i didn't really want to be awake right now
But it's better than still being stuck in the most irritating dream ever.
So, I bought season 1 of Burn Notice when it showed up cheap on Amazon, having heard much about its high entertainment factor, which is an important aspect of deciding what to watch during the school year. I got back to San Diego on Wednesday, and have spent much of the time between now and then attempting to recover from my vacation. I love Boston madly, but it tends to leave me physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. This trip, with the side trips for the (wonderful, lovely) wedding one weekend and to New York the other, and coming as it did after spending a week with my extended family at my cousin's wedding in Hawaii and covering the three most major cities of China the week before that, was definitely no exception. I had a fucking amazing time and saw huge numbers of people I adore (and still not everyone I would've liked to have seen, and certainly not for as long as I would've liked to have seen them), but I am drained like overcooked spaghetti here. At this point, I give myself maybe a 40/60 shot of becoming normal enough to deal with interacting with everyone in my program on Monday morning without either becoming a cold resentful bitch or checking out completely into that dreamy abstract state where everything is just fine, even if it actually isn't.
Anyway, one of the things I do to relax is watch DVDs with my housemate, eowyns. It is nicely social-but-not, and I feel pleased to be entertained and to be keeping up in some small way with reasonably current cultural production. (If you ever wonder if this whole being a historian thing is affecting the way my mind works, the answer is yes. And not always in ways that make obvious sense.)
Burn Notice turns out to be completely awesome. But well, it's about a spy who gets fired, cut off, and stuck in Miami. He kind of flails around and tries to find out what happened and does random jobs in a way that somehow manages to combine a deliciously competent main character with hilarious, snarky, and yet still smart, comedy-of-errors-style episodes. He is alternately helped and hindered by his trigger-happy, ex-IRA ex-girlfriend, his best friend, who everyone involved knows is informing on him to the feds (played by Bruce Campbell!), and his wacky mother and gambling-addicted younger brother -- hence the comedy-of-errors. It's kind of really hard to imagine a show more likely to appeal to me.
My dream started out all right, just the typical adventure-style dream. We explore some kind of mine-like area, looking for something specific. Eventually, I end up still in the mine-like area, but I seem to have infiltrated a huge extensive operation and am trying to smuggle out the contents of one particular cardboard box. Unfortunately, I guess I needed to bring in all of my extended family as cover. Now, I love my extended family, and I even like many of them, possibly even most of the time. But sometimes they are not the easiest to deal with, particularly if you're trying to get them to do something that makes perfectly logical sense, but for unfathomable reasons doesn't match the intuition of one or more of them. So as I'm trying to subtly get us out of the area, with the box just as part of my large amounts of luggage (bearing suspicious resemblance to the complicated mess of bags and suitcases I dragged around China and Hawaii -- I was actually quite mobile with it all, but only if I had them configured exactly right), they're attempting to be "helpful." Which, of course, involves moving my stuff around and obstinately not following directions. Over and over. And at first it's just a bit challenging, no big deal. But it grows, slowly and subtly, until it's basically the kind of frustration that makes you seize up in a haze of red anger.
I had just gotten to the point of starting to yell (and probably give away the game, and confuse the hell out of them, and perhaps bang my head against the wall) when I woke up.
I really, really, really hope that fall quarter does not go like that. Gah.
In better news, I had coffee with some of my classmates yesterday, and then hung out with one of them for several hours afterwards, and it was really nice! So that's a good sign. And I had a lovely time watching Supernatural 4x01 with marinarusalka and eowyns Thursday night -- it was very comforting, and made me feel a lot more home. Plus, the episode kicked ass. So yeah, being back in San Diego facing the start of the school year isn't all bad. I guess.
I really need to figure out how to have more of a life this year. I think that would be good.
So, I bought season 1 of Burn Notice when it showed up cheap on Amazon, having heard much about its high entertainment factor, which is an important aspect of deciding what to watch during the school year. I got back to San Diego on Wednesday, and have spent much of the time between now and then attempting to recover from my vacation. I love Boston madly, but it tends to leave me physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. This trip, with the side trips for the (wonderful, lovely) wedding one weekend and to New York the other, and coming as it did after spending a week with my extended family at my cousin's wedding in Hawaii and covering the three most major cities of China the week before that, was definitely no exception. I had a fucking amazing time and saw huge numbers of people I adore (and still not everyone I would've liked to have seen, and certainly not for as long as I would've liked to have seen them), but I am drained like overcooked spaghetti here. At this point, I give myself maybe a 40/60 shot of becoming normal enough to deal with interacting with everyone in my program on Monday morning without either becoming a cold resentful bitch or checking out completely into that dreamy abstract state where everything is just fine, even if it actually isn't.
Anyway, one of the things I do to relax is watch DVDs with my housemate, eowyns. It is nicely social-but-not, and I feel pleased to be entertained and to be keeping up in some small way with reasonably current cultural production. (If you ever wonder if this whole being a historian thing is affecting the way my mind works, the answer is yes. And not always in ways that make obvious sense.)
Burn Notice turns out to be completely awesome. But well, it's about a spy who gets fired, cut off, and stuck in Miami. He kind of flails around and tries to find out what happened and does random jobs in a way that somehow manages to combine a deliciously competent main character with hilarious, snarky, and yet still smart, comedy-of-errors-style episodes. He is alternately helped and hindered by his trigger-happy, ex-IRA ex-girlfriend, his best friend, who everyone involved knows is informing on him to the feds (played by Bruce Campbell!), and his wacky mother and gambling-addicted younger brother -- hence the comedy-of-errors. It's kind of really hard to imagine a show more likely to appeal to me.
My dream started out all right, just the typical adventure-style dream. We explore some kind of mine-like area, looking for something specific. Eventually, I end up still in the mine-like area, but I seem to have infiltrated a huge extensive operation and am trying to smuggle out the contents of one particular cardboard box. Unfortunately, I guess I needed to bring in all of my extended family as cover. Now, I love my extended family, and I even like many of them, possibly even most of the time. But sometimes they are not the easiest to deal with, particularly if you're trying to get them to do something that makes perfectly logical sense, but for unfathomable reasons doesn't match the intuition of one or more of them. So as I'm trying to subtly get us out of the area, with the box just as part of my large amounts of luggage (bearing suspicious resemblance to the complicated mess of bags and suitcases I dragged around China and Hawaii -- I was actually quite mobile with it all, but only if I had them configured exactly right), they're attempting to be "helpful." Which, of course, involves moving my stuff around and obstinately not following directions. Over and over. And at first it's just a bit challenging, no big deal. But it grows, slowly and subtly, until it's basically the kind of frustration that makes you seize up in a haze of red anger.
I had just gotten to the point of starting to yell (and probably give away the game, and confuse the hell out of them, and perhaps bang my head against the wall) when I woke up.
I really, really, really hope that fall quarter does not go like that. Gah.
In better news, I had coffee with some of my classmates yesterday, and then hung out with one of them for several hours afterwards, and it was really nice! So that's a good sign. And I had a lovely time watching Supernatural 4x01 with marinarusalka and eowyns Thursday night -- it was very comforting, and made me feel a lot more home. Plus, the episode kicked ass. So yeah, being back in San Diego facing the start of the school year isn't all bad. I guess.
I really need to figure out how to have more of a life this year. I think that would be good.