boom-de-yada

Life right now is kind of wearing.  Everything is just fine, really, but between beating my head against dissertation revisions, doing all the preemptive moving things like getting my stuff stored or boxed up and looking into all the things I'll need to buy/acquire/do in Chicville, and just generally having to focus on those things 100% when the summer weather is beautiful and there are so many things I want to read or re-read or re-watch and most of my friends are just kind of settling into summer and I stay inside at a computer all day and night...... I'm feeling kind of down.  Like there's nothing to look forward to, it's just all work forever, and it'll never get any better or easier.

I have coping mechanisms for this feeling, of course.  Bourbon is one.  McCain's Deep n' Delicious frozen cake is another.  But when I want something with fewer calories, I turn to the internet.  My favourite online coping mechanism right now is this commercial:

Also, the one webcomic spinoff I've seen.*  It inspired me to start making up my own versions of the song when I'm feeling mopey:

I love Joss Whedon, I love House DVDs,

I love Warren Ellis, I love the CBCs,

I love the whole world

And all the geeks in it,

Boom-de-yada, boom-de-yada, 

Boom-de-yada, boom-de-yada!

I love my MacBook, I love orange pekoe tea,

I love my boyfriend, I love my family,

I love the whole world,

I love the life I have,

Boom-de-yada, boom-de-yada,

Boom-de-yada, boom-de-yada!

Obviously it's not great poetry, but I make these up and sing them all the time now.  Keeps me out of the bourbon for a little bit.*

* I almost googled Taft slash fiction, but then decided I didn't want to know.

things that are true right now

* I finally got hold of a live, useful person at Chicville U, and he says they'll be happy with a letter from my registrar's office before Chicville U's add/drop deadline, informing them of when I will convocate.  Even if I don't convocate until next May, they're okay with that, as long as my registrar assures them that I will convocate.  I guess the Decision Form is either bureaucratic red tape or a scare tactic.  Or both.  Now I need to figure out under what circumstances my registrar's office will issue a letter promising I'll be convocating.  Eep.

* My life is a cycle of legal liquid drugs these days.  Tea, no matter how caffeinated, has no effect on me anymore.  Bad coffee wakes me up but makes me jittery and gives me the runs, and good coffee is too expensive for me to buy enough to get a buzz.  Red wine helps me focus.  Bourbon helps me sleep.  I've been eyeing caffeine pills as a way of bypassing the gastrointestinal horror that coffee visits upon me these days, so the "liquid" qualifier might disappear soon.

* I have a new Moleskine!  The previous one is filled up.  I got one of the softcover ones, so we'll see how well that holds up to the abuse visited upon anything that lives in my backpack.

* I've learned how to navigate my MacBook, but it looks like the free word processor I use is fudging some of the characters (long dashes and quotation marks, mostly), and rendering some pages in all caps, and stubbornly shifting everything to single-spaced when I want it all double-spaced.  This is bad news, because all of my recent work has been done solely on this machine.  I may need to shell out for the Mac Office Suite or something.

* I'm a wee bit depressed these days, the there-is-nothing-in-life-to-look-forward-to-and-furthermore-I-am-worthless kind of depression.  It makes it hard to get out of bed or up off the couch, and hard to motivate myself to do, well, anything.  I can't wait till this dissertation is finished, it feels like an albatross around my neck right now.

* But that's probably nothing a little bourbon can't fix.  Albatrosses like bourbon, right?

um... maybe...?

Okay, now that I've gone and burned all my bridges, Chicville U is starting to make me very nervous.  My initial offer of admission stated that I would need to provide transcripts indicating the conferral of my Ph.D. by August 1.  This is simply not possible: even if I manage to sneak in a summer defence, my transcripts won't show it until October, when I would convocate.  That's assuming I manage a summer defence, which is by no means guaranteed.

So I contacted their Library Science Dept. and explained this, offering letters from my supervisor, department head, and whoever else they deemed authoritative enough, indicating that all work was done, only the defence remains.  I was told this would be fine.

So I accepted their offer, paid the $200 deposit, signed the lease for an apartment in Chicville, and told everyone else I wasn't coming.

Then, on Friday, I received the "official" notice from Chicville U's graduate studies office.  It looks scarily official, and says things like:

Please note the conditions(s) of acceptance listed on 

the Decision Form.  It is imperative that these conditions 

of acceptance are cleared by the date indicated, otherwise 

further registration will be blocked.

And the Decision Form indicates that they require transcripts listing my Ph.D. conferred by August 5.

I had a mild freakout about this, then I phoned their office and left a message.  And emailed them.  And, this morning (Monday) I phoned them again. They are not answering the phone.

Eeeyikes.  I wish someone would just get back to me about this!

definitely EAST procrastination

After much hemming and hawing, I have arrived at a decision: I will be going to Chicville instead of You Bee See.  I finally said "no" to all other programs, signed a lease for an apartment in Chicville, and paid the Chicville U deposit.  My bridges?  All burned.  Scary.

Things I regret about not going to You Bee See:

* All the awesome people who are or will be living nearby.

* The ocean.

* Hippie culture and all it entails: vegetarian restaurants, nice tea, interesting fashion.

Things I am happy to let go:

* The ree-donkulous high price of housing!

* Humidity, slugs, grey and dreary winters.

* Hippie snobbery and holier-than-thou attitudes about veganism, yoga, what have you.

Things I look forward to in Chicville:

* Other awesome people who are or will be living nearby, who don't happen to have blogs I can link to.  My brother lives there, one of my good friends is starting a post-doc at Chicville U, and I already know several people living there.

* Bagels and good coffee.

* Chic stores and fashion with a certain je ne sais quoi.

Things that currently scare the crap out of me about this move:

* That Chicville U will rescind its offer now that I've burned my bridges everywhere else.  Seriously, I'm waiting for a letter that basically says "Oh, sorry, we made a mistake.  Why would we want someone like you in our program?"  But I've had this fear with all of my degrees so far, and have never received this letter, so it's kind of a silly fear.

* That Starcat and I will break up due to distance, which neither of us wants, but which I fear nonetheless.  I'm all, "What if, while I'm gone, he meets some gorgeous, smart, wonderful girl who is totally into him, and, more importantly, in the same city as him???"  Again: a silly fear, because I'm quite confident in his commitment to our relationship, but my insecurity persists.

* All the usual moving anxieties and fears: "What if my new apartment turns out to be a crack den?"  "Why does packing and moving have to suck so badly?"  "What if I suck at library science and have to drop out and be a bag lady?"   "Where will I get a good tofu-and-black-bean noodle bowl when I want one?"  And so forth.

All in all, I'm happy with the decision, and very fortunate to have found a place to live without having to travel to Chicville and apartment-hunt.  I spend half my time eagerly anticipating my new program and new home, and half my time in sweaty, heart-racing anxiety.  It's going to be a looong few months before the move, I tell ya.

PSA

Lay's Sea Salt & Pepper potato chips are a more-than-adequate substitute for french fries if the craving strikes you when you have access to a 7-11 but not a fast-food restaurant.

like they did it in the old days

Here I am, taking a brief break from revising a dissertation chapter, sitting in my local pub.  There is a half-full pint of Black Cat on my table, a safe distance from my new lappy (whose name is Skaffen-Amtiskaw, Skaffers for short, and anyone who gets that reference gets a million Awesome Points).  The entire row of booths in which I am sitting is filled with people working on their Macs.  I'm totally serious -- it's a row of four Mac-working folks with pints in front of us (actually, I think the woman to my right is drinking Diet Coke, but I'm cool with that).  I feel like I'm part of some club.  And I get a LOT of work done when I'm in a public space, and there's white noise all around, and I'm supplied with stimulants of various kinds (coffee, beer, gin & tonics) by lovely young women.  My old lappy didn't have a wireless card, and was heavy and unwieldly, so I didn't take it out much.  But Skaffers and I are totally hitting the town!  This is awesome!  

I can't help but feel a affinity to the eighteenth-century denizens whose states of minds I so desperately try to suss out.  I mean, they hung out in coffee shops and pubs all the time.  And here I am, in a pub, writing about them.

There's some kind of wonderful symmetry here.

But that might be the beer talking.

i think this makes me a jerk

When I am walking (as I often am) and I cross the street at an intersection, if a vehicle slows down and/or stops at an appropriate distance from where I am crossing, I will walk quickly or even run a little to get out of the way faster.  But if some jerk menaces me with his vehicle, and revs the engine or nudges the vehicle at me, all pissed that I am going to make him stop for ten seconds while I cross the street... then I will s-l-o-w right down, and deliberately look the driver in the eye as I amble past his bumper verrrrrry slowly.

I sometimes pretend that I do this to educate jerk drivers -- how else will they learn? -- but I also recognize that it probably just makes them even angrier at the pedestrians with whom they must occasionally share the road.

But seriously?  The best part is how I can totally see (because I'm looking them in the eye) how much this pisses off the jerk drivers.

So that probably makes me a jerk too.