Okay, you know the drill. I just finished switching from Greymatter to Textpattern. I'm going with the theory that everything looks pretty much as good as it did before, since it wasn't a redesign or anything, but the process of getting moved over was a bit of a pain so if I've missed anything let me know.

Recent posts are now in the archives, of course. I guess the only really recent post was about my gerbil, in case you missed it and you were curious. I know, mind-bogglingly fascinating as always.

The archives and photo gallery pages still link to the old index. I will deal with those soon, but it has come to my attention that I have papers to write, so it may be a couple weeks. Or it may be tomorrow while I am procrastinating. Only time will tell.

I have finally succumbed to new technology and have an RSS feed. (I recently wrote a paper about blogs for one of my classes which made me realize how horribly behind the times I am about such things.) I was initially a bit stubborn about setting one up (going with the theory that if I pay to have this website and spend a significant amount of time designing it, damned if I'm going to let people read it in an aggregator or on Livejournal or whatever. You WILL look at my spiderweb picture dammit.) But as it stands I have it set up so that the first sentence and a link show up in the feed, so technologically enabled people will at least know when I've updated and have one-click access, and I can still get people to come here instead of reading it in their friendslist. Then everyone feels warm and fuzzy and happy.

I started keeping a post-it note of things I intend to post about again. At this point my notes are outgrowing the post-it. So if I haven't been posting much it's not exactly for lack of inspiration, more out of the desire to get my schoolwork done. Look for lots more posting over the summer as I become completely nocturnal by working nights all the time!

Is it weird that I never noticed the flute in "Daydream Believer" until like yesterday?

Okay time to run to school and get a book!

Okay, now that the design seems to be (mostly) under control, I am just typing more things to see what this puppy looks like in the RSS feed.

And then I swear I am going to get some sleep because this is just ridiculous. Unfortunately 3 am is starting to feel like a perfectly normal time to be awake.

I really should listen to the gerbil when he scrabbles around and wakes me up at 9 am, instead of rolling over and grumbling at him.

All righty, this contentless post is now complete. Yeeha.

perfectionist that i am, it is driving me nuts to have to leave the site looking like this and run off to work, but that is exactly what i am about to do.
please do not make any judgments about my web designing ability based on this monster.

with luck everything will be back to normal in a few days.

Here we go again--I've gone and switched blogware.

Right around the end of the semester when I have many other things I ought to be doing.

Clearly I am insane.

But once I get this up and running, it is going to be awesome.

It'll be a little while before it's all up and running again though.

So it seems that now I have a pet gerbil. This is mildly surprising given that after college I was pretty sure I wanted to get a cat and finally have a pet with a reasonably long lifespan, a fair amount of intelligence, and the ability to excrete in an appropriate receptacle. But for various reasons I decided that this wasn't really the right time for that, and not too long after I made that decision, a situation arose which made it make sense to adopt a gerbil from some friends. (Not an incredible amount of sense, mind you, since I did end up travelling to New York to acquire this creature. But it made enough sense for me, which I guess means I really wanted a pet of some sort after all, and I just needed an excuse.)

As I was growing up I didn't see any particular appeal to having pet rodents, since of course we had a cat and eventually a dog, both of reasonably high intelligence, which were far more interesting than anything that lived in a cage could be. But my college roommate got a pet rat sophomore year, and since I cared for it when she was out of the country, which was actually rather frequently, and later adopted another roommate's mouse, I got fairly attached to their rodenty charms. When I found out that Cornelius the rat had cancer I was devastated. As I walked around campus all day I saw shadows of him in the squirrels that were everywhere, sitting up and chittering and stuffing food in their cheeks just like he did.

I adored Cornelius so much that I will probably never be able to get another rat because I would want it to be just like him. But it is nice to have a creature around again with the same mannerisms, like nesting obsessively and sitting up and eyeing me and trying to tunnel under every conceivable object and hoard random papers and writing utensils from my desk. There's something very familiar about it, even if Calamity the gerbil is a little less clever and a little more skittish than Cornelius. And it is nice to have another creature to look after, someone who depends on me, even if only for the mundane tasks of feeding and cage cleaning and letting him run around on the desk and bed and preventing him from arbitrarily throwing himself off of tall furniture.

I think in part I like rodents because their compulsions are like mine only more extreme. They are very small furry control freaks. Calamity cannot be convinced to use the nesting box that came from the pet store no matter where it is placed or how it is oriented. It is Just Not Right. On the other hand, when I gave him the lid to the box that my checks came in, he immediately chewed doors in exactly the places he wanted them and used it for shelter all the time. When that box got old and icky, I took it away and gave him the bottom of the same box. He immediately chewed doors in exactly the same places and set up the same nest all over again. It makes me feel bad whenever I clean his cage because when I put him back in he acts all upset and disoriented, and stays up all night scrabbling about until the shavings are piled exactly the way he likes them again. Sometimes when my mind is all turned inside out because my plans have gone awry or something in my life is not just so, I can almost see myself as a little rat or gerbil, sitting up and chittering huffily because my food dish is not in the right place, dammit.

But in real life I am much, much bigger than a gerbil, and sometimes when I hold him quivering in my hands I feel a little scared, knowing how easy it would be to crush him, and I think maybe the one creature in the world that depends on me should be a little less small and fragile. Terrified as I am of my own capacity for harm (negligible as that may be in a world where most people are probably significantly stronger than me), it's no wonder that until fairly recently I was incredibly nervous about caring for or even holding babies. At least rodents can fall from a height and only have the wind knocked out of them for a moment, and can scamper away if their human has proved to be that incompetent at looking after them.

I'm not dead. In fact I am very, very much alive.

I have started keeping a list again of things I intend to write about, which allows me to turn the ideas over in my head for a while until I feel really ready to write about them.

Yes, some song posts are in the works.

I really feel like I'm back to myself, and better than before, even. I've had an emotional housecleaning of sorts. When I forced myself to let go of what I really didn't need, it allowed me to rediscover what my basic necessities are. I felt like I was falling at first, but that allowed me to discover who would be there to catch me. I couldn't find beauty in the world, but Spring came and reminded me. I had forgotten how to be alone, but I relearned all the little things that sustain me, things that I'd forgotten about for too long. And I felt horribly desolate, but unless I make the mistake of withdrawing into myself, there is never any reason for loneliness.

As a learning experience it kind of sucked and there were times when I wanted nothing more than to be a different person altogether -- someone with, perhaps, a more rational range of emotions. But I know that I could not reach such incredible heights if I could not also sink to such miserable depths, and now that I am on the other side again I know I wouldn't want to be any other way.

I have looked back at the history of my relationships with my closest friends, and sometimes I can't imagine why they are still here, after all these twists and turns. But in the end why doesn't really matter, the fact is that they are, and it is blissful to know that.

So here I am again -- a little more grateful, a little more humble, a little more forgiving, a little less crotchety, and most of all ready to try living in the moment again, living the best way I know how.

Thanks for bearing with me.

earlier -- later