There's a frenetic penmanship to these waking hours, with quisling sentences jabbed upside down on top of old notes. It's vaguely sexual: compact, confused, occasionally sweaty, and diagonal.

Kinky circumstances in the margins.

One of the bigger changes happened about 3 weeks ago. It was an early saturday, meaning before noon but just belly up to it. For months I'd wanted to finally be done with it. I wanted to buzz my hair down to stubble. After stumbling through downtown and hitching up to a parking meter, I went into my usual place, sat in the chair, and semi-giddily asked for the deed to be done.

And so it was and is. I love it. People have universally liked the hell out of it past a certain 'whoa that's really different' factor. Above all it's lovely not to worry about it anymore. My only concern was what lurked beneath my hair. When I was younger, I'd cracked part of my head open while doing a backflip into a pool; gravity and concrete do that. Fortunately enough you can't even tell anything ever happened. I still have the goatee so that, with glasses, I look slightly intimidating. According to my friend Katie, though, it just doesn't work without the specs.

"You have the softest eyes known to mankind," she remarked recently. I guess fitting in a suit called badass isn't in my tarot cards.

The lab is the lab. Because of a quarantine up in the 3rd floor room I usually use, and the PPI programmer needing to carve some code for my new protocol, my 'month and a half of hell' has been pushed up between November to late December. For right now it's just starring and not starring at monkeys to gauge emotive expression, then looking for physiological bits to try to explain the degree of that expression across animals. That's just for one group of animals. Around the later part of the semester I'll be doing behavioral stuff or brain scanning across 3 different groups. And finals. My brick wall americano before being a groomsman for Daniel and Acacia/Selene forces me to have fun and relax in Los Angeles.

Classes start again this week. El yay. I 'parently lied to myself about only ever taking one class a semester. Wasn't my fault. I signed up for Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, which sounds as ponderous and portentous as it probably is. In addition, though, they had this 2 hour/week seminar on studying ischemia, infarcation, and other action-packed brain explosions from a functional magnetic resonance imaging perspective. I figure I'm scanning monkey brains and analyzing the volumetric and spatial characteristics of my areas of interest--so why the fuck not take a class related to it?

I just bought the books too. 250 for 2 of them. Makes me feel like an undergrad again. Grad school really is just like it almost, except you get more lube but less coaxing and preparation. Yeah, it's that kind of boyfriend.

My overall feeling about it all:

Eh.

My personal life is a strawberry banana smoothie that's been left out for a little too long, sweet but slightly bitter, subtext stenciled in the transcripts as the water droplets patter onto it. I saw Katie B. for the last few times this past friday. During the early afternoon I tagged along as she got prescriptions, geography books, and checked out the asia exhibit at the local museum. There weren't any potholes in the outing but we didn't get much time to talk either. She mentioned if I had time way late at night that we could meander to a cafe. I said it might work.

The might was predicated on how long my outing/'date'(?)/thing with Erin lasted. We'd touched base after I sent her an e-mail saying hey, hope I'm not a pest, want to see you, etc. She was sweet in the reply and said sure. I'd suggested the Brocach at 8, because apparently men who set the place and time are seen assertive, and that's apparently a good thing. She vaguely sipped away at a guinness as I picked at the worst irish whiskey I'd ever had. The conversation was a strawberry vinagrette as usual, sweet with the occasional sarcastic eye-flip on her end or some of my own coming out. I found out slightly more about what she likes, which is apparently guys that don't treat her like shit but aren't nice to her either. That doesn't bode so hot for me. In essence, though, she said she doesn't have a type and either is interested or not interested in someone. We ended up downing and paying for the one drink each and walked back to her place. Well near around her place. 10:30pm. A vague hug later and she walked across Washington to her flat.

...The night was pleasantly semi-warm, and I wondered when exactly I'd ask Erin if she was interested. Given this or that I'd at one time thought it'd work if she were single (which she is now), but while we talk and get along well I feel like she's holding back, hiding something. Not sure what the area code of it is, but either she's being very careful or she's not interested.

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