(no subject)

so do you ever have that moment where you're in your car, you're fiddling with the radio or something, and all of a sudden you look up and realize that you've been driving entirely on peripheral vision? around curves and keeping appropriate distance and all that shit? very weird.

i realize how long it's been since i updated this thing. this coincides roughly with the amount of time i've spent in school. i think we can safely assume a correlation and probably a causal relationship as well...

thoroughly enjoyed the rest of december and my new year. i quit the best buy job soon after my last post about it. just called in, said i had to quit, wasn't coming in that night or any other nights. felt guilty for two days, then forgot about it and haven't felt guilty since. i'm sure they haven't thought about me, either.

spent christmas with family, which is always good. (speaking of which, angel_machine, if you're reading this, call me! from dad's or something!) spent a lot of time trading music recommendations with my brother. this is what tends to happen when we get together - we geek out about music. i'll be seeing him perform on tuesday, so we may get to geek a little more.

on new year's eve, my sweetie and i went to hooters for beer and wings. i then dressed up and stopped by a friend's party, but i went home just before midnight to be with my midnight kisser. drank three cokes and two coffees because i knew i was driving and no way was i getting caught with alcohol on my breath on new year's. after ringing in etc, the next hour or so was spent at waffle house. that's the best place in the world at 1 in the morning. i had two bites of a blueberry waffle (the waitress put whipped cream in a smiley face on the waffle because she's just cool) and suddenly the caffeine i'd had all night hit me. couldn't eat another bite and my eyelids were suddenly glued to my eyebrows o lord.

school has been kicking my ass in a good way. spanish is fun and informative and not too hard but not too easy either. the pace is good. human evolution makes sense to me and is a joy to read. the lectures are dry but the material's so interesting that it doesn't matter. we had our first exam last week - just a few multiple-choice questions, nearly all blue book - and it ate my very brain. but i made a 96. i don't think i've ever studied so hard for anything. studied way more than i did the whole of my tenure at smith.

i'm really happy with the university i'm at, in fact. the effort the school makes to include a diverse array of students far outstrips any such efforts i've seen at other colleges. i see students of every color and age every time i walk onto campus, and i'm not talking just one or two people. more surprising to me, apparently wsu is known as a welcoming school for people with physical disabilities. i don't remember ever seeing a wheelchair or a walker or a companion dog at smith, which purported to value diversity, let alone at the community colleges i attended. on saturday, when the campus was empty and i was doing research, i saw five people in wheelchairs and one guy with a seeing-eye dog without even turning my head. and that's the thing - i'm like anyone else - if something is new or unusual to me, i pay more attention to it. that's something nature built into us. i don't ever want to be that person who stares at the person in the wheelchair, but i'd be lying if i said the impulse didn't seize me once in a while. that accessible facilities and an accomodating campus would attract enough students for me not to automatically want to look - that's what i'm really excited about.

i attended the most amazing lecture the other day. dr. cornel west came from princeton to talk to us about forging democracy within the legacy of imperialism, capitalism, slavery, and civil rights. i can't even begin to describe what the feeling was like. there was such a spirit of militant love in the room. i'll write about it more as the mood coalesces in my brain. i ganked this picture from the wright state website:



yes, the person he's talking to is who you think it is.

i couldn't go without mentioning brokeback mountain. we went to see it saturday and were amazed. i mean, i knew what the story was about. i'd read all the spoilers and what have you. and it's a quiet story to begin with, no big surprises (i almost typed "twists"), just a lot of sadness and loneliness. i thought the movie was good the first night. a day later, it was all i could think about. it haunted all my conversations. and that's how it is. it will drag your thoughts back to it for days after you watch it. and i have to say, heath ledger and jake gyllenhall kissing when they're first reunited is one of the most passionate, beautiful, heartrending moments i've ever seen.