Image: Beach!

Beach!

Image: Flowers in Provincetown

Flow-woos! Just testing this new blogger background.

Image: I'm ready for snow, but miss the days of summer and the beach!

Provincetown 2006

to do

22 left!

Update

To Do list items left, down from 57 : 29

Days left to do them: 16

Panic attacks averted so far: 3

Panic attacks not averted so far: 17

Hours of sleep the last two nights combined: 12

Number of anti-grumpy naps I've been able to take: 0

Times per day I rock back and forth while holding myself repeating, "It's only temporary. It's only temporary.": at least 12

Paying someone to torture me this way and doing it voluntarily: Priceless?

The truth - it ain't steak sauce

Well, let’s just say my Tadalist.com To Do list has 57 items on it. And that’s just the school To Do list, not the work To Do list. Oh, and two of the fifty seven things listed include two twenty page papers. Oh, and each of those pages that needs to be written is represented by only one line item of the fifty seven. Oh, and the time to accomplish those 57 things? 31 days.

Oh, and I’ve sunken to new lows and added church on my Sunday To Dos. I guess that makes 58.

:(

Never ever ever!!

Never, and I mean NEVER, ever ever ever eat a whole bowl of brussel sprouts for dinner. Ever. The results are bad, and then you can't write your reaction paper you don't want to write anyway.

Awwwww.

Image: There just might be a reason or two not to live near lake effect snow areas

Oh, Buffalo.

Image: Harrison is FLYING!

Go to the WEE!

One cool thing about attending a research university

I'm sitting in my car on the laptop waiting for Tara to get out of class and I'm blogging.

HOW COOL IS THAT?

Things are nuts. If you love me you'll email me and tell me so because I'm drowning.

Race

Go, Deval, go!

A little math for you people

These are total numbers for Tara and me, unless otherwise specified.

Number of courses this semester: 7
Number of credit hours: 21 credit hours
Number of hours working per week: 63
Number of meal times per week that,
in this coming semester,
will not actually be shared by Tara and I: 1 (x 16) = 16
Number of meals per week we will share on campus: 16
Number of dollars one text from one of Tara's course will cost: $146
Number of pounds of said text: 3.55
Price per pound: $41.12
Today's price of gas, per gallon: $2.58
Average weight of one gallon of gasoline: 6.25 lbs
Cost of gasoline per pound: 41 cents
Ratio of cost of gas to cost of book, by weight: 1:100
Number of times I've blogged in the last 30 days: four
Excuses I have: 739
Apologies I will issue: 0
Number of papers/outlines/presentations due in Ocotber: 4
Number of business trips I am taking in October: 1
Number of miles in said business trip: 7000
Number of hours of help from therapists I will need by October 25: 17

Going to grad school while trying to balance life and work and everything else: priceless.

The Fire in the Dell

I was going to share a story about Drag Queen Bingo and winning a porn called "Ass Munching - Balls" but instead I'll share this conversation regarding the recent, um, trouble with Dell laptop batteries, and upon our discovery that we did not have a laptop model the qualified for the free exchange:

Tara said last night, "Damn! I wish we had one because we need a new battery!"

And I looked at her for a minute.

And then another minute.

Then she said, "But I guess I'm happy a faulty battery didn't burn our house down."

And I said, "I thought that's what you said."

life shit

Despite my recommittment to my blog I have been a major slacker. I don't care. There are many themes that would emerge if you gave my blog an index but no one category would be as popular as the sorry-I've-disappeared category.

I thought once the semester was over I'd have so much free time, but it turns out the summer has been absolutely filled to the brim. We've driven home to Western NY three times in less than three months, thrown a retirement party for my mom, been to Harrison's birthday party, gone to my grandmother's house to help clean it out, and thrown a going away party for friends moving to California. Those were the big things. Then there were the 1,000,000 small things, and now, suddenly, it's August. August includes a four day trip to DC and a seven day trip to the Adirondacks, and then two short weeks before school begins again. And by school I actually mean the unpleasant experiences that is, between Tara and I, no overlapping classes, six of them, and increased responsibility in my job, where I just received a promotion.

In short, I am overwhelmed. Excited, but overwhelmed.

So suck it, blog. I've just finished one of the toughest two weeks of my life, and you're just going to have to wait.

Reading and NOT enjoying

I am just so, so sad about this.

It's like finding out Oz is the old man behind the curtain.

Reading

I'm enjoying this:

"... a small, plastic Noah’s Ark with a slew of animals. Leta went through and named off every animal, and when she got to the miniature Noah she stopped short and looked at me to give her a clue. Before I could explain who he was she held him up and said, “Monkey!” Ah-Ha! A toy based on the Bible is teaching my daughter about evolution. That, Alanis Morissette, is sweet, sweet irony."

from www.dooce.com

Distracted

The past couple of weeks have been hard for me. I've been trying to sort out a lot of feelings I'm having, but the only product I see from these efforts reflects the vague, shiftless existential shit I felt as a late adolescent. Some psychologists argue adolescent development continues to take place throughout the twenties. I know this must be true because I've met some thirty year olds who didn't yet hear that they are out of time.

On one hand, I've been facing a lot of changes in our house. Tara has stopped working and is trying to be a full time student in the fall, and my work, which usually keeps me quite busy and preoccupied, has dropped off as it is want to do in the summer. This makes me incredibly uneasy. Tara's assistantship search is ongoing, not yet fruitful, and frustratingly managed on the resume-receiving end. Deadlines are not deadlines to UMass, so there has been a lot of unplanned waiting. Oh, and then after that? More waiting.

In addition, a student who planned to enter this June called us two days before she was supposed to arrive. She had found a lump in her throat and was being tested for thyroid cancer. She assumed that she would be able to begin the program, but wanted to give it a few days until something conclusive in the tests came back from the lab. Two days later we got a call from her, and it wasn't thyroid cancer. In fact, it was a terribly agressive form of lymphoma, and before she even left the office where she got the diagnosis, they began treatment. In three days, her life changed entirely. In the ensuing weeks the treatment she is undergoing is so severe that she has already lost all of her hair, is so weak she can't sit up, and has to be on a special ward in the hospital because she is drastically susceptable to infection. She is twenty six. Oh, and that lump in her throat? A lymphoma that had actually grown from her abdomen, through her chest cavity, and into her throat.

This hit me particularly hard, because at the same time we celebrated Tara's 26th birthday. It was a wonderful day, but I could not get the reality of the other situation out of my head. What if that was me? Or, oh my god, Tara? How do we live our lives today knowing that something could change so drastically in such a short period of time? Last year my coworker's godson was diagnosed with cancer. He has since been treated and given a clean bill of health, but the last year after diagnosis, and in the aftermath, the family is still recovering in a number of ways. He is seventeen.

I am so incredibly grateful for everything in my life. I am learning to express that everyday, so if something ever happens, I know that everyone knows that. This is the only way I know how to find peace.

Courage sister
you do not walk alone
I will walk with you
and sing your spirit home

27 times

Well, it's only been done 27 times in in 200+ years, so why not amend it to show that we hate gays?

Too bad -- they didn't win!

How did your senator vote? Check it out here.

Thanks, NY and MA, and all the other senators who voted nay for good reasons. Oh, and thanks to those who voted nay because you're conservative enough not to want to change the freakin' constitution of the United States. Bush is a crazy motherfucker.

Crazy, I tell you.

You're on my shit list: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. All of these states voted with a double YAY to pass the amendment. These states also have the dubious distinction of having 894 of the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq since the current war began. Of the total deaths this represents over 36% of those who have died so far. Senators, please, bring your state's children HOME.

And Wyoming, how you haven't learned your lesson. You might remember this story from the last time you forgot about your responsibility to protect people.

Renewal of vows

Dear four readers of my blog -

I have not abandoned you. I simply have been juggling minor personal, work-related, and academic crises. I have returned and now can resume more regular updates. I missed you, and I'm sure you sat around crying because you missed me so damn much. Here's a synopsis:

personal crisis: mostly resolved
work-related crisis: CASE CLOSED
academic crisis: semester is over and grades are in. I got an A-. And yes, the perfectionist in my is really annoyed by that little "-", especially considering no one in the class got feedback after the first two papers, as in, NONE. And there were six total. And I got an A on both of the ones I got back. But you know, whatever. He's the Chancellor, so I suppose I have to live with it.

In other news, I'm reading and seething about this.

Is this OK with you? If not, tell somebody!

Faithfully ruining families on your behalf,
Gay Larry

Translation

In recent negotiations with my mother, I've asked her to be more gentle when she wants to talk about things that might be sensitive to me. It has been a long, hard lesson to learn, but I think we're close to achieving it.

There are moments, though, that I know she's resisting saying something and can't negotiate the compulsion to do so. Knowing what she has to say might hurt my feelings or imply judgement, she finds a way around it. She has become incredibly adept at it, too, and sometimes I don't even notice. For example, this weekend at Harrison's birthday party, we were hanging out together on Sarah's front porch. We were chit-chatting about all kinds of things, taking a much need break from the whir of the six children inside the house.

My mom said, "So, when did you cut your hair?"

But what she meant was, "When did you cut off your hair that I liked so much?"