the best imitation of myself

this morning i finally sent out the effing emails soliciting recommendation letters. if anyone needs me today, i'll be in the file room having a panic attack.

a. thanksgiving by the numbers: TWO parents and ONE cousin up from florida for SEVEN days, ONE niece home from college, and TWO in-laws driving down, for a total of ELEVEN people staying in the house. TWENTY-ONE bodies for dinner on thursday. SEVENTEEN bodies on friday. approximately FORTY BILLION hours spent cooking in the kitchen: FOUR kinds of sweet potatoes, THREE cranberry relishes, TWO stuffings, and TWELVE pies served. ONE afternoon spent at the atlanta botanical gardens, ONE morning spent at the high museum's louvre exhibit, ONE night at the movies, TWO nights at home watching videos, ONE day of running errands to confirm the uselessness of best buy and drinking margaritas at neighbor's with m. and cousin m. and kansas.

all told, not a bad week. cousin m. and i talked about how lucky we are in our family that everyone's so laid-back; some people have their little irritations, and our dad scrapes against our nerves like we're cats getting rubbed the wrong way, but it's just dad being dad. no one fights, no one gets drunk and embarrassing, no one yells. everyone's nerves were badly fraying by sunday night, but we KEPT IT TOGETHER. returning to work on monday was strange and brutal. what were these piles of paper for? what was i to do with them? and why? i asked myself, "how did i get here?"

b. intervention: we took informal bets on how many times during the course of the very, very long weekend i would be asked what i was up to, what my plans were, WHAT I WAS DOING WITH MY LIFE, but our estimations failed to take into account my niece's wildcard presence as a first-semester college student, and most of the boilerplate life questions ended up deflected her way. for the record, she's highly stressed and very unhappy in her major, but she's making lots of friends and seems to be having fun, so we're hoping next semester will be better; and after that she'll evaluate.

no, all the impatience and worry about the course of my life were deferred until my parents and cousin m. were on the way to the airport, when my mother unloaded; luckily i wasn't there, but my brother seems to have gotten an earful. on wednesday night he and i went across the street to THE RIGHTEOUS ROOM (no lie!) for dinner, compliments of my father ("here, take your sister out"), and after we ordered our first round and debated whether or not i should partition my hard drive (see below), m. handed me a present:

me: wow, what have i done lately?!
me: *unwraps package to reveal a copy of what color is your parachute?*
me: ahhh, it's what i haven't done lately.

and he reported the earful he'd gotten from our mother, and we came up with a plan of sorts, and he gave me ASSIGNMENTS with DEADLINES, e.g. read the book, investigate night classes at emory and georgia state, solicit references for a therapist—because it's time! maybe!—and we ate onion straws and drank many more rounds and then stumbled home drunk.

c. the power of apple compelled me: in fact, i was too drunk to turn on the SUPER-SHINY APPLE COMPUTER that had that day been delivered into my feverish consumer hands! i opted for the macbook—in white, like the white album is white, like it should be playing honey piiiiiiiiii-aiiiiiiiie, i love you! ALL THE TIME—with two gigs of RAM and a 120GB hard drive and final cut express preinstalled for the fulfillment of all my pirating, surfing, songvidding needs. obviously i also opted not to wait ONE MINUTE LONGER. so on thursday when i got home, i booted it up and transferred all the contents and settings of ezekiel to the new computer (new computer still has no name. *frets*) and then spent the rest of the night downloading widgets and arranging them to my satisfaction on the desktop and playing bubble trouble, a game that you should not download for the love of god, unless you don't mind losing YEARS OF YOUR LIFE to it. i tell you this as a friend.

it's so shiny, you guys. SO SHINY. and super-duper awesomely fast, and at first it was running plastic-meltingly hot and the fan was whirring like a jet engine and the battery drained after an hour and a half; but i ran activity monitor, and immediately after disabling the new york times headlines-retrieving widget i'd been running, the fan died down to nothing and the battery time left increased by a hundred percent. o.O i didn't need to be globally informed ANYWAY. over the weekend i tried to trick out safari, becuase i know it's fast and native and passes the acid test, but i couldn't configure it to my satisfaction (i can't find a del.icio.us client that works for me—cocoalicious refuses to load my bookmarks and delibar is only for browsing—and i somehow resent having to pay for saft to plug some—but by no means all—of the holes in safari that inexplicably haven't already been plugged by apple. session saving? hello?) so instead i further tricked out firefox and am finding new extensions all the time. i mugged for the photobooth camera and watched apple's famous 1984 ad and then the spoof of apple's famous 1984 ad, and then some of my favorite songvids on the wide, glossy screen.

we're going to be very happy together.

d. saturday: i found myself in an incredibly bad mood friday night, toward the end of happy hour and on the drive home. i played listlessly with the computer for an hour or so, and then went to bed and slept for fourteen hours. i felt a lot more human saturday morning, i won't lie. met m. and kansas at taco mac down the street, and then we checked out the telephone factory lofts art show; there i saw a photograph of goldfish that filled me with rage, and we found, possibly, the perfect artwork for kansas's kitchen. i watched football all afternoon and evening, FOOTBALL of all things, at m.'s apartment with m. and his friend c.: USC and UCLA (which i feel compelled to pronounce yoocla when it's written out in lowercase) and then florida vs. arkansas, and i asked m. a million questions like why were they lining up like that, and how many time-outs did they get, and when could they kick a field goal, which he very patiently answered in between cursing the gators and cheering them and their chances at the championship. which i understand they now have!

we ordered thai and when the games were over we flipped channels to find the last thirty minutes of van helsing, which was AWFUL, except for david wenham saying that if there was one thing he'd learned, it was never be the first to stick your hand in a viscous liquid.

e. visitors from beyond the perimeter: silentfire and i have been like busy ships with conflicting schedules playing phone tag and passing in the night, but yesterday she drove down to play dueling laptops and trade music and roll around in fandom. we ate sushi and walked across the street to publix in the cold to get ice cream, and watched the first episode of life on mars, which we think is groovy!

f. don't jinx it: i'm applying—i think?—to this graduate program, and i'm almost afraid to mention it; it was a capricious, spur-of-the moment decision i made when i tripped over its website last week, and i've been busily regretting it and fourteenth-guessing it even as i go about drafting emails to solicit letters of recommendation and fretting over a STATEMENT OF OBJECTIVES, and the deadline's january fifteenth, so it may all come to NOTHING. but there it is. *bites nails*

g. it was twenty-eight degrees out on the drive to work this morning: i feel GREAT today! even after resolving to get the number for a therapist, and the nightmarish prospect of contacting old professors, and the reams of paper under which i am buried at work! i think it's the weather! and the fact that the computer bag i ordered last week—the one that departed california last wednesday and took what sounds like a lovely road trip through illinois, indiana, ohio, and tennessee—should be arriving at the office MOMENTARILY. i love package tracking and plunging mercury and the WORLD.