Yesterday a friend and I dashed out of cataloging class, relieved to finally escape from the nuances of Library of Congress Classification.

"I spent the entire class trying to find my happy place!" she said. "Was it me, or was it completely impossible to concentrate after the break?"

"Oh, I couldn't focus at all. My brain was somewhere in the end of December, thinking about the friends I'm going to have visiting for New Year's."

"See? That's your happy place." She smiled.

I hadn't really thought about it, but she was right. I smiled back. "Yes."

For the record, I am not dead. I finished the paper. I got three and a half hours of sleep. It was a reasonably good paper despite the circumstances under which it was written.

I used to panic a lot about not getting schoolwork done. I would procrastinate plenty, of course, like everyone else, but then when an assignment got close to being due I'd get very anxious about whether I'd have enough time to get it done and it was really nerves that would keep me working until it was finished. I didn't deal well with the uncertainty -- the feeling that this time I had really blown it and I was going to fail and it was my own fault for not planning well. And every time I somehow got it done and passed it in and got a decent grade and the unthinkable doom of academic failure was averted yet again.

I think it was sometime during my sophomore year of college when, during one of these situations, I said soothingly to myself "You'll get it done somehow. You always do." Which was, of course, completely true. I had been doing this since high school. I never asked for extensions. I never made up excuses. I just put things off as long as I possibly could and then finished them in a desperate frenzy at the last minute.* The vast majority of the time my grades gave no hint of my ridiculous work methods. So I reminded myself of that over and over again, and I gradually became less panicky about the whole thing, which was a pleasant result, emotionally speaking.

Since then, though, I feel like I've constantly been pushing the envelope to see precisely how long I can put something off and still do it well. The panic was a sort of motivation, and now that it is gone I have to delay longer and longer to feel that rush of urgency, the feeling that if I don't start NOW it might not happen. I watch myself as though watching a TV show, and wonder detachedly how our heroine will win against all odds in the final seconds of the episode. Eventually I start moving, I write the paper, I realize again that I do in fact enjoy what I'm studying. I get through the next day on little sleep and lots of caffeine, and then I sit back and file "went to a concert with barely a paragraph written and the paper due at 9:30am the next day" under Ways In Which I Have Tempted Fate So Far.

I don't do this sort of thing in other parts of my life. It's not that I hate schoolwork. It's just that for some reason avoiding it is as habitual as being in school, for me.

*There are a few specific times that I can remember when this was not true. I never procrastinated on Greek because I knew there was no way I could afford to. That whole thing was like panicked last-minute work from the very start. And I spent a lot of time in my senior year of college working on both my Red Sox culture thesis and my study of Mayan hieroglyphic stairways, which I think are some of my best academic work. I don't know how I convinced myself to be so diligent on those, but I'm really glad I did.

Here are some things you should not do:

1. Spend all day Sunday Christmas shopping when you have a paper to write which is due Tuesday morning and you know you will have no free time to write it on Monday.
2. Accidentally take a nap Sunday evening for several hours which you could have been using to write your paper. Especially because this will make it impossible for you to feel sleepy at a reasonable hour so that you can get up early the next day without severe pain and suffering.
3. Spend the remainder of Sunday night waxing poetic about your favorite anthropologists and write only a very, very small portion of your paper, which you justify by imagining extra hours into the next day which you can use to finish writing it.
4. Get out of bed twenty minutes late on Monday so that you are at the mercy of a merciless bus to get you to your morning new employee orientation on time. The bus will show up fifteen minutes late just to spite you.
5. Go to a concert on Monday night, ignoring your still quite unfinished paper. (Well, it was a fabulous show -- Amanda Palmer -- so perhaps you should do this anyway, and just try not to make all of the other mistakes on this list.)
6. Stop at the immense 24-hour supermarket on your way home and wander about completely entranced by all the munchy things you could buy to help you get through what is increasingly looking to be a very, very late night. Remember, the time you spend wandering those endless aisles is time you could be using to WRITE YOUR PAPER.
7. Eat about half of a large hunk of peppadew cheese in one sitting.
8. Blog about all the ways you've recently fouled up your personal time management before writing your very, very easy, and therefore VERY ignorable paper.

I have been griping all evening about how I have to write a paper essentially explaining what ethnography is. This is a smidge frustrating because a large chunk of my undergraduate education involved studying about and by means of ethnography. I feel like I'm taking Remedial Sociological Methods for Graduate Students. Something in my brain twitches a little bit when I think about how much money I am paying to take this course. (It's a requirement.) I didn't even think I'd have to go to the library for sources because I glanced over at my bookshelf and grabbed my intro Anthropology book, which has a chapter with a pretty good explanation of ethnography.

But then I decided to grab a book or two from the library just to make sure (nothing worse than realizing you don't have enough material late at night after the library's closed.) And then while I was there I picked up The Interpretation of Cultures even though I wasn't completely sure it would be helpful, just because I like it. And now that I am reading through the material again, I find myself fondly greeting familiar names in the field. Hello Boas, hello Malinowski, hello Evans-Pritchard, hello Geertz. And I remember how much I love this stuff. It's not that reading about ethnography is anything new or revolutionary, but I can always read more about critiques of the objectivist and humanist methods. And re-reading about the beginnings of modern ethnography, the off-the-verandah movement and the start of participant observation -- it's like settling in for a familiar fairy tale, one from my college years.

For weeks now two poems have been stuck in my head -- one is H.D.'s "Prisoners," and the other is a poem that someone brought to workshop over the summer. They are strangely twined together and I keep hoping that they'll inspire the birth of a new poem of mine, but so far it is just the echoes of their words, not words of my own. I think that the common point that has them hovering in my head together is that they both use the vocative, addressing a person directly, and I find this very evocative. Perhaps that is what I want to take from them to use myself. The problem that stalls the poem, though, is that having addressed the person, I have no idea what next to say. Part of writing seems to be about getting to the bottom of these moments of internal speechlessness.

I haven't written anything since the beginning of September and it's really starting to bother me. The semester can't be over soon enough.

(timestamps are correct now, btw.)

Days go by when I don't find any reason to leave my apartment. On those days my head gets larger and larger until you can fit an entire universe inside it, and I spend my whole day there. At some point my roommates will come back and I'll be forced to re-enter the real world of this little apartment I've been stuck in all day, and my head will feel heavy and strange from having so much going on inside it. The world inside my head is full of half-truths and inventions which sometimes try to sneak into the world outside and pose as reality. This world is always creeping and growing even on days when I am busy, but days like this are like days devoted to gardening: watering and guiding and fertilizing the things that live here, and especially (if I can manage it) trimming them back from the edges where they try to get out.

Sarah Lee Guthrie has stayed in my head since the concert last week. I can still see her, lovely in tall boots, curling and stretching like a cat as she sang "Mornin's Over." I hadn't realized until I got to the show that Arlo was doing a "Family Legacy" tour and would have his daughter and her husband with him (along with his son Abe, who always seems to tour with him anyway.) I left with the vague feeling that maybe I should buy one of her albums, even though she and her husband, Johnny Irion, do more of a country music style, which is not usually my thing. But that didn't stop "Mornin's Over" from playing over and over in my mind.

Today was filled with wonderful food and family, and especially catching up with cousins I hadn't seen in ages. Sometime after we had all shared our stories from grade school and filled up with various desserts and sprawled out around the living room, my dad suggested that we listen to ye olde traditional "Alice's Restaurant." It was then that my mother and I mentioned that we had seen Arlo and Sarah Lee at the concert last week, and it was then that my cousin mentioned that he had gone to high school with Sarah Lee. (I hadn't even realized she was so close to us in age.) Western Massachusetts is a small world.

I love that I have a job where I can listen to the people around me talk about their favorite part of recasing a book. Today they were passing around stories as though their jobs were a good movie that we all had seen. "Well, my favorite part is peeling off the such-and-such, it's just so fun!" "I think my favorite part is sewing on the endsheets." "My favorite part is casing in." "Oh, I used to hate casing in because I could never be sure whether I'd done it right because the people who taught me said I couldn't peek to see if it went in evenly!" "They used to not let me peek either, but I like this job because they let you, and if it's wrong you can always trim the endsheet or something." "Well, you can't peek too long because the paper keeps expanding." "Oh, that's right, good point."

I don't get to work with the bound materials myself, but everyone around me does and they know so much about it, it's fun just to listen to them talk.

I felt incredibly giddy for most of today. It is so close to Thanksgiving I can almost taste it, and I knew once I got through today it would be smooth sailing. I indulged in something I haven't done since high school -- doing homework for my late class during my morning class. I would feel guilty, except that the class is like a dumbed-down version of a sociological methods course I took as an undergrad, and (as I vividly described to my parents in a fit of impatience) I think I could shoot myself in the head and still have enough brain cells left to get an A. The plan (to do my homework, not to shoot myself in the head) worked remarkably well, and I suspect the professor thought I was taking more notes than usual. Then it was straight to work and then straight back to class again, where I was so giddy I could hardly contain myself. I felt like a problem child in elementary school. We went over the Dewey Decimal exercises on the board and I giggled at how bad some of my own numbers were. When the professor was talking about number building (the process by which you create a Dewey classification number) he at some point used the phrase "If you build it..." which I immediately followed up with "they will come?" which set everyone giggling. One of the numbers I gave as an answer towards the end of class turned out to be about 20 digits long, and as I recited it for the professor to write on the board, I realized the impossibility of it being even close to right and collapsed in giggles, saying "I must have been on CRACK!" to have come up with such a thing. (Oddly enough, the number turned out to be very close to right.) At the end of class I even apologized to the professor for being such a spaz, but he didn't seem to mind. One of my classmates assures me that I'm not that bad and it's okay because I'm funny. But part of me wonders, when did I get like this? I was certainly never such a spastic clown in high school. One of those weird college transformations I suppose.

As I walked home I thought about how horribly tiring Tuesdays are, since I leave my apartment at 9am and don't get back until close to 10pm. I thought about how nice it will be in a few weeks when the semester is over and Tuesdays are no longer so evil that I barely have time to eat. I thought about walking into my apartment and collapsing on the couch and saying to my roommates, "I hate Tuesdays. But there are only a few left." Then I burst out laughing as in my imagination I saw my roommates look at me askance because it sounded like I had just predicted the ending of the world. The person standing at the bus stop looked a bit disturbed that I was laughing at nothing, which made me laugh more. I know, I am totally nuts. But it is important to entertain yourself, you know, and if nothing else I am fairly good at that.

Getting through this past weekend was kind of like getting over a hump of some sort. I got through a stack of schoolwork, I saw some friends, I talked to some people I hadn't heard from in a while, and by the end I was a well-adjusted looking-forward- to-Thanksgiving sort of person instead of a maladjusted ball-of-tension preoccupied-with-stupid-things sort of person. And there is a lot to look forward to for Thanksgiving!

I've recently realized that Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday these days. I tend to be full of angst over Christmas because it is force-fed to me by the stores and the media and because it is overhyped so that it can never live up to any expectation (and everyone gets stressed trying to make it somehow Perfect) and because our family traditions aren't terribly consistent (outside of sweet, delicious pierogies. How I love pierogies.) Halloween is nice, but my friends don't celebrate that consistently either, so there are some years like this one with a couple different Halloween gatherings, and some like last year where I never even thought of a costume and I didn't see anyone on or near the holiday. But Thanksgiving has evolved into a tradition that I can totally live with and features a perfect combination of familiar relatives and friends. And food. Lots of food.

It started in high school when my sister and I were in marching band and colorguard and needed to be at school for the Thanksgiving football game. Before that I can't remember whether we traveled or stayed home for Thanksgiving, but I don't think we had consistent traditions. My mother got her parents to come over, too, so it was a pleasant six-person event preceded by football and music and marching, which, band geek that I am, was good enough for me. During the six years that we did Thanksgiving high-school football, my mother took the opportunity to claim Thanksgiving as Her Holiday. There would be no more driving around significant chunks of Massachusetts and Connecticut for this one. And it was good.

It was when I was in college, when I was home for a hectic three days and trying to see as many old friends as I could in that time, that we started the tradition of Inviting Friends Over for Dessert. This got to be more and more important as the years went by and Thanksgiving was really the only time that old hometown friends were ever actually in town anymore. It was never any trouble to have enough dessert, since my grandparents always brought unnecessary amounts of pre-made pies, because they get a kick out of the fact that one brand has the same name as me (despite the fact that this wore thin to the bearer of said common name quite a long time ago.) And we never worried about having enough chairs because dessert was the time that people draped themselves around the living and dining room wherever they could and watched whatever football game was still on and chatted and caught up on things while trying to keep the pie away from the beagle.

Now that I live on my own Thanksgiving involves a train ride from Boston with cake. It is also the day I get to have Cynthia over for a holiday. The relatives involved change from year to year, but there is always food and family, friends and dessert, and afterwards, another train ride, this time with bags of tupperwares of leftovers, and collapsing in my apartment in front of the tv -- perhaps for a movie, perhaps a marathon of That 70s Show -- and relaxing, and feeling like maybe at this one time of year, the list of people I miss is a little bit shorter.

Rumor has it that comments are sometimes posting and sometimes not. I haven't been able to replicate the problem thus far, but if you are having any commenting issues, please email me at amanda at ageoldsongs dot com and let me know, along with any details about your computer that might help solve this mystery. Thanks.

I have been chiding myself again lately for being too backwards-facing about my life. I have so much right now, but I hardly even think about that because I'm too busy thinking about what I had before. Every year is a separate unit, and I always measure each against the last, trying to see if I'm still in touch with the same people, if I have as much direction in my life. Too much of my life is recorded, and old emails and blog posts make it easy to contrast. It's not exactly that I am lacking people to hang out with and new friends and things. It's just that I hate losing people, and each year seems to mark communication tapering off from another quarter, much to my regret. I am only just learning that if people want to let go of me, I just have to let them. You can't make yourself stay important to someone, at least not always.

Last night was the last Halloween party of the season, and I was surprised to know a reasonable amount of the people there. The person hosting it was a friend of a friend who is now herself a friend, but I didn't really think that I knew that many of her friends. But I will always know a chunk of the people from my hometown in a certain age range, and it's neat to realize how many of them live in or near the city now. These days I talk a lot about how it doesn't really matter where I live once I get out of school, because there's nothing really tying me to this area or to anywhere. This, though, is something I'll probably never experience outside of the Boston area -- just running into an old friend at a party, realizing you work near each other, and agreeing to go to lunch sometime. There are people I used to know lurking everywhere, it seems, and friends who have friends who become my friends and introduce me to more friends. And while I'm not terribly social when it comes down to it, it is nice to know that they're out there.

Today I went with Joanna on an expedition to the craft store. Since I don't get out of the city to bigger stores that often, I figured it would be fun to go along even though I don't have any projects immediately planned. And it would be handy to pick up some embroidery floss while I was there anyway, for a long-planned project on my dollar-a-pound coat which is now adorned with leaf-shaped buttons and with any luck at some point in the future will have a few little embroidered leaves on the back.

I definitely did not intend to buy yarn, since I am still working on my knitting project from last winter, which happens to also be my first knitting project: a scarf. I strongly suspect I have made it too wide, to the point where it will be annoying to wear. Oh well, this is about learning I suppose.

The point is, I did buy yarn anyway, because I was completely in love with this blue-and-earth-tones yarn that was really soft, and I decided that even though I didn't have a project for it at the moment, I would find one. (As soon as I am done with that scarf.)

As I was stroking its soft blue-and-earth-tone goodness I glanced down at the label to see what it was made of, because somewhere in the back of my head I remembered a conversation with one of my classmates where I had mentioned my ongoing scarf project and she, an experienced knitter, had asked what kind of yarn it was and I had replied stupidly "Uh... the green kind," because I didn't remember at all.

So I glanced down at the label and saw that it said SOY WOOL.

What?

I had to examine it further to determine if it was like soy chicken, where the soy is emulating the chicken and there is in fact no chicken involved, or if it was a combination of soy and wool. Turns out it's the latter (30% soy/70% wool), which is not really any less perplexing.

Perplexing, but somehow totally fabulous. They can make soy into anything!

A lot of the things I own that mean the most to me are things that were given to me by friends. As I look around my room they are everywhere, decorations on the walls, knicknacks on the shelves, clothes and blankets in drawers, even cards and postcards that I hoard and reread and pin to bulletin boards and closet doors. Sometimes I look around and find it comforting to have within my grasp these tangible memories of the people who have cared. On the other hand, sometimes they seem to stand starkly in the past, as though they're possessions abandoned by people who couldn't leave fast enough. And I, left behind, collect and cherish them all as though they're something real, not just a symbol and a shell, an idea of a person gone.

And that's how I realized that there's nothing that really makes me happy or sad. I have these ups and downs and I will have them regardless of what's going on around me. The same things can have completely different meanings depending on what mood I'm in. I am constantly trying to find the reasons for every feeling, but the reasons tend to be rationalizations: the feelings happen on their own.

For the record, it is Not A Good Sign when you've spent so much time in cataloging class that you've considered writing a poem that references Dewey Decimal Classification. On the other hand, it is really the classification's fault for having tables like the Table of Last Resort. Tables with names like that are just asking for you to stare off into space and think of other contexts you could apply it to, while your professor waxes poetic in his own way about hierarchical structure and useful collocation.

Unfortunately writing poems is not really a good use of my time right now, thanks again to cataloging class, in which I am always working on roughly three different immense assignments at once. I miss the summer, when I was writing all the time. As the fall began I was still in that wonderful state of mind where things would come to me and I'd need to scribble them down, sometimes on the bus, sometimes as I was drifting off to sleep, and I got very compulsive about keeping my notebook with me and there was always something I was trying to build in the back of my head. But as the semester has worn on there has been less and less time for that. My notebook has only fragments in it, things I scrawl down but never work on, and I drag myself out of bed less and less often to write in it. When inspiration comes and I toss it aside because I am doing too many other things, it gradually comes back less and less, like a puppy kicked too often, and I feel guilty and worry that someday it'll never come back at all. But the people in my workshop remind me that it's okay. I tell them about kicking my inspiration like a puppy and they say it'll come back. I tell them about unworked-on fragments in my notebooks and they say I am working, in my own way. And they say these things not just to be comforting, but because they have been there too, because we all know about the ways that life can get in the way of itself sometimes. There are the things you have to do like going to work and cooking dinner and running errands, and there are the things you have to do like writing and dreaming, and somehow you have to squeeze them all in amongst each other.

Okay, I know that those of you who get updates through Livejournal are painfully, painfully aware of this, but the rss feed is working again. Wahoo.

Today was filled end to end with running about from class to work to class again with no time for anything more than snack food in between. Everything in my week seems to lead up to Tuesday, and I tend to spend Wednesday and Thursday catching my breath before starting to prepare for yet another Tuesday. Usually my Wednesday recovery involves sleeping in all morning before going to my favorite class, which is about conservation techniques and is essentially arts and crafts for grownups who like books. Tomorrow, however, I am instead going to go to work and do actual conservation (dance dance dance) and then meet my mom to go to see Arlo Guthrie at the Somerville Theatre.

There is still something that seems very strange about skipping a class to go to a concert, with my mother's knowledge and even her tacit consent, given that she is part of the outing and all. I even feel vaguely guilty in my compulsive-nerdy sort of way, even though I'm acing the class. This is certainly a better reason for skipping a class than those occasional mornings at Colgate when I just didn't want to drag myself out of bed. My fondness for classic folk music is something I don't share with anyone I know except my mom, and it's nice to devote an evening to it now and again. Last year when my parents and I went to see Arlo at Symphony Hall, it was immediately following an allnighter and a day full of classes and work, with the end result that at the end of the concert I had been awake for something like 37 hours straight. I have no idea how I stayed awake during the show (actually, I do: behold the power of bottled frappucinos.) This year I hope to not feel like a zombie for the entire experience.

So my new job involves flattening and repairing newspapers to prepare them for microfilming. Sometimes while I'm working I see myself from another person's point of view and I think, Amanda, you're ironing newspapers for a living. But then I see myself from my own point of view again and think, I get to DO REAL BENCHWORK fixing RARE NEWSPAPERS and they are PAYING me for it. And then I do a little dance in my head, but not in real life, because I am wielding a tacking iron and someone, likely me, could get hurt.

(So far -- in a whole week -- I have managed to not burn myself on the tacking iron, which I think is pretty good given the fact that I have to reach over it to get other things on a regular basis and that it's on my right so for logistical reasons I'm frequently using it with my non-dominant hand. It is only a matter of time though.)

On the bus ride home today I realized what ironing newspapers for a living does to your brain. I saw someone across the aisle from me reading a half-crumpled Metro and I desperately wanted to take a spritzer and iron to it. I even contemplated splitting it (for some newspapers, depending on the size, we cut through the center fold so they can be microfilmed a single page at a time.) I hope the day never comes when we feel the need to microfilm the Metro for research purposes. So far I've found that the best feature of that newspaper is its absorbency. But that is another whole story which involves ziti and a lot of alfredo sauce.

Today I am going to write a little about my trip to CVS. This is not, sadly, because I had a truly riveting trip to CVS, but rather because that is all I've done today outside of reading and taking notes on articles about different methods of book classification. And I do not want to write about that because I don't want my entire readership to develop a sudden, visceral understanding of the meaninglessness of life and jump out a window. I like you all very much and I aim to entertain you, not bore you senseless or numb your minds. There are numerous perfectly good drugs available for the latter.

It is because my task for the day was so incredibly mindnumbing that I found it necessary to make a trip to CVS in the first place. I had been trying to read an article and grew so sleepy that my attempt to remove a throw blanket from the bed to warm myself while I read accidentally turned into me collapsing onto the bed under a throw blanket for about forty-five minutes, despite having slept plenty last night. During my brief nap my brain even tormented me by conjuring up dreams about classification schemes. No, not even interesting ones (an epic duel between Cutter and Dewey would at least have been entertaining.) Just strings of numbers and letters and debates about the merits of beginning a classification number with one letter instead of two. It's a wonder I didn't fall asleep during my dream, too.

So I knew I needed to get to CVS and stock up on caffinated products of some sort in order to complete the relatively simple task of taking notes on a series of articles. So I walked over and faced the increasingly complicated issue of What Flavor of Cola to Get.

(For the record, I resisted the urge to use "purchase" in that last sentence instead of "get". It's come to my attention recently that I seem to have some kind of grudge against the word get, because I am always using substitutes such as "acquire" or "purchase". It has also come to my attention recently that I sound like a pretentious freak. This was highlighted this summer at a family reunion when a young cousin started pestering me about what my IQ is for no reason that I could figure out. I can only assume that I was having unnecessary-big-word moments -- god help me, I probably said that I was going to go acquire a soda, as though I were proposing a merger of the businesses My Stomach and That Generic Cola Over There. More recently, I was at a party and people started giggling at me because we were all tipsy and I was still spouting words like some kind of SAT prep book. So I am trying to reconcile myself with the word get, which is a perfectly pleasant and versatile word which has never done anything to deserve this unintentional boycott.)

But, back to What Flavor of Cola to Get.

This used to be a simple process for which the correct answer was always Pepsi, or, if I were feeling daring, that crazy alternative, Wild Cherry Pepsi. But then there was Vanilla Coke followed by Vanilla Pepsi, and then Lime Coke followed by Lime Pepsi, and Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper and Berries and Cream Dr. Pepper, and other various combinations of the words "diet", "vanilla", and "cherry" combined with various colas.

In the past, even dealing with that was fairly simple. I preferred Pepsi to Coke and Dr. Pepper, and full-calorie to diet, so there were only a couple of choices, except if a new Coke flavor had just been released and we were still in the intervening month or two during which the Pepsi people were scrambling to issue their own version and I felt like I just had to try it anyway.

But the fact is, during most of this time I was in caffeine denial anyway. That is to say, I had a low tolerance for caffeine and claimed that I was not going to drink any for that reason, but I was in college, so inevitably I needed caffeine anyway. So when my roommate and I went to the store, she'd get some kind of Coke product, and I'd be good and get orange soda or something, but then late at night I'd crack under the pressure of being required to provide some kind of literary analysis of Herodotus and dig into the Coke. So I spent a lot of time chipping in for my roommate's cola rather than making cola-related decisions myself.

Sometime in the middle of college, Colgate started selling Only Coke Beverages on campus. They even had a promotion by which I somehow acquired got a Coca-Cola mousepad. I was leaving the Coop one day with a Coke cup on my tray and a man in a suit appeared out of nowhere and said "Congratulations! For having that Coke product on your tray, you've won this mousepad." He then held out the mousepad, which I was unable to accept since my hands were busy holding the tray. He then awkwardly draped it over one of my arms. The complexity of the transfer distracted me from pointing out that since Colgate was only selling Coke products to drink, everyone who walked out of the Coop with a beverage would have a Coke product, and that, furthermore, there was no need to promote Coke on campus for the same reason. Later I took a pen to the mousepad and wrote "Colgate sold their soul to Coca-Cola and all I got was this crappy mousepad." Then, having satisfied my need for self-expression, I gave it to my mother. I had a laptop at the time and didn't need a mousepad. Anyway, I was more distressed about the loss of Snapple than the absence of Pepsi products.

But I digress (again.) I swear I'm getting to the point though.

Over the past year I have tried to be fairly healthy and avoid soda. I have also found myself, when succumbing to the need for soda, buying the expensive but tasty Cane Cola over at Trader Joe's. But there are always days at school or work when I could use a soda, and since both of those schools carry both brands I get to exercise my freedom of choice and buy Pepsi. But every time I did I noticed that it tasted kind of... weird.

This semester has been the first semester of my life that I have not been in caffeine denial. I went to my Tuesday morning class the first week and was so bored that I felt my brain cells throwing themselves over cliffs like little brain lemmings, and I knew it just wasn't going to happen. I went to my Tuesday evening class hoping that the caffeine from the morning would get me through, only to find myself stabbing my thigh with a pen in an attempt to use pain to stay awake, and dashing to the Coke machine across the hall as soon as the professor gave us our break. Don't try to be a hero I told myself. Just two more semesters of this and then you can go into caffeine rehab or something.

So for my Wednesday night class I planned in advance and hit up the Pepsi machine across the hall from that classroom. Mmm, Pepsi I thought as I bought it. Tastes funny... I thought as I drank it.

That was when it dawned on me.

Colgate and my roommate and years of caffeine denial had turned me into a Coke person.

*insert melodramatic end-of-Planet-of-the-Apes-esque scene here*

So now, when I go to CVS to stock up on caffinated soda, I have this problem of What Flavor of Cola to Get. I still feel guilty about abandoning my lifelong loyalty to Pepsi. On the other hand, now I apparently like the soda that actually comes up with its own flavor ideas, rather than the underdog that's imitating all the time. On the other other hand, that's kind of like switching from being a Red Sox fan to a Yankees fan. It seems wrong to ditch the symbolic underdog soda that is always trying to catch up.

BUT that is what we call Investing Your Soda With Way Too Much Meaning.

So the last time I was at CVS to stock up on some sort of cola product I avoided the whole quandary by just buying the most interesting flavor of cola they had, which happened to be Black Cherry Vanilla Coke. It was delicious. This time around I was again spared the confusion of pondering my soda-related value system because there were no interesting Coke flavors available, but the new Pepsi Jazz line had Diet Black Cherry French Vanilla. Oh snap, Coke. Pepsi may have come out with it later, but they used MORE ADJECTIVES.

On the way home it occurred to me that I had knowingly bought diet soda for the first time in my life. An image flitted through my head of me staring at my computer screen at '34 House in the dead of night, chugging my roommate's Diet Coke.

WHAT HAVE YOU PEOPLE DONE TO ME???

Today I went with my parents to my sister's last college colorguard performance at her school's last home football game of the season. This fall I'm so used to not being up at the crack of dawn for football games each Saturday that I've conveniently forgotten to miss marching and playing in the stands. But every time I go watch one perform I'm still a bit envious. Today I admired her band's beautiful new uniforms -- an upgrade from the last ones which were bought off Ebay for cheap and had some other band's name embroidered on them -- and their crisp marching, as well as the seven-person colorguard now with store-bought silks. When my sister first came to the school there had been no colorguard and no budget for one; she had recruited a couple other people, bought poles from Home Depot, sewn flag silks, and choreographed a routine for them. Now the colorguard is a legitimate group with a budget and supplies of its own, and is likely to last many years after she's graduated. It must be nice to leave a place knowing you've left a mark like that.

I am enjoying my Veteran's Day holiday from work by spending the afternoon and night at Kat's! And what is really incredible is that this is the same Kat that I mentioned all the time in my first year of blogging. We goofed off in Chemistry together in my senior year of high school, I broke my parents' rules to bike to her house when I was bored, we edited the school's literary magazine together in the first year of Creative Writing Club (back before Microsoft Word had intelligent ways of printing out booklets, when we had to coordinate by hand and memory which pages had to go next to each other so that it would all fold together in the right order.) She is really responsible for my having a website in the first place, as she had one before I did and it sort of inspired me to figure out HTML myself. And we were only in touch sporadically throughout college, but now we've reconnected again, and it is wonderful to have people who have known you for that long and remember all the same things you do, and even some of the things you'd forgotten or nearly forgotten. (And especially people who giggle every time you say the word "embittered" because it is the Best Word Ever.)

I am sort of trying, in an unofficial way, to NaBloPoMo for the rest of this month even though I started kind of late, and even though the dates on these posts are sort of misleading because the time on this blog is a couple hours off and I need to change that at some point. It seems to give me an extra couple of hours after midnight on each day, which at least makes some sort of sense because I usually go to bed after midnight, so if we are counting days by when you sleep it all seems logical on some level.

In case anyone was wondering, the picture now is of the lampposts at the Coolidge Corner T stop, not far from where I live. My camera has a much better eye than I do, and it noticed the sun glowing through the lampposts before I did. I was just snapping pictures every which way in an attempt to make a panography of Coolidge Corner. (Panographies are a great timekiller by the way.) When I saw how amazing that one picture turned out, I took a lot more. (I love the instant gratification aspect of digital photography -- you can figure out if you like something or want to change it a little or take more of it without even having to move your feet.)

The new tagline is from Sleater-Kinney's song "Get Up", which I've been thoroughly obsessed with lately (along with the entire album The Hot Rock.) I am already pretty sure that that song and album are going to be imprinted on this autumn in my mind. (Or is it that this autumn will be imprinted on the songs?) The Hot Rock is not lush like summer (like One Beat in some ways was, not that that's a bad thing); it is more clear and spare; it is piercing like the slanting autumn light between newly-bare trees. To me it is both haunting and exhilarating at once. I'm glad I bought it when I did. It is exactly what I needed this season.

It is the album I was listening to on my way to my job interview, and after I got out of the hour-and-a-half ordeal it was going through my head as I tried to figure out if I'd done all right. I hit the mark... I target moon, I target sky, I target sun... they sang in my head. I didn't know; I hoped I'd hit the mark. I felt thrilled. Or maybe just relieved it was over. A couple weeks went by and self-doubt set in. I figured I hadn't gotten the job. I tried to just forget about it. Then I found out I did get the job after all, and the same song ran through my head.

Sometimes I think my conversations with the universe go something like this:
me: ZOMG i want this one thing SO BADLY, PLEEEASE let me have it, I DON'T KNOW WHAT I WILL DO IF I FAIL AT THIS!!
universe: dude, i have given you EVERYTHING and you've barely had to sweat, why should i just hand this to you too? calm the fuck down.
me: yes'm, sorry, that was presumptuous of me. i don't need this that badly. i'll work something out.
universe: eh, want it anyway?
me: are you serious???
universe: sure, why not? *sprinkles fairy (universe?) dust and goes off to do other things*
me: *boggles*

Sometimes I also think that people are only given as much adversity as they can handle, and therefore the reason I've had so little is because I am somehow inherently weak. But then I remind myself that (a) I don't believe in a universe that has that type of rhyme and reason to it, (b) there are probably poorly-coping people everywhere who disprove this theory, and (c) there's no point making up ridiculous theories which accomplish nothing beyond perpetuating one's own low self-esteem.

For the record, I also don't believe in a universe that talks to you. That was just for dramatic effect. If your universe is talking to you, you may want to seek help (or make sure you're not in that movie Stranger Than Fiction or something.)

So I am still in the long process of categorizing the old posts, and in the process I have sort of decided that I don't despise the me of five years ago quite as much as I thought I did. Mostly I kind of want to give her a hug. Occasionally I have no idea what she is talking about when she has her cryptic emo moments. Occasionally I still remember very, very clearly what a cryptic emo moment was about. It's like little secret notes to myself that everyone can see. Maybe some other people know what they were about too, who knows. I am always surprised how much my friends know about me. Ultimately, it appears, I am not that complicated to figure out.

I have also found some things that I didn't even know I had recorded, though, which is awesome, and it reminds me why I bother to save these old things. Not long ago I was trying to remember an occasion when I was in class with Jason and I had been daydreaming about something funny and started involuntarily smiling so that the professor asked what I was laughing at and I had no idea what we were talking about so I just said "______ is funny," in a totally deadpan way, the blank being whatever the class was about, I guess. And I had no idea which class it was, and I was thinking probably Social Deviance? because that was one of those classes we were in together where I stared off into space a lot and was a smartass on some occasions. But holy crap, it was actually all the way back in freshman year, and the class was Challenge of Modernity, most of which I have nearly repressed by now, and I have no idea why I even remembered an anecdote from that far back, but the original story is here. And it's not as though it's a riveting story or anything, but I love that a friend and I were trying to remember a story from the past that neither of us really remembered, but there was actually a resource that had the answer in it, this bizarre sort of encyclopedia/play-by-play of my life.

And when I think about that it makes me sad that I blog so much less these days (while three times a day is deeply unhealthy, twice a month is perhaps not as much as I'd like) because I'll miss out on having these little pieces of memories and notes for myself years down the line. But partially I think it is because my cryptic notes to myself are never really that cryptic, and my friends can always figure out about twice as much about me as I think they can, that I've cut back on recording some of the wrenching little moments that are part of anyone's history. No matter what words I use to record something, there is someone who can figure out what I'm getting at. It is nice to be known that well, but we all need to have our secrets.

Fortunately there are plenty of other things to write about. Now I just have to do it more often.

We were all antsy in cataloging class, really just wanting to go home and watch the election results come in. Even the professor was hoping we'd get out early, though as it turned out despite our best efforts we only managed to finish up ten minutes sooner than usual. We worked on putting together subject headings in groups, and as each group announced their final heading choices and wrote them on the board, I found myself cheering under my breath when they selected the same ones my group had, as though I'd been overcome by the horserace atmosphere of the day. But everyone laughed at my caffinated giddiness, and we put in a good-faith effort at understanding the formation of Library of Congress subject headings, and then headed home as quickly as we could.

In the rain waiting for the subway, my classmate and I decided we couldn't wait anymore and started trying to get news on her phone. I still haven't figured out how to use the internet on my cell phone -- since I spend so much time online while I'm at home it seems a bit ridiculous to be buzzing around the internet while I'm on the run, too. But I hadn't counted on situations like this. So we stood huddled peering at her phone as it scrolled slowly, sloooowly through the Yahoo story about Democratic upsets in significant races. There was no news on the Virginia senate race, which is what we had really been looking for, and we were frustrated until we realized what we'd just done. We checked breaking news using a tiny portable phone while standing in the rain at a subway station. "Can you believe it? When I was a kid, I never would have imagined." And almost more fantastic, we were on the point of complaining because information was not falling out of the sky quite as speedily as we had hoped.

So: I think most things are done and working. I do not have a new archives index set up yet. There is a link to an older one, which I suppose would be enough to keep any determined person busy for a while. I also am not yet generating feeds because I still have some fussing to do with them. And that ugly orange rss button is going to go. Oh yes.

Everything from March 2002 forward should be categorized and searchable. I'm working on doing the older ones little by little.

I have that new little side blog now, which I intend to use to keep track of things I've recently watched or read or listened to or am currently obsessed with in any way, as well as to post little links or remarks here and there. Lately my memory has sucked so badly that I find myself wondering where a phrase in my head came from and knowing that it was from something I recently read but can't figure out what it was because I can't remember what I read last month. And besides, I figure if I find things neat, you might too, or you might have some remarks on them.

Some of the categories are for the little blog, and some are for the big blog. Hence, miscellaneous is for the big blog, and misc is for the little one. (I figured someone was going to ask what the deal was with that sooner or later.)

Other than the stuff I mentioned above, everything should be working, so if you find something else not working, please let me know.

And on that note, I have to stop obsessing over the website and do homework. Seriously, Amanda.

Finally, the weblog is back, after the longest break I've ever taken from blogging since I started back in 2001. I can't believe I haven't posted since July. It is saying something that since I last posted, the horse that everyone thought might die has just had his cast removed. Nearly four months. Sheesh.

It took so long partially because I had nothing to say for a while and got tired of having the same old thing up there day after day, so when I took it down I didn't have an immediate plan for what I was going to put up instead, I just wanted it to not be there anymore. It was also partially because I was fussing with blogware again and really couldn't decide what I wanted in something new. I knew I wanted some of the new bells and whistles like searching and categories, and I wanted to be able to import all my old posts so they too could be categorized and searchable, but whenever you start dealing with old posts there's always the question of whether to be content mashing them into the new template or whether to try to keep them in their old designs. I find it disorienting to read old posts in new designs, and it seems an extraordinary bit of luck that I've managed to keep all the old archives in their old designs for so long -- without any conscious attempt at backing things up, and despite occasionally accidentally hitting the dangerous "Republish All" button. But at the same time, the code in the older designs is like the furthest thing from valid that I have ever seen, and it seems ridiculous to go back and try to update all the code and apply new blogware tags to it and somehow try to preserve the feel of those horribly old designs in this much much newer context. And that is how this all got to be a preservation problem.

I've been taking courses in preservation management, and inevitably the topic of digital preservation comes up, and of course we've talked about preserving websites, and we ask, what exactly is the most important thing to preserve? Is it the text content? If we printed it out, we still wouldn't have preserved the website, just what was on it. What about its appearance? Should we go through websites trying to write code for them that will render them like older browsers did in the time they were current? What about the endless network of links? Because websites aren't stand-alone documents, aren't all the things they link to an important part of the context of the site itself? And so on until your brain bleeds.

And with all this in my head I became utterly paralyzed by the idea that my decision about what to do with this website was somehow a microcosm of the entire problem of digital preservation and I had no idea what to do AT ALL about the old archives, and so the site sat there and I took classes on other things, like cataloging, which are time-consuming and make your brain bleed in entirely different ways.

And even up until last Friday, though I had been working on the website and had a new design and everything, I was still wembling, indecisive, straddling two different blogwares and two different courses of action, and then some small setbacks had me feeling very melodramatic about the whole thing, until I told myself to have a cookie and go to bed, and not turn this into one of those exhaustion-and-low-blood-sugar issues.

The next morning I woke up, made a decision, and got on with it. Because it is not the future of the frickin' universe. It is just my blog. And I wanted to write in it again.

this thing is almost almost almost done...

please, no comments on anything that might be broken yet, i am still working on things.

wait for it... wait for it...

earlier -- later