September 28, 2006

Oh no, she didn't. No. Really. Tell me she didn't.

My first excuse is that I went to bed late last night. Zach flew into town at midnight, and even with my extremely generous housemate Ping driving it was unreasonably late by the time we got back to the house, gave a brief tour, got sleeping spots set up and went to bed.

My second excuse is that I didn't sleep well even after I went to bed. I'm not sure why -- it was cold in my room, I was guilty over undone schoolwork, my roommate was up doing physics problem sets, something.

My third excuse is that my mental acuity is not at its highest in the morning under any circumstances. I can more or less handle an uncomplicated morning routine; deviations tend to confuse me.

I have no fourth excuse. Frankly I'm not sure I should have any excuses. All I know is that I woke up at 7:00 this morning when my alarm clock went off, put some clothes on, dragged Zach out of bed and pointed him in the direction of breakfast, and then dashed out the door to Taekwondo.

At 8:00.

My Taekwondo class is at 9.

I still don't understand how it happened; I recall looking at my alarm clock last night and thinking to myself that it was set for 8. It's not Daylight Saving Time yet (or do I mean that it's still Daylight Saving Time?); my watch is correct; the clock in my dining room is correct even though I blithely assumed it wasn't. But somehow I managed to cheat myself of an hour of sleep, shaving last night's total rest from a scant 6 hours to a scant 5 hours to absolutely no practical purpose.

At least it explains why I feel like such a fucking wreck this morning. I think I'm going to go to Taekwondo and then come home and nap all day.

Posted by dianna at 08:50 AM

September 24, 2006

You scoundrel! I'm not the kind of girl you spread chocolate on!

I have an assignment for my Anthropology of Food class tomorrow which involves tracking the ingredients of a processed food item to find out their commercial source and historical trajectory. Since my house is typically stuffed to the brim with a combination of fresh produce and unlabeled bulk items, and I really didn't feel like going and buying a processed food item for this project, I scrounged briefly around the pantry and eventually came up with a jar of Nutella to investigate. It fails one recommended criterion of the project in that it's not a food I actually eat -- Nutella has milk in it -- but in general I have few objections to researching cocoa, sugar, hazelnuts and vanilla. So that's what I've been doing for the last hour or so.

Now I have a terrible problem. My roommate was up until 8:00 this morning (insert obligatory co-op drug reference here) and has gone to bed early. I've politely turned off most of the lights in the room while I continue to work. Because our room is directly in the path of people walking up and down the stairs, I find it necessary to shut the door to avoid distraction; hence, the door is presently shut.

What I'm saying here is that I'm sitting behind a closed door in a dimly-lit room with a jar of Nutella and reading a lot of propaganda from marketing coucils about how deliciously sweet and creamy hazelnuts and cocoa butter are. It's just me and the jar here, with no one to tell what indiscretions we may get up to. Omnivores, suppress your expressions of triumph -- my dietary virtuousness is defended by the imposing combination of my questionable willpower and a house policy against hoarding spoons in bedrooms. Then again, if I go downstairs to get another cup of tea, and that tea requires a spoon for stirring, well, the prospects for this battle may get somewhat bleaker.

Bleaker, but more delicious.

Posted by dianna at 10:29 PM

September 18, 2006

Cheat cheat.

I've already been called out once for failing to follow up on my earlier mention of my house's yearly mystery event. However, since said event has now taken place and I can be officially considered a veteran of it, I feel responsible for maintaining its secrecy in a way that I didn't before. So I'm going to skip out of my promised explanation (at least for now) and go on to talk about something entirely different!

In this particular case it's Zach's new blog. Shiny! Exciting! New only in that it is now located on Cementhorizon with all the same content it had on Typepad!

Still exciting, though.

Posted by dianna at 08:57 PM

September 15, 2006

Pity please with sugar on top.

For some reason, since the start of the semester, I've been unable to remember to do anything that isn't written on my left hand. Every day, then, I've got something new written there. Some days the nearest pen to hand has impressive staying power, and the next morning I find myself trying to scrub off yesterday's to-do list so I can start on today's. On bad days, I have to re-write yesterday's list and add today's after it.

Sometimes the lists are calm and reasonable:
"Nut. CD."
"Read."
"Anth library, pots, laundry"
Other times a keen observer will notice some panic showing through along with yesterday's ink:
"read read fucking read"
"5:00 bookstore 5:30 library 5:45 dinner 6:00 class."

Today's list:
"work 1-2 print Nut food pots dishes read ow."

That's because I need to print out a lot of articles from e-reserves because I can never get them read if they're on my computer, I need to go after work to Pet Food Express to get food and litter and a carrier for Peanut, then I need to come back and do both a dishwashing shift and a pots & pans washing shift for my house (after a dinner for which I won't be around because I'll be buying cat food), then I need to catch up on a hell of a lot of reading because there's a huge hullabaloo of some mysterious nature going on in my house this weekend (more on that later) and it's taking up my entire Saturday so I need to read now if I'm not going to get more behind, and I sprained my foot this week but foolishly went to tae kwon do yesterday anyway and now it really kind of hurts. And I need to remember that I can't do any of this stuff during lunch because my co-worker doesn't come in on Fridays and I have class during the one hour that one of us needs to be here for a time-dependent task, so I need to come in the hour before and try to bend time to get it done.

That sucks.

On the other hand, this morning someone in my house got up early to put on weird, horrible, sappy hippie music which I think has something to do with the higher-consciousness-education center which used to own our building... and to put a bike lock over the cabinet holding the stereo and volume control, with cheery notes reminding us that Living Love Is Coming! It's so horrible that I'm actually strangely delighted by it.

I am, however, sorry that this year the house president will not be hiding in the fridge to hand out invitations to Saturday's event. Apparently this has in fact happened in the past. And now, really, more on that later.

Posted by dianna at 11:54 AM

September 12, 2006

Good news for people who love good news.

It may be because the last two days have been warm and sunny and humid, after a couple of weeks of treasonous autumnal gloom. It may be because I've finally shaken the cold that I had last week. It may be that I've had three cups of tea, one of coffee, and a lot of chocolate in the two days of this week. It may be the pornographically gratifying sight of the bookshelves covering my walls now that I've finally finished unpacking. Or it may actually be because I've dropped a frustrating class and switched to one that I really want.

I'm in a goddamned wonderful mood.

As of today my workload seems manageable. I have readers, and I can open them and do reading. I have enough time to work all the hours that I want at the library. I have a nicely standardized schedule that lets me come home at noon and cook lunch for myself every day. I don't have any subjects that I can't handle, nor any that I'm not interested in. I don't have a butchery lab tomorrow afternoon nor an ethnographic butchery video to watch in lecture right before lunch. I don't have an osteology quiz, which, in all masochism and honesty, may be the only thing that I'm sorry about.

When I'm not doing schoolwork (and occasionally when I should be) I have a home that is completely awesome. I have housemates that I like and am getting to know. They stop by my room and talk to me and flip through my books and hang out in the comfy chairs which my roommate seems to call into existence from thin air. They invite me to their rooms to sprawl on their Foof Chairs and talk until ridiculous hours of the night. They make delicious vegan dinners and cookies for me to eat. They share Magnetic Fields albums on the house network. They go on random trips to Home Depot and ride unattended courtesy scooters around the store.

You could call this a response to Kristen's last post, although I'm fairly sure we won't have to fight for primacy over it. Though I am 95% less settled than she, as I sit here in my comfy chair in my comfy hippie house with my books and my guitar an arm's reach away in either direction and free dinner readying itself for me downstairs, my delight is comparable to Kris's to at least five significant figures.

Edit: actually my delight resulted in me wandering down to dinner before posting this, so just imagine that that business about food has been neatly reconfigured in the (delightful) past tense. Thanks.

Posted by dianna at 07:25 PM

September 04, 2006

A quick question.

Does someone have my copy of the book Good to Eat by Marvin Harris? I recall recommending it to a number of people at some point, and may have loaned it out. I have to read it again for another class this semester and I've just realized that I can't remember when I last saw it. Before diving into my numerous boxes of packed books, I'd just like to see if anyone reading this will conveniently come to my aid by admitting to having it.

This doesn't in any way supersede my earlier suggestion to read it, whether or not you are the person presently possessing it. It's an extremely interesting book. It's just that I'm also extremely interested in not having to buy it again.

Posted by dianna at 09:20 PM