Physically sick.

Finished final (?) edit of manuscript. 36 pages. That translates as really damn massive for a science article manuscript.

I had sushi for lunch and dinner, wasabi dollops and soy sauce; with nearly an entire pint of the arabic coffee smoothie drink thing, light caffeine and heavy chocolate.

Listening to the latest album from Depeche Mode. My mom's loved the band ever since I was a tiny thing, and I grooved to it in the early 80's too. It all devolved or evolved from there, to combat boots, leather, and dancing with curious characters at a goth/industrial club.

Mama didn't raise no fool. She raised a dancing fool.

I have to wake up at 5am on tuesday to do a brain scan of two monkeys. That sits in my throat about as well as this light cold. Thankfully it's one of only three sessions to do this semester. And after this semester, I get extended vacation. At least that's the plan.

I'm also headed out to a conference toward the end of the week. From Thursday to Saturday. It's for Ford fellowship people. They fully pay for everything: plane; hotel; 25 bucks worth of meals; transportation. This is quite unlike the last conference in Miami (which I never did finish talking about and might get to when bored). I got to pay my own way on that one because my advisor is cheap. I love the man professionally and in a fatherly way, but unforgivably cheap is the only way to describe it. Other profs in our area group thought I was joking when I mentioned it.

I'm not in the mood to continue the 2-parter just now.

I'm glad to say I've been slowly moving on from the last two prospects. Not enough return on investment. Not to say that I've ceased being lonely and all that, I'm just fine with being decidedly single for the time being.

My next thought was trying to strike up a friendship with Anne. She's in the program and laughs at my jokes. Kinda sucks to start back on square one, and she could be unavailable. Beyond that I figure I might try Craig's List. I could do with a series of dates, if anything for the sheer story potential.

So it goes.

It's become colder and colder here. The night comes earlier every day, like an overeager lover, hands swept in winds of gentle madness over trellises and walls. Darkness is so comforting. I was so afraid of it as a child. The shadows that moved, the entities I felt, the cold scrapping sweat gently trickling along the indents of their overlong nails. But the darkness has become my home; I only feel genuinely comfortable and safe at night, and most at peace in pitch black or near approximations. Brian laughingly called me a vampire tonight as I tapped at keys in the lightless living room. It is as my mindset is: subtlety, suggestion, non-definitive lines and spaces. Mystery out in the opening. Darkness describes me well.

The winter months are intensely important that way, but for many other reasons. In the past, those were the times when change was everywhere and love flowed so intensely, with such impossible youth. A year long ago, by a giant Christmas tree, playing Dragon Warrior while soft yellow lights danced everywhere, mom and I talking hours on end as a fire knitted the air. Years alongside Kris and Raven, Adi and our crew, all the teens and 30 and 40 somethings at the hobby store, not a one of which I know now.

Somehow when nearly everything else has become a shadowy echo of what it once meant in my heart, winter reaches out its ice white fingers and cups my cheek. So strangely warm and soft, ironically like spring. It helps me to remember what it's like to feel something besides the transient chains of anger and sadness, or the fleeting liberation of contentment. Any emotion besides hate is short lived these days, and even that goes away with enough thinking.

previous - next