tales from just a smidge above the poverty line.

you know that you are a poor grad student when, on payday (FINALLY! summers are beastly), you go grocery shopping and the following occurs:

• purchasing more than one genre of fruit.  you want strawberries? go girl.  bananas?  yep.  WHAT? APPLES TOO? it’s like christmas in july.
• prepackaged stirfry vegetables are in your cart.  who is going Asian tonight?  this girl.  right here.
• splurge…on diet caffeine free dr. pepper.  and, yes, it feels like a big treat.
• protein powder.  FINALLY!
• the piece de resistance: buy a redbook.
• in sum: more than three bags.

you know that you have definitely improved your out-of-control spending ways when, during same shopping trip, you had the following internal conversations or experiences:

• “romaine or BOGO dole salads?  dole salads = no work. flip, the lettuce is TWO DOLLARS LESS! hello big fluffy romaine goodness.”
• “ooh. strawberries.  they’re on sale.  SCORE!  but wait…the big one is $4.99 and the little ones are two for $5.  i get to buy the big one!  and not feel guilty!”
• instead of just buying the big yellow onion, you bought the tray of tiny little mutant yellow onions for $.79 because it was cheaper.  the bonus of not having to deal with extra onion when you’re cooking for one and those big onions are like GINORMOUS was a factor, but let’s be real.  it was because it was $.79.
• when looking at the toothpaste, you are immediately drawn to the one with the free toothbrush. you vacillate, because there’s some crest on sale.  but they don’t have the crest you like, so you’re paying full price anyways.  so…you immediately choose the one with the free toothbrush.  who doesn’t love a free thing that you already need?
• despite not wanting to spend the time separating the creepy gross raw pork chops into individual bags, you could not resist the sale.  it was like a dollar a pork chop.  it was like an awesome deal.  so you did it anyways. almost against your will.
• buying the big milk makes you feel like a big spender.  you have to convince yourself that the new use of milk in protein shakes would warrant such a purchase and that it’s better to have it than to not.  and besides…it doesn’t expire until august.
• you have to restrain yourself from snatching the redbook off of the belt after you put it there, telling yourself “you can actually afford $3.50 for a magazine.  i know. it’s okay.  it’s got good stuff in there.  and yeah, there’s some stuff that’s lame.  but you’ll like it. and you’ll read it over and over again.” and even then? not convinced.
• you calculate, in your head, in about 30 seconds, how much you spent. and you were right, within $.75 cents.  stupid onions.

if then.

if on a random thursday, you walk into your class and check your email because you have ten minutes before it starts and you’d rather not just stare off into the distance like an idiot, and you find out from facebook that the girl who has been home from her mission for like ten minutes is marrying the hot younger brother of a formerly close friend (no drama there…just distance and life getting in the way), you might accidentally go WHAT THE HECK! sort of loud.

that might be sort of awkward.

and if in the course of that same class, you realize that you are in fact smart about poetry and you suddenly flash back, in the midst of said class, to the days when you were like your students, all intimidated by Percy Shelley and glazed eyed and unable to make heads or tails of even the simplest of sonnets because IT! WAS! POETRY!, then you might realize just how far you’ve come.

that might be sort of awesome.

and if you are sincerely trying to be less selfish by trying NOT to burden the people who love you most with things that they can’t do anything about and that will probably be resolved soon anyways (namely my increasing degree of frustration at being unable to get this novel finished and catapult me into writing again) and decide to write something different than the two pages of ranting because, if i’ve learned nothing else, it’s that it’s always darkest before the brilliant dawn of dissertation inspiration, then you might not be entirely failing at life.

that might be sort of hopeful.

and the result is anger and tears.

humbled.

so, today, even though she’s having the roughest week ever, Lindz sucked it up and came up with positive things to say on her blog as she made the very valid point that sometimes hearing about other people’s burdens sucks when you’re already struggling to play the miss mary sunshine card.

so, instead of ranting and raving about how i’m growing increasingly stressed out, i am following the leader and doing the same thing.  but different.

so…things i’ve loved about this week so far:

it started with me seeing a couple of people that i haven’t seen in about a year that i totally love, and it was just like old times…chatting and laughing and being silly silly. i love that.

i spent 62 minutes on the elliptical.  that ties my record.

novels instead of poetry in my class.  even though it’s more work, it elicits more conversation and that’s good.

the closer marathon and premiere.  i’m easy to please sometimes.

my shorts are too big. got called “super skinny.”  have demonstrably larger/defined quads.  in short: RESULTS!

i downloaded ne-yo’s closer. love that dang song.  love that man. did you know that he wrote “take a bow” for rihanna? frickin’ good song, too. that might be next.

i got all of my grading done about a half an hour ago.  i might actually be in bed by midnight.  that pleases me muchly.

i straightironed my hair on sunday for the first time since i got the new cut and it looked supersassy and cute.  if the humidity would just WORK with me, i could do it more often.

i am halfway through the summer b semester.  this is both horrifying and exciting to me

things i’m looking forward to the rest of this week:

good mail coming from home.

so you think you can dance!  (remember: easily pleased.)

a weekend of hard work on the dissertation. i’m about two hundred pages away from sweet freedom from primary text purgatory and a kickstart into writing again. i’m frightened and thrilled by this prospect.  it may or may not occur in a house all to myself.  that could be very exciting.

my roommate’s birthday! i have gift ideas that i will not disclose until after said purchase because she reads (hi saf! happy early birthday!) but i get to bake.  i’m so excited.

i get to go to institute.  i am lucky and blessed to have that opportunity.

swimming tomorrow.  exciting.  walking/running/maybe stairs in the stadium on thursday.  we’ll see how it goes.

the prospect of, sometime, actually, maybe, honestly sticking to my time/study/work schedule and not falling farther behind.

what have you been blessed with this week? what are you looking forward to?

tuesday’s message to the universe.

i need time to go slower and me to go faster.

there’s so much to do.

edited to add: don’t think i didn’t notice the hilarity of the rainstorm after the workout. yeah, i was already sweaty, but the white shirt was not the best choice for walking back to the apartment in a deluge. it was funny. i get it.

monday’s thought for the day.

when the day comes that i am not playing juggler with the multiple elements that make up my life, trying to keep one up in the air long enough so that i can deal with the next so that i can keep that other one from smacking me square in the jaw as it lands on my face, that will be the day that i will know true peace.

or else i’ll be so bored i’ll sign up for all kinds of activities just to keep from wanting to punch myself in the face for sport.

i haven’t quite decided.

WHO AUTHORIZED THIS?!?

someone who lives in my house has cooked something with a VERY pungent odor.

i mean seriously.

like…we don’t cook like this.

like…this house doesn’t have pungent odors. we are not a curry group, or a really spunky spicy crew. every once in a while, one roommate will cook fish. oh wait. i do that too. (fish sticks rock, btw.) but i mean…this smell was like so pervasive that it left the kitchen, wafted in full glory all the way through my door into my room which is like…feet and feet away from the kitchen.

and while this may or may not be sickness/fever related, my only response to this is to go all WOE IS ME, whine a little, shake my fists at the heavens, cover my face with the butterfly blanket, try not to vomit, and find solace in the fact that the pilot episode of joan of arcadia is coming on sci-fi.

the good news is that THAT SMELL is keeping me out of the kitchen.

maybe.

because, if i’m not wrong, i think there might be some pudding calling my name.

but i really want cake. red velvet cake and i don’t even really like red velvet cake.

weird.

brought to you by the number 99.

i may or may not have eaten four pieces of brown sugar cinnamon bread and frosted flakes for dinner last night.

let me tell you. if you are running a low-grade fever for two days, which basically just means that you feel tired and alternately hot-cold, hot-cold all day long with no will to do anything except try to figure out what’s going on on as the world turns but also feel really stupid because even though a fever for your body is anything in the neighborhood of 99 because you run subnormal it seems like you are actually just normal but you still feel exhausted and crazy and you have to keep convincing yourself to rest because you’re not sure whether or not you’re actually sick, and your body tells you “hey. let’s get subway” because apparently it wants some roast beef and you say “listen, i barely had the energy/motivation to take a shower. why don’t we eat some beans and rice that we have in the cabinet” your body will say “hey. let’s get subway” again when it comes dinner time and you’ll say “no. it’s almost dark and i’m tired and no.”

and then you’ll eat four pieces of yummy bread and some cereal. and feel stupid about it later because even after all of that…you still wanted subway.

the moral of the story is: go to subway. feverish body should always win.

also, when you have a fever and are feeling sort of puny, and you go to class because you cancelled yesterday and of course murphy’s law is that when you cancel class you no longer have a fever at the time of class but can’t cancel again so you have to go the next day even though your temperature was going up when you left your house, and your students start to gang up on the woman writer at the center of one of your dissertation chapters because they think she should be more passionate and shouldn’t write so many footnotes because apparently it’s obnoxious, and you feel sort of fuzzy anyways because you didn’t eat breakfast because you didn’t have an appetite and you had to walk half a mile to class from the parking lot in the heat and you being smart decided that this was the day to wear jeans mainly just because they were clean and you knew they sort of fit, you’re probably not going to do a good job of justifying her existence or her work. and mainly you’ll just feel like you want to say “YEAH HUH!” and stomp your feet when trying to articulate why she’s a good author.

i should probably stop blogging now because when you try to write anything it all comes out in a big giant mass of nonsense.

and besides…as the world turns is on.

silver lining.

this face plus good mail unfortunately diverted but nonetheless received made this craptastic day better.

sometimes you know that Somebody loves you a lot, you know?

BYOA (bring your own answers).

it’s tuesday.

right?

because it feels like it’s about…oh…say…friday afternoon.

why?  science guys…suss it out for me.  kthanks.

i got a stability ball.  also known as this really cool thing that i have my feet propped up on that allows me to lay myself over it ever-so-not-delicately and crack my back.  it came with a dvd. i tried to watch it. i really did.  but it was phenomenally lame.  so no go.  there’s a poster.  it has directions for things to do on it.  some of them make sense to me. some of them seem utterly preposterous.  so…what do i do with this ball?  i’ve heard tell of crunches. i can probably handle that one. i’m thinking the bridge move won’t be so hard.  i tried pushups already.  that was fun.  and then i fell off.

yeah.

remember when i wasn’t going to write on my blog anymore?

good times, y’all.  good times. this little move right here? the one i’m doing now with perfect form and a great deal of training?

procrastination.