...or goodish morning? Maybe both.

MEAAAT

That, more or less, is what my morning consisted of - I'd been thawing this ridiculous chunk of bovine flesh in my fridge for the past TWO DAYS, and finally got it into my head this morning that I ought to make a roast out of it, because of several things. 1) I'm running out of real food, 2) it's delicious, and 3) my grandmother just got her knee replaced, so i figure that with the FOUR THOUSAND POUNDS of leftovers that I will inevitably have, I can bring some to her place tomorrow so that she won't have to even think about cooking and/or eating something crappy.

Here's hoping it turns out as incredible as the LAST time I made this thing with the bone in; I bought a Wegman's grass-fed chuck roast with no bone once and while it was good, it wasn't nearly as robust. This local stuff with a giant marrow bone in the middle is much better.

Also? PANNNNCAAAKES

My work avoidance technique today is, apparently, cooking. I think when I get home from visiting gram, I'll make and then freeze that batch of sprouted pancakes that I've been meaning to do something with for like a week and a half (good thing I kept the mix in the fridge). Yum. Pancakes. I like waffles better, but without the requisite equipment, pancakes will have to do.

All this stuff comes from less than 50 miles away from here, minus the extraneous stuff I had to put in the pot roast (the onions were local, and the potatoes, but not the carrots and celery and extra beef broth).

I AM SUCH A SNOB

Anyway, Off With Me

Going to the hospital. Mrrr. :-/

Maybe later, when I am inevitably holed up here and going out of my mind, I will write more and specially!

Ugh, when you go out to the bar before 7, you come home and you feel like it's 2AM, but it's not, it's 10PM and you could theoretically still get stuff done, but you've been at the BAR, and so you stare at your desk for a while and eat chocolate.

Isn't this what everyone does? It probably is.

I Forgot

...about the Michael Collier reading! It went very well. He kept telling me how nice my intro was, which he was doing probably because he's just one of the nicest guys I've had the privilege of meeting in a long time. There weren't as many people at his reading as I thought there were going to be; while I don't think that I had any illusions that this was going to be another Li-Young Lee reading, I thought that maybe we'd fill the library's mini-auditorium, but it wasn't the case. Alas, but also probably okay, as if it had been packed I might have done something untoward, like passed out.

(This is the problem with me flying along here without any medication. Sometimes the reason I was on meds in the first place wells up and threatens to black me out, which is NO GOOD.)

The better part of the night, really, was sitting out on the back deck of the Nittany Lion Inn and having martinis and beers with Collier and the MFA gang; it wasn't at all awkward and we had a very good time. See, uh, THIS IS WHY I DO NOT WANT TO LEAVE. Because if I can finagle it right, someone might actually keep paying me to have these kinds of experiences.

I was outside enjoying the INCREDIBLE weather earlier this afternoon, and some prospective master's student was complaining loudly on his cell that while he *could* do this whole doctorate thing, he'd be in school until he was 35 and he wouldn't even get to have a real job until he was, like, middle aged, dude.

I muttered there are so many worse things under my breath and kept reading.

Because seriously. Having a real job is probably the worst thing in the whole world. Even thinking about it makes me a little bit suicidal. If you're smart enough to not have a real job, WHY WOULD YOU?

On My Way to Becoming a Morning Person (?1?!?!-Edition)

So here's an incredible fact: I've been up and at them by 9 or BEFORE for the past two weeks.

You guys, I used to be practically nocturnal. Getting up at noon when I didn't have somewhere to be was a good day.

This is delightful! And I have no idea where it came from, but today I got my ass out of bed and got a whole grocery shopping trip done before I had to be on campus, a little before noon. This is a splendid thing because it does a good job of convincing me that I'm NOT in fact depressed about this whole horrific-transitional-stage that I'm in, and that I might managed to scrape through it with at least a few of my neurons firing adequately.

The sad thing about all this is that even though I'm jubilant about this whole waking-up business, I realize fully that most of my colleagues hold normal hours in which they are up by 8 or 9 every day. I am still not a "morning person." I don't ever think I will be. But this is improvement! Maybe I'll go for being up around 8 next week, and then I'll get to feel even better about myself. Because I really like daylight. It is good shit.

Produce Wrangling

I got stymied in the middle of guinea-pig-lettuce-prep by the basketball game. I guess, since it's NOT EVEN ELEVEN, that I can probably finish that up before going to bed. And since I am actually capable of rising more than 10 minutes before I have to be somewhere, APPARENTLY, I can let other stuff (like, uh, bathing) wait until morning.

Right now, two heads of green leaf lettuce have an appointment with my GIANT KNIFE

...you know, it would be interesting to see the number of posts I have that are titled "graack" or something similar. It's probably about half. That's useful.

Not Enough Shape

Several things: I am not in shape, my time does not have enough shape, the poems I wrote today have no shape. It's a bad day for geometry over here!

Grumble. Other than that, today was okay. Got to bitch about life to one of my professors for a while, which is always cathartic and he is a good listener, so bonus; got interviewed by the student paper about Michael Collier, which was amusing as I haven't read him at all lately but have to INTRODUCE HIM on Friday. Yike! Read his latest book last night and it was wonderful; I think I'll read another before I got to bed tonight.

(As the 1.5 veteran readers of this might know, I've encountered the guy before, he just doesn't know that he was an integral part of the best day of my undergraduate career. Ready, set, FAANNNNGIRRRLLLLLL)

Then I came back here and was all set to wash the pigs' blankets but then discovered that I have exactly $3 in quarters, total. So no laundromat. GEE DARN. Problem was, the only other things I had to do were read an article, which I accomplished in about half an hour, and then about 14 other tasks that I reeeaaalllly did not want to do. And whose deadlines, predictably, are either uncertain or far-ish away.

So I took a nap.

I am bad at this! (Doing stuff, not taking naps. Actually, come to think of it, I'm not real good at naps either. I always turn them into outright sleeps. This is poor form.)

So I woke up later than I wanted, and did some housecleaning and then made adobo for myself. (Note: family recipies are ludicrous. To make this for a pound of chicken, I had to TENTH the recipe. HARDY HAR)

So now I've got chicken, some work to do, and fed/cleaned/idiotic pigs, and I'm bored out of my skull. I blame the internet.

Tonight, I am going to order a large chewy Pizza Hut pizza and sit around and make lists and watch bad TV.

Why?

Because gp is not here (went to go help my sister move into her new apt in exchange for a courtesy trip to the WORLD'S CRAZIEST FREAKING BEER STORE) and it is the only time I get Pizza Hut because he hates it! Which is probably better overall for my health (he's so healthy, and I love Snickers and dammit, THAT'S NOT FAIR), but I have made a promise to myself that in order not to feel all dejected and sorry for myself, I get to have Pizza Hut when I'm alone.

I just have to keep telling myself: it's not about being perfect. It's about being happy. And gp being around usually makes me happy.

No gp? Pizza it is, then. Nom nom.

And I'm back. Lazy day in Manila today; I woke up at NOON. It would appear that I am back to my normal sleeping habits here on the other side of the planet; this is bad because our days start at like 8 but not ALL bad because it might make my jet lag less horrendous when I go back. Speaking of, I hardly had any jetlag (other than waking up at 5 for a while, which in Bato, seemed almost normal) on the way here. Does this mean it will hit me double when I'm stateside? PLEASE NO.

The Story of the DKK, and Other Things

So Baguio is an unspeakably neat place. I have determined this. After getting back from Itogon (THAT'S the name of the mining barangay whose name I brain-farted on earlier), we went straight to Baguio's version of an urban poor community. Basically, this means indigenous people whose land has been encroached upon by the ever-expanding city of Baguio, not to mention the many and varied, uh, "interests" of the national government, who seem to be at the nerve center of EVERY POSSIBLE THING that is wrong with this country. But anyways. These people are weavers - they do some subsistence farming, but to get by, they buy thread from local corporations, and make parts of things like bags, table runners, jackets, etc...then sell the parts wholesale back to the corporation, who puts them together and then sells them at a markup.  They do this because there seems to be no way for them to get enough startup capital to do anything that would even approximate eliminating these (rather exploitative) middlemen. Thus they're stuck making about $3 for 9 hours worth of manual work at a loom that looks as if it has been time-warped there from approximately 1756.

At least they're not living on a mountain of garbage? I dunno. Slanty-face.

On another note, most of the mining companies that have a stake in demolishing stuff up here are from the UK and the US - apparently we use THIS gold to back up OUR currency, while the peso slides because the national government sits on its butt. Crazy but true - the motto of the Philippine socioeconomic situation. Or "horrible but true." Or "unspeakably evil but true." Or "fucked the shit up."

So after our visit to the weaver community, we were whisked off to lunch. Lunch was uneventful, but I do realize that I've been skimping on my culinary blogging. So here are some interesting Cordillera food-factoids for you, some of which are gross:

1) The local delicacy around here is known as pica-pica, or as the locals winkingly call it, "killing me softly." What is it: a chicken that has been BEATEN TO DEATH, then cooked. This results in, basically, rubbery chicken. I have no idea why it's considered so good. I just felt guilty for eating a chicken whose last moments consisted of every inch of its body being bruised. I HAS A SAD

2) They also do the above to dogs. Dog is very common up here. I didn't eat any because I didn't have the chance; I might have, but then again, I might not have.

Hm. Those two do seem to be the biggies of the area. I'll list more if I can think of them.

For Real This Time

The DKK - otherwise known as Dap-ayan ti Kultura iti Kordilyera - I had to look up the D word, because it is in Ilocano I think and also I have no idea what it means (the whole thing means "Cultural Center of the Cordillera"). This is where we went after lunch, and stayed until the wee hours of the morning. It was, in other words, a REALLY LONG STRETCH OF BEING AWAKE. Turned out to be more than worth it, though.

The DKK is a group of musicians and artists that are committed to preserving the (extraordinarily) rich cultural heritage of the indigenous people of this country. This is not an easy feat, as nearly every province has a tapestry of different art forms. So it's a multi-chaptered group of people that do everything from make documentaries to record cds to stage protests and spontaneous mural-ings. They took us in for the afternoon to teach us how to play the more common indigenous instruments, most of which are made out of bamboo and fall into the percussion category. So we thunked things on the ground for a while, and hit things with mallets, and blew over the tops of some things to make noise. We made a lot of noise.

Then we took the noise outside, where we hit GONGS (the handles of which, back in the day, were made from HUMAN JAWBONES) with mallets and generally made a racket while dancing. Yes, DANCING. This is another hilarious/embarassing gringa moment, because here I am, Kermit-the-Frog-esque body waving around and shuffling my feet to indigenous festival and funeral tunes. The courtship dance is particularly hilarious; you basically get shoved into the middle of a circle with a member of the opposite sex and you have to dance such that you look as much like a chicken as possible. As if that weren't enough, as the female, you have to watch the male dance like a chicken and THEN, if he comes anywhere near you, you have to do your best coy-chicken impersonation and run away from him. It is great, and by great I do really mean great but also embarrassing and pee-your-pants hilarious.

So I learned how to whack indigenous instruments and to badly approximate indigenous dance. It was super fun, until they told us that we would have to perform for them after dinner. WTF. So we spent a lot of time being nervous and planning things badly, until we agreed to let Philippe recite something over us demonstrating just how well we had learned to whack indigenous instruments. I should have realized that letting Philippe do his poetry thing would have been disastrous - as much as I told him to KEEP the motherfucking VOLUME down, he started, predictably, yelling things about spirituality and other nonsense concepts in the middle of our performance. I tried shushing him, but it didn't work. He's an idiot. But my rhythm remained intact, and they seemed to like it, so that was a thing. At least a puppy didn't poo in the middle of our recital like it did for some of the ALAY kids (San-Fran based Fil-Am youth org) who were interrupted in the middle of their hip-hop performance by said pooing.

After our ridiculous recital, the DKK members treated us to a bit of a jam session.

I am not sure how to approximate what happened then in words, because it's not one of those things that translates into words very well at all.  I think it might have epitomized how very musical the Filipino people are - honestly, for being some of the most downtrodden, poverty-stricken people on earth, they sing as if they had every reason to keep living. And even though I didn't understand a word of any of the songs, sung as they were in regional dialects (not that I would have understood them in Filipino, but you know), it didn't really matter - you know, transcendent properties of musical beauty and all that. HAR HAR. I think what was most moving was when three of the members started singing a particular song, and then when they hit the chorus, suddenly EVERYONE (that's about 20-odd DKK members that came out for this shindig) joined in. So it's dark, and we're sitting outside in a circle, and suddenly this chorus of voices crescendoes out of nowhere in PERFECT harmony...so many chills. Not to get emo, but it moved me to tears, it was that unspeakably beautiful.

Blah blah life changing moment blah blah blah

You know, you try to write these things down and you fail. I am going to stop failing now, and sign off, but suffice it to say that it was probably one of the single most emotionally-jam-packed moments of my life. I felt full to the brim with it, my proverbial cup running over. These people are amazing, and their culture is amazing, and I am amazed.

Because it is COLD up here!

Baguio, or, Land of the Vertical

I'm up in Northern Luzon for the next couple of days. Won't get to write tomorrow, because I will be staying in the middle of a poor mining community. Weeee?
Anyway, we left at like 1 AM Friday morning from Manila, on a bus. So I slept on a bus. Sort of. I think by slept, what I really mean is bounced around with my eyes closed for five hours. The upshot of this is that when I DID open my eyes, because it was getting light out, I had a hard time believing we were still in the Philippines. The Cordilleras are WACKY, man. Sheer mountainsides covered in little houses and impossible-looking rice terraces, mist that trails around between the ridges and looks as if someone put it there for dramatic effect, and a road, traversed at disconcerting speed by our bus, that makes the west-coast US 1 look like the Autobahn. Or Nebraska. Or both? Unreal, yo.

Our accommodations here are only slightly like camping; we're on mats on a floor but it is a CLEAN floor, and the bathrooms are sketchy but not TOO sketchy. The only problem is is that there's no hot water; while this is never a problem in 1305971-degree Manila, up here it is dry and borders on cold. I cannot tell you have weird it feels to walk around in the Philippines with a hoodie on. Weird but absolutely wonderful, as my pores are no longer producing like four gallons of sweat a minute. That's disgusting. But true.

Baguio is a seriously cool (now in the figurative sense) city. It's big, but not TOO big, and has the feel of a college town because most of its population is taken up by UP's campus, which is in the middle of everything. It also has one of the most amazing marketplaces I've ever seen - It's half-covered and half-open air, and because of the climate up there, the selection of produce for sale is STAGGERING. We got mangoes, lychee, strawberries (!), mangosteen, kamote tops...they even grow BROCCOLI up here. Anyway, I kind of wish the whole program was up here - but not really really, as it is rather isolated from...uh...everything (which, at the moment, is pretty much all of its charm).

We ate tonight at, I think, the only vegetarian restaurant in the entirety of the Philippines, which is owned by (surprise!) some artsy-fartsy types in film making or painting or something. It's called Oh My Gulay, which is verruh clever because gulay is vegetable in Tagalog. So most of the things on the menu are "OMG *insert food here*", which is pretty terrific. Not to mention that the interior looks like a cross between a pirate shipwreck and a botanical garden. To flush the toilet, you push on the a little tribal wooden statue guy. Bizaaaaaarrrrrre. But tasty! Uh, the food. Not the toilet flusher. Ew?

Anyway, I think I'm done for the night. I have a cold (for real this time; I can't breathe through my nose and it SUUUUUCKS) and I'm pretty sure whatever I bought for $3 at the drugstore isn't helping. Mrrr. Bedtime. Will update in two days, provided I don't fall into a mineshaft and die. Huzzah!

Can one eat too many bananas? Even if they are the tiny, fat, DELICIOUS kind that is pure awesome in a peel? I feel as if I might have approached a critical number of bananas eaten. My sister is trying to convince me that I will wake up tomorrow and have become a banana. That is okay with me, I guess - beats being my sorry fat self. And I AM fat at the moment - I think I spent the entire day eating things today, including several wildly disparate things that I have never eaten before:

1) A poached egg (Eggs Benedict, to be exact, I know, wtf, but there you have it)
2) A fish head (in the form of a tawili - tiny fish foun only in Taal Lake, fried whole, dunked in vinegar (OM NOM) and eaten on a stick, bones n' all)
3) Dragonfruit (doesn't taste like anything! hruh?)
4) A cherimoya, which is basically like jackfruit, only sweeter and white and not the size of TAIWAN
5) Taal tilapia, which is about as similar to American tilapia as, say, a seven-course French dinner is to the gunk under my toenails.

I am gastronomically pleased, today. I would continue my Bato tales, but I feel as if this deserves note now, as I am still reeling from the sheer amount of calories I took in today. Why so much frigging produce? Walp. Spent the day in Tagaytay, which is about an hour and a half away from Manila. This is, of course, factoring traffic, which is no small factor, in fact, I think it's only like 15 km away but holy JESUS people in this country cannot drive. Or can they? Maybe it's Americans that can't drive. I am starting to think the latter is the case. Also, on that note, one of the things that is patently hilarious about this country is that Filipinos have absolutely NO concept of personal space. This is usually nothing of note, until you get to public transportation. Then you end up with 10 people on a dirt bike and you start to think "my god, these people are so small not because of the tropical environment, but because they need to be able to ride around with FORTY OTHER PEOPLE IN ONE JEEP. I get it now." Seriously, I have never seen so many people crammed into so many small spaces on wheels in my entire life. I am still agog. I do not know if I will ever get used to it. This is not a country for claustrophobic travellers! Nosir!

ANYWAY. Back to Tagaytay. The region is significantly higher up, elevation-wise, than Manila, and has incredibly rich volcanic soil, thanks to the periodic burpings of Taal Volcano, a fantastically weird volcano-inside-a-lake-inside-a-volcano-on-a-mountain just to the left of Tagaytay proper. The upshot of this is a METRIC ASSLOAD of fruit is produced here - everything from pineapples to bananas, guavas, jackfruit, mangoes, coconuts, passionfruit, dragonfruit, avocadoes, citrus of unknown names, and a bunch of other produce that I am positive that I am forgetting. You can't throw a mango here without hitting a fruit stand. In Lake Taal itself, there are also several indigenous species of fish, mentioned in my list of eats above. They get fried. SO MUCH NOMMING. This region is also famous for buko pie, some of which (of course) we bought today and ate. More nomming.

I am, so far, pretty sure that all Filipinos due is eat. I mean, there are like three time zones here: the five minutes before you are eating, eating, and then the five minutes after you eat, during which you burp and/or use a toothpick for those minutes until you move into eating zone again. Dad observed this early today, and so far, it has held up superbly. I have never been so full in my life. Minus maybe Paris, but this is entirely different. In Paris, you can't just use your hands to convey large quantities of stuff to your mouth. Here, MY PAWS ARE FOOD SHOVELS. GLURP. There is a kind of visceral pleasure that you get from, like, picking fish flesh off a skeleton with your hands and getting it all over yourself while chowing down. Sorry, v*gans. The same can be said for mangoes and jackfruit and the like, so this isn't necessarily me being a vulture, I swear. Anyways, that visceral pleasure, I have no doubt, must contribute to the Filipino love affair with eating. They all eat with their hands. Its a terribly satisfying thing, eating this way. Arrrrrrrr. I am a caveman. *bashes things with clubs*

Anyway, Bato? Things? Stuff?

GOD I am never going to catch up on all the crap that happened the first few days we were here.
I pulled back my bedsheets to find HAND-SIZED ROACH NUMBER TWO on my pillow. I about had a seizure and died. I then made my dad kill it (Kim, the intrepid traveler, strikes again). Then I slept with the lights on. It was great, and by great I mean full of lizards. I slept fitfully for, I think, about 12 minutes, and then at five in the morning I was woken up by the national bird, aka the rooster. Roosters are ubiquitous in the provinces; in this case I think the stupid thing had taken up residence on my air-conditioner and was crowing at approximately 700 decibles directly into my ear. Huzzah. No more sleep for Kim! I have been up by about 6 every day I've been here, and lemme tell you, for someone who's waking hours are usually about 3PM-4AM, it's freaking weird.

Anyways. Roosters. There are a lot of them. Occasionally the locals tie spikes to said roosters' feet and have them kill each other in rings. It's great. So I was up, and there were roosters, and breakfast was mangoes (they're not kidding. The mangoes in the Philippines are simply amazing. Like, the most amazing fruit in the whole world. Have I mentioned that they're amazing? Let me put it this way: AMAZING) and a mealy avocado that, I think, had been sitting in the fridge since Labor Day. Whoops. Post-breakfast was sitting around and being hot for a bit, then a trip to the family plot (read: mausoleum, cemetery, dead people, etc), then a trip to the market, then pig roast.

The market: smelled like dead things, and a crowd gathered around my father wherever we went. It wasn't, like, an ebullient crowd, though. That would have been less weird. This was...uh...well lessee. We'd be shopping for calamansi (TINY limes) and one or two people would emerge out of the back of the market stall. Then there would be four. Then eight. Then ten. Just staring, silently, no facial expression save very mild surprise. Hello! Creepy! They also stared at me, as I am pale and WEIRDLY tall for the area (all women here are, I think, about 5'1". At 5'9", I am a veritable giant. I haven't felt that awkward since about 7th grade. Joy! My sister, at five foot nada, fit in just fine). We bought...stuff. Foods. And a few rice sack bags, which I think just got stolen by the laundromat people here in Manila. Buggers.

Lorna, Lorna, Lorna.

During all this cemetery-viewing, market-shopping extravaganza-having time, we were accompanied by a woman whose name we later found out was Lorna. She sort of just...appeared at the house right as we were leaving for the market. Lola has a maid (everyone with anything has hired help here, it's bizarre but you get used to it pretty fast, oh ho am I spoiled or WHAT), so this was unexpected. She looked about my age though I suspect she was about 10 years older, with skin the color of a brazil nut and one of the most beautiful smiles I've ever seen. She puttered around behind us and if I would start walking the wrong way in the market she'd grab my arm, firmly but gently, and steer me in the right direction and haggle for me at the stalls. I felt like a dog on a leash, but a very willing dog on a very charming leash. I sort of wanted to steal her and bring her back to the States with me. Hell, I still do. She'd probably fit in my suitcase, which is approximately the size of Delaware.

So, I eventually figured out that Lorna hung around Lola's house because she (Lorna) didn't have anywhere else to work, and knew that Lola was one of the few villagers that had hired help on a regular basis. Lorna has FIVE children. Lorna cannot feed said children without money, and money she does not have. So she just shows up, in the hopes that she'll be of some kind of use and will thus get paid. (Insert more mind-boggle here.) Lucky for her, she showed up last week and found four hapless Americans doodling around the house. Four hapless Americans not only means extra cleaning and laundry which equals extra $$, it also equals a pig roast, which is a LOT of extra cleaning and prepping etc.

(Every time anyone from far away comes to the Visayas, they kill a pig and roast it for you. That's just the way it goes. You're family, and visiting? GET OUT THE KNIFE, THAT PIG IS GOING DOWN. IN FLAMES. LITERALLY.)

Blah blah blah blah skipping some stuff...at the end of our stay, we decided to pay Lorna. Lola was going to give her something, but that something was not very much, considering. We bypassed Lola, because Lola is basically a terrible person (more on that later? MAYBE), and gave Lorna 500P.

This is about US$12.50. This amount of money made Lorna burst into tears, cling to my mother, and say something to the effect of "you've just saved my familiy."

O________O;;;;;;

This is the part where I stop typing and just do something like say "a;oweirth;w3orhg8ETY3P193iu4ropiandsgal;jksndfnasdfsafsdafdm,fgd"

Anyways I cannot stop thinking about her. I didn't get a picture of her, and i am kicking myself for it, and I sweartagod I will go back to that godforsaken town just to find her and check up on her. $12.50??! For doing the laundry BY HAND, cooking, cleaning, clearing, marketing, fetching and carrying, erranding, transporting, negotiating, and dealing with Yankees? FGHWHGHADS. *boggle* *other boggle-like verbs*

Okay. That's enough for today. Tomorrow: pig roast and other family gatherings, and Kim Goes To the Tiny Island Beach Thing.

It's 9:30! This is my new bedtime! I'm 80!

THIS is where your supermarket-bought beef comes from! This shit is enough to make me think that PETA might be on to something. Christ.

On That Note.

I am so glad that the sirloin steak I bought today cost me $20 (for two and a half pounds, don't get your panties in a bunch), but was made from a cow that could, um, you know, WALK. And got to eat the food it was designed to eat. The fact that this is news, and that people will CONTINUE to turn a blind eye to the shitstorm that is modern factory agriculture for the sake of a cheap steak/pork chop/chicken breast, makes me aaaaaaaangry.

Lest I go into some sort of crazy environmentalist rant about the perils of big ag, I will shut up about it now. But seriously. It should not take a video of some soulless douchebag pushing a dying cow around with a forklift to get people to realize that the meat they are buying for $3/lb comes from some very, very sick animals. Yum!

ZZZZZzzzzz.

I think I might need to either a)start up a coffee habit, or b)see an endocrinologist. I am tired. ALL. THE. TIME. I am pretty sure I don't have a b-vitamin deficiency (I get it in both the kombucha I drink and in some of the probiotic stuff I take), and I'm not depressed that I know of (more on THAT in a minute!), and I don't wake up too frequently in the night or anything. I wonder, then, if I'm hypothyroid(al? ic? what's the ending for that?), or if I have adrenal fatigue or something. I mean, I CANNOT need 15 hours of sleep a day, but that's what my body is telling me. It's aggravating, and it's starting to affect how well I deal with students etc. For instance, I had two students just now here at the ol' office, and I was on the verge of completely useless because I just couldn't THINK straight. I just wanted to drift off, right in the middle of their earnest little sentences. That is unlike me! I am not that jerk!

So anyway. Apart from caffeine and taking even more B (supplements make me nauseated, so I can't take it straight, but mebbe I'll start incorporating more of those awesome eggs I get at the co-op into my diet. I also haven't been drinking as much milk as I usually do; maybe that has something to do with it. My raw milk went funky on me. :(

Okay. Here's to me being more awake, soon! Ghhzzzzz.

Also, Dependency!

So, in a fit of stupidity, I forgot to take my little brain-meds for TWO WHOLE DAYS - okay, not forgot. Forgot as in subconsciously refused. I COULD have gotten out of bed to take the stupid thing - but I didn't. I could have taken it the next morning - but I didn't. Why?, you ask. You are a stupid stupid idiot!, you yell. True enough. But I think I just wanted to see if I could stomach it. I couldn't. By yesterday afternoon, I was shaking, mildly dizzy and having little brain zaps - think a feeling, minus the pain that would come from, you know, tendons snapping, of your head suddenly going POP! and being about four feet away from the rest of you, and then going POP! again and coming back onto your neck. Yeah, there's no good way to describe it, but it suuuuuuucks! And my vision would sort of go all funny periodically. Hooray for tunnel vision! I kept thinking that I was hypoglycemic, because the symptoms were almost identical (but now with 45% more brain-related weirdness! Try today!).

Uh. So. The upshot of all of this is that I am yea!verily annoyed at the level of dependence on this stuff that my body has currently reached. I am not entirely sure why I am, in fact, so annoyed. Is it because I hate feeling helpless? Because I fear that I'll never be normal (or worse, would be UNABLE to be normal) without my daily pink pill? I think it might be the latter. I sort of don't know what I'd be like now without the Effexor. I mean, my life has changed so drastically since they (haha, 'they,' like some panel of crazy-assessors) put me on it that I wonder if I even need it any more. I mean, c'mon:

Me upon start of a/d's: living at home, hostilely, with parents, unsure about grad school, in weird relationship, issues with substance abuse, dead end jobs dealing with the general public, did I mention I was living at home?

Me now: living on my own, in a slightly less stupid relationship, no abuse issues, normal job, stress levels are high but normal for a grad student, don't have to deal with the general public, day to day routine barely varies, have pets

I mean, my total lack of having anything to say about anything at all should be some indicator that my life is, well, pretty regular. (I'm regular too - I eat prunes! LOLZ.) But I can't go for a day and a half (I know, it's because I don't TAPER, but that's not the point at the moment) without feeling like a total psychopath on this med. Like, the withdrawal symptoms make me fifteen times crazier than I would be, I THINK, without them altogether. I dunno.

GwarrrrrrrrrrANYWAY, I think that this is a longish rant that is slowly derailing because the office is getting noisy, so!

Blah blah life shit blah blah

I am back. At it. Whatever 'it' is. Ripping my  hair out in small chunks, I think.
It's not even that I'm busy. Schoolwork, at this point, can sort of wait. It's more like I feel like my life is in a meeeeeeeeleeeeooonnn tiny pieces all over the place and I am void of a dustpan. Or brush. So here I am, picking up the little pieces by hand and not having enough space in my palm to fit all of them and so some of them spill out and I have to start over isn't this a lovely extended metaphor? I think it is.
I have a couple of gloriously free(ish) days here, tho, so I think that feeling might dissipate a little by Monday. WE CAN ONLY HOPE. This would have been mitigated, probably, if I hadn't come back at 8 pm on the day before classes started. Alas, that is how the fam-vacay schedule worked out. And, really, I had a fab time in Breck. Got to hang out with zovietsquid and his lovely-and-morbidly-hysterical companion, got to watch the 15 minute lowest-budget-parade-ever, did a lot of good skiing. But the timing! Was bad!
I think, for Spring Break, I don't want to go ANYWHERE. I'll just stay here and stew. Because right now, stewing sounds okay.

Resolutions: Are Resolute

I am, as it turns out, okay at this hippie shit. And honestly, I think I might feel better, even if it's only the psychosomatic result of knowing that you're not eating a cow that was once sick and standing hock-deep in it's own feces. ANYWAY. I'm waiting for some of my probiotic supplements  (ThreeLac and Bio-Kult), buying my food from Nature's Pantry and Stone Soup (those of you in the area, look it up! Buy stuff! They need all the help they can get!), and trying my damndest to not eat white flour/sugar/pasta/bread/carbs. Minus white rice, because, yunno, I'm sorta Asian and I also have a 20 lb bag of the stuff on my floor. Alas!

Also, it's a good thing that I resolved to cut down on the superfluous consumerism, cuz, uh, somehow, I am broker than usual. I am usually only semi-broke. Actually, I am barely every truly broke. But I think I might be coming upon an actual, real life budget crisis. POOOOOO.

And Now, A List.

Because I am terrible at writing actual entries, but I am good at writing about what I SHOULD write about:
-Teaching creative writing
-Cod liver oil - so good for you, yet SO GROSS. (Even in lemon. I am a weener.)
-Needing a break from academia between the whole MFA and PhD thing (?!?!?!?! or something)
-Meds

This entry has been sitting in a browser window for like 3 days. GET IT OFF MY DESK

( Resolutions. )

Colorado on Friday. The high at the base all week is supposed to hover around 20F. Ur socks, I needs them

It's Cranky Time

Hey everyone, I think I might be sick. With something like strep throat. Wunderbar.
This would be tolerable, uh, sort of, if most of my job did NOT involve talking loudly to groups of people. Alas. The joys of being an instructor. And a tutor, albeit that is usually a quieter endeavor. Unless I'm trying to get the student really enthused about something. Then I tend to flail and get really animated, which is probably more of a put-off than anything, really. Look! The crazy tattooed lady is having a seizure about English! AGAIN! Let's run and hide.

As if that weren't enough, I am also running into a real case of (dun dun DUNNNNNN) Writer's Block. This is like Writer's Great Wall of China. YOU. SHALL NOT. PASS.
I just can't seem to write anything useful. I have a lot of ideas, oh yes. And they're all about the Steel, and Bethlehem and Allentown and a lot of nifty things that I could put into a book that people from Bethlehem/Allentown/the Steel might actually BUY, if it weren't all locked up in my head for no good goddamn reason. Like right now. I'm halfway through a piece about the Banana Factory, and all I can manage to vomit up onto the page is some trite comparison about what it might be like if we could actually manufacture bananas. THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SUBJECT MATTER AT HAND, PEOPLE. And there was much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair.

Sometimes this makes me wish I were better at photography. You know, the whole thousand words thing. Because this suuuuuucks!

Minnesotans tie the knot?

Haha, that sounds like I'm curious as to whether or not anyone from Minnesota gets married. WELL DO THEY?
Actually they do. Because I am going to a wedding this weekend. This proves it. Hopefully I will not hack all the way through the service. Gp does not want to go, and I don't really blame him, and I'm sort of wondering what caused ME to want to go when we made flight reservations, other than some deluded moment where I thought that it would be fun and/or necessary for me to supervise him when he gets hammered with his uncle. Hey, what do you want - I'm stupid and irrational. Whoa. Female self-loathing, anyone? I can't help it. Especially because...

Also, fat.

I am not fat. I know this. Just wanted to clear the air about that one before I get any 'omg u r a BEANPOLE shut up bitch!!11one' commentary. Even though I still probably deserve it.
Anyway, I am retaining water. This sounds like something women go through when they go through menopause. It probably is, but it's happening to me NOW, and it's causing me to look somewhat pregnant. I am also sure that I am not pregnant. Just thought I'd clear the air about THAT, too.

So holding water. Or something. I'm not sure if this has to do with me skipping the gym because I've been sick, or bad eating habits, or medications, or some combination of all three (probably), but suddenly I have spillage. And, despite longstanding evidence to the contrary, my jeans are starting to tell me that I might have hips. And spillage. Of course, my boobs remain exactly the same. Damn them. So now I look like a flat-chested, bird-calved female who somehow managed to swallow a fire hydrant. I swear that that is how I look lately. And I have NO IDEA WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. So I've started keeping loose records of what I eat, in hopes that it will tell me something and/or embarrass  me. Probably both. And I will start walking more instead of taking the bus on days where I don't have 50 lbs of books to carry. That just makes my back kill, which is a bad tradeoff for fitness, really. I don't know if this will help. But I would like my ribs back, thank you, as well as the ability to button my pants properly.

What I really should do is see a GI specialist to see if I'm gluten or lactose intolerant, as those two particular quasi-allergies have been known to cause a certain amount of, um, ballooning. Really, though, I think I'm just looking for excuses - 'oh, I'm not getting a belly. It's just my meds. Or maybe it's the milk. Or the bread. It can't be the fact that I love Snickers SO MUCH.' I need to get off my damn ass. The end. (Also, a life without cheese would be no life at all. As an aside.)

Okay. Back to manufacturing bananas, bitches

I really like Lunchables.
No. That's not exactly right. I really like PIZZA Lunchables. The cheese ones.

I am, however, scared to bring their delicious convenience into the office. Am I a shallow wanker for this? Probably.

Does anyone else here have salad phases?

I swear I go through, like, salad menstrual cycles. I'll totally ignore greenery for a while, then suddenly I'm all 'OMG SALAD HOW DID I EVER LIVE WITHOUT YOU AND YOUR DELICIOUS DELICIOUS DRESSING'

Rinse, repeat. I dunno.

broiling MEAT, part un!
hopefully this night will not result in frozen pizza. the broiler pan in that other kid's oven has a little convenient drippy-catchy thing - convenient, it would be, if it weren't SLANTED THE WRONG WAY. what the hell, people?

*later*

that kicked ass. not only did i broil something (marinated/butterflied pork tenderloin) without burning/over/undercooking it, i only set the smoke alarm off once, which apparently for broiling is pretty good. cooking for two actually allows me to COOK, rather than unpackage/defrost/can-open, AND there's the added bonus of an ego boost when i cook and it doesn't suck! my silly little domestic life. i don't mind it, i suppose. now i have had oreos and milk and will do poetry commentary for a while before i try and write my own brand of awful.

this weekend i slept through a reading, which made me feel like a douchebag. and a hypocrite. *sigh*
must not get toooooo domestic now, lest i shrink away from all things social and forget that in reality, i am not a housewife. and yet.

and OKAY FINE I WILL START USING TAGS
*grumble*dammitxml*grumble*