Danya

Last week, I bought my tickets to visit Japan over New Year's. December 28th to January 8th. Very exciting. Very distracting.
I'll be staying with my friend Kenji and his family. He emailed me offering their hospitality and asking for my schedule so he could "prepare the best Japan eating tour ever" for me. Haha! How could I resist that? So I bought my tickets and sent him my itinerary, such as it is so far.
I can't wait to see them again.

Slightly less dramatic, but still good things:
rediscovering Pat Benatar
reading World War Z, by Max Brooks
finishing things
family
starting things
this still awesomest video of dancingness

Please enjoy Indian Thriller.

So I met this ( girl )

( Teaching is my life, help! )
I need to continue my lesson-planning.

When you work your butt off, where does it go?

furious

( Some forceful suggestions for your consideration. )

( Nothing to see here. )

So.
I... I,uh... well, I went on a date. ( Yes. )
"Yeah. Listen, I think I'd better try to explain a bit more."
"Alright, go ahead."( Okay. )
Her name is Madison. I called her on a Wednesday night before spring break began. I left a voice message(  and so it began. ) my thoughts are often occupied with the movement of her hair, the sound of her quiet laugh. When is the next?

a date? ( what's that? )And I'm pretty damn sure that movie is going to make me cry.

So, um, I'm in Bangkok.
Yep. I arrived around midnight last night, local time. It's quite warm.
I'll be in Thailand until the 18th. I'm not sure quite what to expect from this trip, but... things are changing. And this is part of it.

I totally think a cat cafe is like the awesomest idea.

hahah! so I was just saving some data for a research project, navigating my labyrinthine Documents filing structure and I realized something: it's been so long since I posted last that I accidentally saved that last post in my private journal folder instead of my posted blog entries folder.
so either that was seriously freudian, and I didn't actually intend to post that piece or... I've seriously got to start posting more often!

I don't know what to say, or how to say it. Guess I'll say ( something. ) it's just embarrassing.

I was driving through the dark and early evening last week when I found myself singing along to Dave Matthews: "Crash into me."
And I just started laughing.

so. graduate school is eating me alive. it was all shiny-shiny the first three weeks, all 'look at me, i'm a grad student, i'm awesome. and i can complain about how poor i am and laugh about it, and talk about research like i know what i'm talking about and stuff.' that was pretty exciting business, hey.
but that was before assignments started coming due, and heh, yeah.
"and then you found out it was actually work, and that really bummed you out." well, basically.
i am still really, really enjoying being a TA. i TA a grammar class for unsheltered ESL students. it's like post-ESL, i guess sort of. anyway, i have students! and that is always awesome. i hope (and am kind of banking on) that that will always be awesome for me. so far so good. but i'm supposed to come up with a lesson plan this weekend and teach the class sometime next week or the week after. that's, uh, a little frightening. (and this is right after midterms week, so i'm all zombie now.)
and it looks like the rest of the semester is pretty insane. i really, really need to start doing research for my term papers. or at least select topics, jeez.

also: simin's fiance arrived yesterday from Ethiopia. yeah. yeah, he's here. he's living in our house. he's real. they're getting married in LESS THAN A MONTH. it's all craziness.
and i don't have any time to hang out with him or anything.
and i don't even have a suit for the wedding. i'm going to be in the wedding. and i'm wearing a suit? what's the world coming to...

i think my life and my super-powers are locked in an epic struggle, and i don't know which will win... (who's even supposed to win that one?)

You know, I never really believed that old saying: Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
But I think I might have started missing sleep. It's funny because we've never been very good friends. But lately, I just feel like we need to hang out again. Do some catching up maybe, or even just chill.
We've spent time apart in the past. But this is different. When we were younger, if sleep didn't like come over and visit me, I'd be kinda mad and wouldn't really want to go visit sleep.
But now, even though sleep and I still don't see that much of each other, I just have this feeling... maybe sleep misses me just as much as I miss sleep. And that changes everything.

The moon is bright and full of promises tonight. I wonder if any will come true...

( Random questionaire that I decided to answer. )

You Are A Realistic Romantic

It's easy for you to get swept away by romance... But you've done a pretty good job keeping perspective. You're still taken in by love poems and sunsets You just don't fall for every dreamy pick up line!

I picked up my shoe from a shoe repair shop yesterday. The outer seam was coming loose on the left half of my favorite pair of hiking boots. It actually started coming loose a month or more ago. When school started, I looked up shoe repair places up near the campus and tossed both shoes into the back of the car. They stayed in there for quite a while.
It was difficult to find time to go off to Irving street. I kept leaving the house too late to go before classes, and after class, well... that usually means about nine pm. I don't think most shoe places are open at that time of night. (Heh, "24-hour Emergency Shoe Care!")
I've got the same problem, actually, with my bag. It's about ready to disintegrate, but I haven't found the time to replace it.
Anyway. On Wednesday midday I went up and found parking a couple of blocks from Neighborhood Shoe Repair on 20th. (Incidentally, there seems to be an awful lot of construction, like, everywhere. Seems strange, somehow.) I went in to this small place and gave up my shoe for inspection to an older black man in a work smock with lots of small, interesting-looking tools. I felt kind of nervous, never having been to a shoe-repair place before. (What if it's ridiculous to repair dirty old hiking boots? Maybe people only repair expensive ballroom shoes or something...) I also felt kind of excited to be visiting a cobbler. Sort of mythical.
I stopped by yesterday and got my shoe back. The guy (cobbler!) was rather friendlier than last time. From the first, I felt sort of an instant affection for this man. He's a cobbler and his store is called Neighborhood Shoe Repair. It's like visiting a secret and unpretentious piece of history or something. Difficult to explain. But I visited a cobbler!
It's funny, but even though we completed our transaction and ended our business on good terms, I can't escape this impression that I couldn't understand a single word that man said. Anyway, I'm really glad he fixed my shoe.