the best imitation of myself

a. okay, i joked about it, but i really don't know how to post anymore. i thank god every day for the alphabet.

b. ( i've been reading back through my old livejournal entries )

c. i feel like my brain is running at half-speed. this is probably due to four parts sleep-deprivation, three parts mental stagnation, two parts boredom, and one part despair.

d. for my birthday—not last thursday, but two weeks ago thursday—my dad woke me up at nine-thirty in the morning to take me to breakfast on the beach where it was very bright, oh god so bright on three hours of sleep, and then to a movie theater where the only thing showing was eight below which it turned out he'd really wanted to see; so basically for my birthday i was a better daughter than i am for the majority of the other 364 days of the year. and the movie ( wasn't terrible ) afterwards, i retreated to the house for an afternoon nap (because if you can't nap on your birthday WHEN CAN YOU) before heading up to ft. lauderdale for sushi with malelia_honu. the employees at hollywood video sent us home with dot the i's, but back at her place we watched our other rental, chris rock's most recent HBO special ("a father's only goal in life is to keep his daughter off the pole"). at home again late that night jules IMed me to wish me a happy birthday, and didn't mean to wreck me with helpful career and life guidance, but these things happen. you go to sleep wrecked, you wake up wrecked; may the new year be a good year for me.

e. i watched the oscars with malelia_honu because awards shows are wanktastic, but we do adore jon stewart. the next time i have to watch four hours of red carpet, montages, and acceptance speeches because jon stewart says so, i'm doing it with ALCOHOL. hey, who has an academy awards drinking game?

f. it was my grandmother's birthday the monday after mine. we bought her a plant and took her out for chinese food; she might have remembered why.

g. silentfire sent me a t-shirt because she's awesome and we're dorks and it's the funniest thing in life. i wore it and cracked myself up all day.

h. gjstruthseeker hopped the train from lakeland and came into town for the weekend, which in her world meant wednesday to friday last week. ostensibly it was a belated birthday celebration, and granted we did go downtown for thai and gelato, and to the beach for lunch and a walk in the water, and to jaxson's for ice cream, and she kept buying me meals, but the REAL purpose of the visit was to pimp me into battlestar galactica and then RUN. *shakes fist*

( bsg reaction shot, 100% spoiler-free )

the discs weren't hers so she couldn't leave them with me, but still. STILL. the library will get them to me one of these days; of course, amazon would get them to me SOONER. perhaps blockbuster will make a middle ground.

i. oh, and also while jules was here we settled in for a good long chat about what i'm going to do with my life, featuring all sorts of rationalizations and navel-gazing on my part, and lots of praise and encouragement—highly flattering, though i still don't really believe most of it—on hers. ( conclusions! )

j. i think—i think—i've finally reached the ceiling on "i can't believe i'm STILL LIVING IN THIS HOUSE." it's not that it's horrible here; it's just that it's here, and i am ready, so very ready, for some new tensions in my life. i'm not asking for none, just different ones that the ones between my PARENTS and me, the same ones i've been ready to get away from for the last, you know, TWENTY-THREE YEARS. you never think you're going to be that person, but here you are.

k. ( inspired by the above, a short list of things i want, aka goals to work for )

l. we had dinner at my aunt c.'s house last friday and it was refreshingly not horribly boring. i watched paper moon with my dad when we get home, a movie i knew nothing about except for ryan and tatum o'neal, and i found it 100% charming. it's a period piece, and everything was right—the sepia, the accents, the bibles and the cars. two minutes into it, i went looking at the DVD box to find the director's name, because it was such beautiful, distinctive work: establishing a frame and allowing all the action of the scene to take place within it, without moving the camera. i thought it was fantastic.

m. saturday night malelia_honu and i were supposed to watch dot the i's, the movie we'd rented the weekend before, but she'd left it at work; so we watched high fidelity instead. ( that crazy john cusack! )

n. two people in two days randomly mentioned t. s. eliot's "four quartets" and i love t. s. eliot, and i went off on a, a thought tangent, in which i compared the process of reading a poem to playing a difficult musical piece, i.e. you generally break it down into component parts, work on the parts, work on the parts in combination, until eventually, with practice and repetition and concentration on the tricky bits, you understand all the parts and then can synthesize the parts into the whole and seamlessly play your way through it. which gives some element of production—or at least reconstruction—to the reading of a poem.

o. ( NCIS )

p. because house wasn't on this week and i always forget to watch scrubs akjhdfkashj, i watched ( supernatural: faith )

HOWEVER: this does fulfill my one-episode minimum prerequisite for fic-reading.

q. speaking of unpopular opinions: i suppose i could care less about march madness if i tried, but why expend the effort? on the other hand, there's no rain at indian wells right now, next week they're playing the nasdaq right in my own backyard, and the rest of the country doesn't even know who roger federer IS, so i figure we're even.

r. on wednesday i went with my mom to the aventura mall on a wild-goose chase for dishes. i ended up making a list of things i hate, including (but by no means limited to): 1) the city of aventura, 2) malls, 3) conspicuous consumption, 4) brand-name loyalty, and 5) people in general. this sunday she's dragging me off to sawgrass, oh god.

s. this week's criminal minds was a repeat, but i watched it anyway (because it's awesome) and it inspired me to finally, finally, for the love of god, make icons. I THINK I GOT MY MOJO BACK. i owed saturn92103 and leksa icons from, like, a month back, but i finally made good.

and then last week's criminal minds finally finished downloading at 7:30 this morning (coincidentally: also when i went to bed!) and i watched it this afternoon. it's all about hotch, except that it's all about all of them. it's like the west wing in the way that whoever's onscreen and speaking at that second is my absolute favorite. they're such a team, and they so obviously know and like each other, and they're good people, they do the right thing, or try. and in a way they're like, the anti-SGA, because they're so rarely stupid, and when they are stupid for, you know, a second, they realize later that hey! they were stupid! and then they FIX IT and THEY AREN'T STUPID ANYMORE. the concept is so strange and new!

t. yesterday was our weekly dinner at my grandmother's; we brought thai. she doesn't remember names most of the time anymore, but she still knows who i am. last week she'd forgotten that my grandfather had died a year and a half ago (my dad's dad, not her husband), and asked if anyone had heard from him recently. the other day she confided to cousin m. that my mom and dad looked like they might "make a go of it." last week she thought she was at our house, not her apartment, and asked as we were leaving whether anyone was going to take her home.

u. malelia_honu pulled me a virtual pint because in general she's, oh, a thousand times more awesome than i'll ever be. cheers, baby. here's to you.