The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Another night without sleep, I think, though without tears either; the kind of thinking that's keeping me awake isn't so melodramatic as that. (And I remain quite cynical enough to observe that I should switch CDs once in a while, lest my thoughts get stuck on loop.)

I looked up some stuff from five years ago; ancient enough, at two-computers-ago, that I was lucky to have it on a 3.5 floppy. ('member those?) And I got to thinking, ai, five years? I've travelled so far, and tread in a circle.

Five years ago I was eighteen-ish., which is to say I had cleared sixteen. I had been in college a year already, at a public university; if you had asked me, I'd have told you I was going to be a doctor. I went on scholarship to another university with much that intent. I think I even had a real zeal and love for the subject, at the time. Words were my fun, my beloved toys, but medical school was going to be my challenge. In retrospect, I'm really glad I didn't take up the Maimonidean oath and wind up still in a residency somewhere... But it's hard for me to pinpoint or explain such a great ideological and mental shift in myself. It makes me ponder far into the night.

See? When I ponder, I make this face.

You may accuse me, if you know me well, of going all Gwyddno Garanhir over a woman long-dead; but I don't think that's it, not anymore. I am, eventually, a sensible selkie. There's just been so much change, like someone flicked a domino somewhere on the table and it started things to click; so much change, like the sea picking me up and hurling me, so that I no longer know up from down, and panic before my feet can find the sand.

And if you thought yourself always, always drowning, you wouldn't get much sleep either.

I got a few hours. Better sleep through Foucault... Darkness, darkness, be my pillow, but if that doesn't work, let me grab some French literary philosophy off the shelf. Now, I'm an untranslated lit junkie -- it's the only way I can remember any languages, ever -- but that, sir, is some dry dry reading. It would be dry in Esperanto. In Elvish. (It probably doesn't help that I associate the memory of that class with 'a table in the presence of my enemies...')

So in other words, high literary theory puts me the hell to sleep.

And yes, I should probably back off the caffeine.

But my mood is better for having got all that deep thought out of the way, and at 6 AM I got another hmmm... three pages handwrit in the notebook, which is why I'm going back to bed right now.

I know a fair amount about the armaments, the culture, the bloody war-horses;  it's the theology that's making me go "Yi! Weird beasts!"

Should perhaps have heeded more in Catholic school ...

Just when you thought all I did was sling coffee, scribble in notebooks, and read the Mabinogion Tetralogy, I show alarming signs of getting a life.

Not just leaving out a dish of milk for the leith broghan who seems to have stolen one each of my work shoes (black left, brown right) -- though I wonder if they accept Silk Vanilla -- but an actual chain of social interactions. I'm  'an honored guest' at some St. Paddy's thing Dain is doing, and there are sings every coming Sunday, and a shabbes dinner on Friday, and random poetry readings at the cathedral (all my friends write better poetry than what's been read, IMHO) and I have to legitimately learn 'The Greenwood Side' and 'Jack Orion' (my musician acquaintances got hit over the head with a large amount of Pentangle.) by the 17th. Yee!

In other good news, Birmingham has added ten or so real, CTA/MBTA caliber buses to its fleet. Too bad they still only run every 90 frickin' minutes, but what can you do? I'll take an air-conditioned bus that runs every hour and a half over some clunk of junk van-thing every thirty...

We have attempted to learn to drive. Three times. It has not gone well with us.

And I am exhausted, and has anyone seen my shoes? And dammit, at least it's a good CD stuck in my computer's CD-ROM drive, but the fact remains, it's stuck wicked well.