I fear I am ill-qualified to recommend myself to strangers.

I almost didn't make it to class this Friday either. Oh, the senioritis. It burns us, precious. But I was in the middle of laundry, and laundry was important. I was only ten minutes late. In penance for missing Advanced Step with Ann on Thursday, I made up for it with Step with Lisa on Friday, and lo it did kinda suck, as it usually does, which is why I usually skip the gym on Friday. After dinner and a shower I was sleepy and anxious and I hung around online not doing much of anything before I passed on the chance to hang out and drink with Jules and the Alligator crew in favor of putting myself to bed and squeezing my eyes shut against a panic attack.

Hello ten hours of sleep in a row! How I have absolutely no idea what to make of you, except that I do love the long series of dreams I have through the late morning and early afternoon. The bibliography is due on Monday, so as you might imagine I have been doing everything in my power not to work on it. This included breaking out the solitaire. Had several more panicky thoughts about work habits and life skills and coasting through college, including I have never given one-hundred percent of myself to anything. Really what I've always done—consciously or otherwise—is calculate the minimum possible effort required for the greatest possible return (usually impressing professors but leaving me cold) and then keep scratching away at that bare minimum until my GPA holds (relatively) steady while I hardly move a muscle. And that's not exactly an education—that's suspended animation. So in my last months here I suddenly grow restless and shake myself as I lift my head and look around, realizing fully how much nothing I have done.

(This, by the way, is not news to me. I once wrote a bad poem about Imposter Syndrome before I knew that's what the literature called it, and if ever ordered to use five adjectives to describe myself, I have for many years kept one slot reserved for self-destructive.)

Anyway, Jules handed me the crosswords from this week's Gainesville Sun and I took up space in her room for a little while as she did actual homework. At about nine we took ourselves out to dinner at Chopstix and were horrified, repeatedly, by the boy at a nearby table with his back to us who desperately needed to hike up his jeans. But the food was good! We headed after that to Target Copy where I signed off on the poster proof, though I fretted about a couple of pictures that looked slightly odd and possibly pixelated omg. Then ensued the search for an Entertainment Weekly Jules needed for homework purposes. This proved unbelievably elusive. On our journey we did manage to acquire facial products and snacks at CVS, and eventually tracked down one last lonely issue in a random rack at one of the checkout lanes in Wal-Mart. It probably fell through a wormhole. Jules almost didn't want to take her hands off it so the cashier could scan it. The evening ended, as so many evenings do, with coffee and cake (apple pie à la mode for me omfg) and Trivial Pursuit at Maude's. Maude's was hopping at 12:30 a.m. and another table was in the middle of Millennium Edition Trivial Pursuit, so we tried our hand at the Silver Screen version. The questions proved practically impossible for us, so we abandoned our game pieces and the game board and reverted to our former Trivial Pursuit M.O.: alternating asking each other all the questions on a card while using verbal charades, twenty questions, and broad cross-referenced hints to guide each other to the answers. In this way we make our own fun and end up drawing everyone's attention while we sporfle over spontaneous movie titles like Naked Time in the Jungle, a Charleton Heston vehicle set on a South-American plantation which ought to be watched on mute to the soundtrack of one of our favorite classic episodes of Star Trek.

I've been reading through that issue of CMYK I picked up (a magazine I bought because it looked interesting, and I have only vague and conflicting notions as to who puts it out and what, exactly, is its raison d'etre), jealous and marveling and wondering why I didn't go to design school. And then I am reminded. To fill in the picture, this is the same back-and-forth I periodically berate myself with in re: law school, med school, the rabbinate, the Peace Corps, professional poetry writing, etc., etc. Like a retreating thunderstorm, I keep waiting for the chorus of it's never too late!s to thin and quiet until it fades away into ozone and the memory of possibility.

just to keep from being thrown to the wolves

Another reason Geoffrey Pullum is my hero:

The story about Irish lacking particles meaning "yes" and "no" is true, by the way. But it has nothing to do with the Irish mind or spirit or way of looking at the world or the notion of neither agreeing nor disagreeing. In Irish you repeat the verb of someone's clause to agree with it (as if someone said "Got milk?" and the way you gave an affirmative response was to say "Got"), and you repeat their verb with the negation particle in front to deny it ("Not got"). But the same is true of Chinese. Anyone want to suggest that the Chinese have exactly the same cultural propensities and outlook on life as the Irish? More bullshit about language and thought.

Here's some advice. Whenever you hear someone starting to say something that begins with "The X have no word for Y", or "The X have N different words for Y", never listen to them, and always check your wallet to make sure it's still there.

Pullum is the author of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language, a book that has been on my reading list for something like three years.

Last night on our Entertainment Weekly scavenger hunt, Jules and I ran into A., a high school friend we bump into every year or so. We caught up and exchanged stories and she invited us to today's meeting of the Russian Club, where there would be, she promised, lots of free Russian food. I rolled out of bed at about 1:30 and Jules stuck her head in my doorway an hour later asking if I wanted to go; it's a good thing she did, as I had forgotten completely. I threw on some clothes and we took ourselves off to the lovely ballroom in Dauer Hall, where we'd missed the dancing and the singing, but the buffet (however picked-over) was delicious and indeed free. There was someone fooling around on the piano, and somebody broke out an accordion in the forty-five minutes or so that we were there, lounging on a sofa and talking with A. about ESOL and high school reunions.

It's something like 78 degrees out and sunny—very, very sunny. Jules drove off to work and I called silentfire on the walk home. She actually answered the phone, and we were actually on the phone with each other at the same time, so be alert for falling pieces of the sky.

Right now there is no rain at Indian Wells and there's tennis on the teevee. Pre-match analysis:

Cliff Drysdale: And Federer, is he vulnerable in any way that you can see?
Patrick McEnroe: Uh, no.