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juhhhhhhhhhhhhh (my cat believe it or not just jumped onto the counter / keyboard and "typed" this). Seems an appropriate way to start.
So.
Finals.
Nothing inspires me to write and evaluate my life and be generally melodramatic quite like exams. Writing is my way of trying to herd in my mind and get myself focused. It's a way to purge whatever is bugging me.
I'm drinking tension tamer tea, and being kind of calm, and trying to think about things rationally and logically rather than letting my brain splay out into nonlinear connections and fractal kaleidoscoping the way it was doing yesterday. When I'm under stress, sometimes everything saturates with meaning and I see ties between different parts of my life that I wouldn't normally see; one memory will be spliced over the top of another memory, like movie scenes, and I feel a sense of love and direction, and everything will come together like a beautiful snowflake. Or, oppositely, I may be thrust into panic; I've missed the snowflake somehow, I've dropped the ice-9 and let things run amock. I tend to miss a lot of sleep during finals exams; they seem to serve as some sort of spiritual austerity for me, or my personal David Blaine "I will sit in ice for 9 hours" routine. Hence my migraine. Next semester I realize I need to make exams less of a sundance ritual and more of a meditation.
My schedule:
Takehome test due at 7AM (mostly finished)
Takehome test due at 2:30 PM
Final tomorrow (rescheduled due to migraine) tomorrow at 4 PMish
Final Wednesday (?) in morning (being rescheduled)
- el fin -
That's a lot of work, obviously, but I am going to attempt not to panic about everything. I have pizza on order, I'm going to eat that, and then I'm going to get to work in earnest with last minute studying. Watched Howl's Moving Castle over Thanksgiving break with Shane; brought on some nostalgia and re-evaluation of things since 2008 when I first saw it with my friend Eric.
There are a few stressors. I'm probably taking a friend's cat. My parents are probably going to be annoyed with this, because I go back and forth between my place and my folks' and take my own dear Marko Mozart cat with me. Having an extra cat will make everything a little bit more difficult. What's kind of hard to explain is that this particular cat is important to me. The cat is 19 years old -- way above life expectancy of a Maine Coon. I'd basically be providing hospice care. I'll put my foot down about it and figure it out somehow; the cat may pass to kitty summer country before the date when I might be taking the cat on anyway. This is the cat: http://www.precision-guesswork.com/zoot.html.
Mmmmm. Pizza just got here. Gluten free crust--artichokes, canadian bacon, pesto sauce, olives, mushrooms, sundried tomatos. Yes I know I am strange.
I'm 26 and have sort of assembled myself a rather nontraditional extended family. Maybe in some ways this is standard anymore. There's Keith Ashman down the street who has given me most of what he owns in some sort of bipola