is like
wow
and Not I dude dude
that shit made me like rocky horror more.
just cuz i kinda think about the mouth a little when i see that other mouth
i changed my profile picture to billie's mouth
it's facebook official
i'm smitten

my thesis peaking out behind this window

I never thought too much about the idea of opening a new window. It's certainly more romantic than opening a new tab.

I'm trying to do some thesis. I'm nested in the ETC. Water, textbooks, notebooks, pens, pizza. Pizza. It's not working.

I saw Interstellar with Justin and Andrew. Someone raved about it in sci-comp the other day. The boys loved it and marveled at the science and the drama. It didn't click for me. It was too long, the characters were half-baked (maybe they were actually high that would explain a lot) and the science... well... it didn't seem a lot more real than magic. Why muddy your magic by calling it science?

Anyways, it sunk me a little that I couldn't be amazed like everyone else. Worse, it made me feel like less of a physicist, that I don't cream when general relativity plays deus ex machina and physicists play deus. Wow, harsh Jules. I just get angry when anything makes me feel like less of a physicist. Maybe that's why thesis progress is coming slow today.

I've been having amazing dreams. Yesterday in the library I dosed for 2 and a half hours, comfortably folded in an armchair. Closed eyes against closed knees. Someone dropped a piece of paper on my closed book which said "sleep is for the weak." Half-awake, I scrawled "dreaming is fucking awesome" on the other side and then started to record my dream. I had moved to New York with Amy. I was going to job interviews. For the first few I was nervous that my faux fur coats were sending the wrong impression. After many interviews, I was finally dressed in a sleek professional sheath dress, presenting myself and blowing the competition out of the water. My student consulting partner gave me a personality quiz about myself, and told me that Dobby only got one right. I walked around the office where I was interviewing and hid more quizzes about myself. I turned a corner and there were a bunch of monkeys. One of the monkeys bit my hand and I tried to yell help, but I just breathed raspily. I woke up, breathing "heh" out of my throat in the silent library. Good thing I couldn't yell.

Then last night I dreamed that Neal and I took a weird opiate. It was a tiny, crunchy black pill. I reeled around a walgreens/hardware store, unable to find what I was looking for. We rolled around in the grass. It was lovely.

Maybe I'm settled enough to do my physics now.

rib-caged

when you are trapped by your own humanity :P

This unfortunate tendency to begin books or chapters of books with a quotation

Am I supposed to be reminded that the book is in conversation with elements of culture from the past? Am I supposed to remember that other people have thought the same thoughts, maybe more neatly than this book or my interpretation of it will arrive at? Do I disagree?

I think that the place for a quotation is after all is said and done. I don't want to read a chapter  contextualized by a sentence, but I will react to a sentence based on the chapter. In fact, when I finish a chapter or a book I almost want something to react to. Not to tie a bow, exactly, or even to "hammer it home." To use the hammer metaphor, I think that reading a book can feel like tapping a nail, slowly sinking it into wood. Maybe the climax strikes a little harder. But at the end of a book, the nail is never all the way into the wood. A quotation at the beginning of a book makes me wonder if I should start hitting. A quotation at the end of a book would be a final swing with extra follow-through. I think that this jolt might shake me in a way that makes the whole nail more important.

I feel like writing because I have been reading and because I am still so destabilized from my nightmares.

Nightmares on Halloween

The first one was mild. I was being tattooed. The tattoos were on my upper arms, and not at all what I expected them to be. Two of them were Chinese characters, in green, and the third was a sunrise of sorts inscribed in a circle. In my dream I was thinking of what clothes I could wear to cover them, or what I could get tattooed over the characters. I vaguely remember Elspeth talking about her bad tattoo, on her chest, where an f looked like a p. The word was just a random set of letters. Meaningless. When I woke up it took me a few minutes to realized that my arms were unmarked. The sense of disconnection with my body continued until I fell asleep.

The second one was hellish. I was running through the woods with friends. We were chased by saber-tooth tigers that looked more like sloths. They caught us, and then transformed into people. We were held in a corral of sorts, but it wasn't locked. I think that we were being tortured, but I never experienced the torture. There was just an air of injury in the "cage." We were scared and hopeless, but at some point I realized that I could just walk out. I left, and made it back to a city and I told someone where I had come from. They sent me to therapy. After telling the therapist what happened, I ended up going back to the corral. I think it was part of a plan to free everyone. When I got back it was worse than when I had left. A cruel woman that I don't remember from before was directing the operation now. They had captured the president of the country that we were in, and were torturing him. They covered him in insects that bit him. They carved into his hands (maybe I was feeling the cat scratches pressed against my pillow.) They put him in a metal box, with his head in a glass bowl looking out at me so that I shared his pain. At the climax of the dream, they were somehow putting pieces of his wasted body in an oven with sizzling oil on top. When I asked if they were going to kill him, they said they couldn't but that they would kill a friend who was also in the corral. I was screaming and crying and so afraid. I decided that we had to escape, but I was worried that they had told me this as a trap. We left, found a car, drove through the dry woods until we ran out of gas as we approached a highway. My friend wanted to hitch hike but I thought that everyone on the road worked at the torture-ranch. I don't remember if that is how the dream ended because it had a feeling of endlessness. No matter how escaped I was, I would end up there again, or maybe I had never left.