New Year's Eve is decidedly my least favorite holiday. Every year I silently decide to un-celebrate it by staying home in jeans and intending to be so engrossed in a book or movie that the stroke of midnight goes unnoticed. "Too much unnecessary self-reflection! Bad for your brain!", says the girl with the daily blog about herself. Besides, champagne gives me a wicked hangover.

So of course, around 9 or so, I always start itching for social stimuluation and decide that maybe I could put on some mascara after all. Maybe I could drink a beer or six. Maybe I would like to be with friends, to send the old year packing and make pie-in-the-sky promises for the new year. Because that's what you do.

The holiday season has a knack for collecting all my favorite faces from across the country and world and putting them in one living room. It's really wonderful.

2009 goal: Visit Mark and Michelle in L.A.

They've been there over a year now (can that be right?!) and I could use a change of scenery, even if only for a weekend. Especially in the thick of the corpse-like Ohio winter - some southern California sunshine on my eyeballs could mean everything in the world.

While stir-crazy in Tennessee, I kept thinking that I needed to get back to my "regular routine". As much as it makes my stomach flip to remember that I have to start being mostly in Athens very soon, school and structure is good for my brain.

After a couple days of wobbling across the family tightrope feeling hostile and moody and ineffectual, Leslie and Jon make me feel less gloomy and dark and backwards.

Also, should I be this bummed that Larry's closed? Because I am pretty bummed. That's the first bar I ever really went to regularly, and so many good conversations and people were shoved into those splintering booths with me over the years. While some parts of Columbus are getting very excellent these days, campus has become dreadful. It looks like a college campus ride at Disney World. But with neverending construction.

Fuck, how good was the jukebox at Larry's?!

When you're 82, you get toys for Christmas. Heidi, my grandparents' dog, wasn't terribly excited about my grandpa's new remote controlled car.

I've really only had four or five real visits "home" since my dog died in June, and I feel guilty how quickly I've grown used to cracking the front door without fear of a slippery little dachshund escaping. How thoughtlessly I leave food on once nose-able or lick-able surfaces. How no nails on tile greet me when I come home at an ungodly hour, and how no little warm friend finds me on the couch after everyone else has gone to bed. I can't really explain how this isn't a totally absurd notion, but I didn't know if my family could hold it together without her. Sometimes it seemed like the only thing we all had in common was how much we loved that awful dog.

I'm visiting my grandparents in Tennessee right now, people who talk almost exclusively to or about their dog. You know, everyone stands in a circle around Heidi while my grandma says "Oh, she says, I'm the center of attention now! I like this! I'm a good girl!", while we nod and thump the dog affectionately on the shoulder. I want to be able to not shut up about my dog, too. But I don't want another dog. I want my dog.

My mom found an exact reproduction of my dad's favorite childhood toy, a rubber frog named Kneedeeper, who was tragically snatched up in the jaws of a garbage truck on trash day during an ill-fated game of Hide and Seek sometime in Cleveland in the late '50s.

Merry Christmas.

My heart's in my stomach and my guts are in my throat and I felt like if I paused too long in reflection at any point today, I'd have to be scraped up off the floor. But, hey, at least I had to go to church!

Hey, Jon. The same old conversations with you in this big, empty house was the best part of my day by a mile.

Beers with my siblings in my hometown on Christmas Eve Eve.

Rita was saying how in most families, one of the kids ends up being kind of a religious nut. This didn't happen, thankfully, with us, but I feel like somebody has to get on the get-married-have-kids-buy-a-house train to Normalsville, so that my parents can feel like they raised regular, well-adjusted kids. Seems like the Jesusiest one in the family tends to do that first and no one is stepping up to the plate.

I guess it could be me, but, naw, rain check.

Shepard Fairey's now-iconic poster hardly scratches the surface. So much great-looking design inspired by the president-elect. Children's books, though? Maybe I just wasn't paying attention to this sort of stuff during past elections but a "My Mama Voted for Bush!" picture book seems unlikely.

Target was a war zone today, toddlers hollering injustices and middle-aged people slumped lifelessly over their shopping carts like the corpse cart in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I saw the local TV weather guy shouting into his cell phone, made quick eye contact, and looked away like he was an ex that I'm on ignore-in-public terms with. An old guy in a Santa hat was walking up and down the looted aisles, singing Christmas carols into one of those green and purple 90s Nickelodeon microphones. He'd pause at the end of his hymns to say things like, "We're all so worried about HAVING THINGS, that we can't enjoy LIVING. Everyone turn to the person next to you, the person standing next to you right now and wish them a merry Christmas. Hug them. Love them."

And of course, like good Midwesterners, we all looked down and pretended not hear.

Cousin's baby shower.

At 37, Jennifer is the oldest cousin on my mom's side; I'm the youngest at 22. Growing up, she called us "bookends" and always went out of her way to take an interest in me. I felt she wanted to have genuine conversations with me, not that I'm-talking-to-you-to-say-funny-things-for-the-benefit-of-the-other-grownups-in-the-room thing that I was often subjected to as the baby of the family. She and her husband have wanted kids for a long time, but she was stuck kicking thyroid cancer's ass for a few years and only recently was deemed healthy enough to get pregnant.

While I usually can't suffer the cooing over all things TINY and PRECIOUS that goes on at these types of things, this was a completely tolerable baby shower. Forgoing shower games, the host (also my cousin) printed images of cartoon characters from Jennifer's youth onto iron-on decals and we transferred the images onto 30 cotton onesies. There were fabric markers to sign or write messages on them.

I wonder if I'm the only one at events like these, who in the midst of the frenetic anticipation and excitement of something so wonderful and important, thinks, "God, I hope nothing goes wrong" - some irrational superstitious part of me gets nervous when things seem too good to be true.

So, hey, kiddo. There's a whole hell of a lot of us out here where it's cold and bright and loud - and we're rooting for you. See you in February.

Nick's brother and sister-in-law were in Columbus today on their way to Canton from D.C. for the holidays.

Mike is at once just like Nick, and uncomfortably opposite him. Bizarre-o Nick. His face is like a reflection of Nick in a pane of warped glass. They share a certain neurotic Woody Allenness, but probably don't agree on very much at all. Every once in a while I'd observe the two of them talking and it would make me shudder inexplicably.

I think in posing this photo I said, "Exchange gifts, but look pissed about it."

The photo I was going to post today was of a little vegetable man with a clementine orange for a head, parsley sprigs for hair, celery stalks for arms and legs, and a carrot torso, constructed from the raw materials readily available at the restaurant. I think I wanted to caption it "hardly working." Dicking around at work is enjoyable. I was so happy to have my research assistant job this fall because it meant that I wouldn't be on my feet for hours at a time, smiling falsely for strangers, coming home smelling like garlic and shawarma beef. I managed to forget that working at a specific place, with other people, has a normalizing effect. I forgot that having a job is a social outlet.

I lost my phone though, which means I also lost that picture. Nick recently gave me a keyfinder keychain. When I whistle, it beeps at me so I can recover my misplaced car keys. Really, though, I need that device for my house keys, my camera, my cell phone, my shoes, my driver's license..

I feel like an insipid, idiot girl-droid every time I see that commercial for Dior's fragrance Cherie. I get intoxicated by the Brigitte Bardot clone flitting around Paris in a party dress, adorably pointing out her frosted prize at a pâtisserie, coyly running through the Jardin du Luxembourg, riding her cruiser bike while the wind whips through her blonde mod coif. Finally, she flops on a bed, laughing. How exhausting it is to be idly cute all day! Whenever I watch it I sink into the couch, shielding my eyes from the glowing television. "Nick! Change the channel! It's working! I want to smell like a carefree Parisian model in the 60s."

When I was a French major, I was irritated by the scores of daffy female classmates seduced by the whole "All things French are beautiful and romantic" idea and wanted to do Powerpoint presentations on Coco Chanel and the Louvre but recoiled when it was time to talk about the horrors of colonialism and the problematic nature of French nationalism. How unpleasant! Back to Hermès scarves and making out under the Eiffel tower on New Year's Eve.

I looked up the commercial on Youtube and I guess it's directed by Sofia Coppola. Ha! I may be an airhead, but I'm a sort-of-erudite airhead.

And at the pâtisserie, I always pick the tarte aux framboises.

Before we took the gloves off in a cutthroat game of Spades, Ana threw together a fanastic tomato bisque to complement my fancy grilled cheese. Kurt, Nick, and I had our heads to our bowls like beasts at the trough.

She and I have been planning to open a restaurant for around a year now. Sometimes it's hard for me to give a shit about school or building my resume or co-authoring a big paper when all I really want is to pick out paint swatches for my new restaurant and write short stories.

I'm pretty sure this bisque could end wars. But bottomless hunger might have clouded my judgment.

Today my red car took me all around town, scooping up last minute Christmas notions in the bitter cold, swiping the magnetic strip of my credit card with irresponsible abandon.

While I am certainly not immune to a love of Stuff, I hate shopping. I think it takes me back to that dread memory of my childhood - Running Errands with my mom. Blinking at the fluorescent lights above from the pinching metal seat of the shopping cart while my brother and sister ride along like tiny garbagemen for what seemed like hours while my mother painstakingly consulted her list and her coupons for every single aisle - it was enough to ruin the "magic" of retail for life. I can only be in Target for twenty minutes before I get light-headed and want to close my eyes and click my heels and get magically transported to a sunny porch. With a book and a stiff drink.

Then, I drove to work. In the restaurant's parking lot, with the engine off and my hands still on the steering wheel, a narcotic numbness washed over me from the manic afternoon of shopping. Why must there be so many goddamn things to buy? How am I gonna bounce back in 2009 from all the things I fake-bought for the holidays? How am I gonna afford to travel next fall without any savings? Why must my grad school stipend be so meager? Why do I let money problems affect me so much?

For my Christmas gift, Ana took this old steamer trunk, painted it, and decoupaged the interior with vintage maps, because Ana and I share one brain. And not to get all George Bailey on you, but this gift reminded me what a wonderful thing it is to have an overwhelming number of people in your life that require Christmas presents. Every single one of them a flash of warm light in this tragic, chaotic place. No gift felt like an obligation - every purchase or handmade bullshit that I've wrapped in optimistic paper has been fraught with anxiety because I want that gift to be a year's worth of my appreciation for their being alive.

And this is exactly the sort of overinvestment that makes Christmas afternoon such a huge disappointment.

I have an uncommon name and an even less common nickname. In all the years of telling substitute teachers how to pronounce Evie, having absurd variations scrawled on my coffee cups by well-meaning baristas, and being the only Evie in my loved ones' lives, I can't help but feel that part of my identity is wrapped up in my old lady name. Who knows how I would have turned out if my parents decided twenty two years ago that I seemed like more of a Brittany.

So whenever I encounter other Evelyns, and on the rare occasion, other Evies, it's unsettling. A poem called "Beware of Things in Duplicate" by Dana Gioia comes to mind:

Beware of things in duplicate:
a set of knives, the cufflink in a drawer,
the dice, the pair of Queens, the eyes
of someone sitting next to you:
Attend that empty minute in the evening
when looking at the clock, you see
its hand are fixed on the same hour
you noticed at your morning coffee.
These are the moments to beware
when there is nothing so familiar
or so close that cannot betray you:
a twin, an extra key, an echo,
your own reflection in the glass.

How can I possibly trust someone who knows what it is to be named Evie? We shouldn't be in a room together. Being Evie should be nobody's business but mine.

I waited on a girl tonight whose name was Evie. She was about ten, her brand new adult teeth much too big for her head, her confidence and comedic timing impressive for someone so young. Instead of feeling threatened by her, I was excited for her. I wanted to tell her, it's gonna be so great! You're gonna fall in love, and see the French countryside from train windows, and ride your bike through the city in dresses and heels, and break into swimming pools in the summer, and never sleep, and always sleep, and have your heart broken by every stupid, little thing in the world.

And it made me feel like maybe I like being myself, and being alive, and all the bullshit that comes with it.

I've been decking the halls, creating mental top five lists of Christmas movies and Christmas songs (would you consider The Apartment a Christmas movie?), and making plans for indulgence and excess with my family. My shopping is finished, my gifts folded and creased into blood red paper and puking curlicued ribbons. But I just can't help but feel like I skipped over the cheer of the holidays and stumbled into mid-February listlessness. Looks like somebody could use a midnight visit from the Ghost of Christmas Sack-up-and-be-a-person.

Ana and I watch Stand Up or Die at Lauren and Jimmy's holiday party.

Some holiday party advice: The key to successfully eating one's weight in cheese products and crackers undetected is to participate silently in smalltalk around the kitchen island. It's all about misdirection - your hands never stop moving to load up your plate with goodies but up top you are nodding and grinning mischievously in agreement with a story whose beginning you missed. Occasionally, punctuate a raunchy line in the other party's story with a "hey-o!".

I got to experience Stand Up or Die for the first time. I was impressed by my friends' ability to get behind the mic and tell jokes that are funny because they are bad on purpose. Even from behind the protective shield of irony, I could tell they were nervous. Maybe next time I'll have the stones to give it a shot.

Nick's work holiday party was tonight. Oncology nurses gone wild.

He put in our names to do a song for karaoke without telling me and pulled me up to sing with him. He is pretty lucky that his girlfriend is a lush and an extrovert otherwise there would have been Words later.

Nick has been so busy the past few weeks. Coaching OSU's debate team at tournaments on weekends, regular 40-hour work weeks and a sociology class that ate most of his scant free time. Selfishly, it has been pretty unfun for a bored girlfriend in a freezing cold house with no motivation or energy to do much of anything except watch Law & Order marathons. And even I can grow tired of Jack McCoy's Moral Outrage. By the fifth hour or so.

So tonight was date night. Dining out always produces the best, funniest, most important conversations. No distractions, no television, no roommates, just you and a table and another person.

The plan was that everybody would bring holiday beer and we would watch A Christmas Story.

We didn't get to the movie.

My lovely former roommate, but forever roommate-of-my-heart, Jenn, and I ate a shit-ton of sushi and saw Milk. And sobbed our faces off.

Then I went home and stared at the wall for a few hours.

Hey, Nick, why don't we just get you Flash footie-pajamas at this point?!

Winter Science Reading Club this Sunday dealt with video games and narratology, but mostly, I was excited to hear about Matt's band, Tin Armor's, creepy stay at a bible college in Indiana.

Matt and Ana differed in regards to the future.

"My anarcho-primitivist group is gonna cut your cord!" -Ana.

Charlie's birthday gathering culled old/new/close/distant friends from all over.

I was glad to give him my birthday well-wishings, but goddamn if it wasn't unbearably smoky in that house. I used to hang out in smoke-filled bars, diners, venues, houses without even realizing it except for the reminder of stale smoke in my hair and jeans the next day. Since Ohio enacted its smoking ban in early 2005, something I voted against but privately hoped would pass, I am rarely exposed to indoor tobacco smoke except for the occasional house party.

And now I can't stand in a small enclosed space while my beautiful friends smoke like fishes without my eyes burning, my throat getting raw, and my head starting to spin. The latter may just be the booze though.

O'Reilly's. There's no way to say this without sounding like a snot, but I am sort of bummed that all the ipsters-hay found out about this cozy, neighborhood bar.

After we left, I got face-down on the floor at Erin's house and she aligned my stubborn old spine with her tiny but powerful hands. Is there a greater sound than the sound of a back cracking?

Back at the farm.

Kate and I became friends when we were hired at the Restaurant at the same time and went through training together. During our last training shift, she waited on a man that we dubbed, uncreatively, Creepy Guy (if only we knew how many creepy guys we would come to encounter..). Exerting no responses save for neanderthal grunts during the meal, as she dropped off the check he suddenly jolted to life with an unctuous smile and asked for her number. Like the other wackjob regulars that showed their face several times a week at the restaurant, Creepy Guy would enter the cast of irritating, imposing characters in my Columbus life. One time he hit on me at Target while I was shopping. With my mom.

So it makes sense that Creepy Guy would show up just a few minutes into my first shift back, chomping on a stupid toothpick, smirking his stupid smirk. As I rang up his carryout order he mentioned that he hasn't seen me around in a while. And because I often forget that I'm under no obligation to run my mouth at all times, I geared up for the dialogue about how I moved, blah blah, I'm back temporarily.

But I paused. And just offered a dismissive, "yeah".

Ana and I made dinner at Kurt's tonight.

Besides being a good guy, Kurt served in the army in Iraq, spent a year in Washington state mastering the craft of wooden boatbuilding, and is leaving in a few months to study agriculture in Africa through the Peace Corps.

I suggest he list these things on his resume under the heading, "Pantydropping".

I found a disposable camera among the precariously stacked mountain of things on Nick's desk. Since he's not much of the picture-taking type, and I'm very much of the picture-taking type, I was sure it was mine. I carried it carefully in my purse for a few days, so that the next time I passed by the camera store I could get it processed. It seemed so delicate, some lost weekend wedged between 2006 and 2007, a forgotten party spent laying across a couch in a pile of people, some throwaway shots of my dog before she died in June. These quick moments had long passed, and now were just light on gelatin. They hardly existed at all.

Unfortunately, the camera that very well could have been mine belonged to Nick's ex-girlfriend. I flipped through the photos of beach vacations, uninspiring costume parties, smiling strangers; these memories were not mine. Feelings of foolishness, disappointment, and jealousy settled in my gut as nausea. But the last picture on the roll was vintage Nick, smiling with his whole face, and that made it worth paying for someone else's film.

I went on a visiting-friends-at-work tour of Columbus today. I have some literate, pretty lady friends. Priterate. Literetty.

I shake 'em down for handouts. Free shit tastes better.

Tin Armor show at Chop Chop.

Is it ever possible to talk frankly about your friend's/boyfriend's/sister's band without sounding clouded by the cataract of your own squishy fondness for them?

New songs sound great, guys. I'd say that even if I hated your guts.

Another tradition among my friends is a Thanksgiving weekend lunch buffet feast at Ajanta, easily Dayton's best Indian restaurant. No other Indian restaurant can ever get the texture of Saag Paneer just right. I think the copious amounts of grease, pooling orange on the plate, are key. You can't really catch up with friends while packing your greedy maw full of fried naan, but oh well. There's always the phone.

Leslie is my best freaking friend since 7th grade, but our lives are tragically divided by geography. Her family got an adorable new dog, who is decidedly...special needs? I have never encountered a dog like this. Blank stare, no licking, no barking, no whimpering. If you prop him up and let go, he will slump over like a sack of potatoes, eyes unblinking. Like her dad said, "the lights are on but nobody's home."

I am not proud to say that a retarded dog provided a solid hour of weeping-from-laughter entertainment. Cuddly little bastard.

Somehow I lucked out with really funny, smart, interesting friends in high school. I'm still in touch, both closely and distantly, with most of them. But a Thanksgiving tradition of pie in the evening at Matt and John's house is a chance to talk existential crises and make poop jokes with the people I used to break curfew in order to talk existential crises and make poop jokes with. I love to drink beers and laugh until my face hurts with these guys, and I really only get to see them all in one place this one night each year.

This year, we hit a neighborhood bar after the festivities died down at the Umlands. When I was in high school, my parents used to say "Nothing good happens after midnight". I took this picture of Joey beating me at pool shortly before the evening went disastrously downhill.

Heidi, my grandparents' dog, observes the drawn-out sink recovery project. Of course the garbage disposal breaks on Thanksgiving afternoon.

My fake turkey "roast", which looked like a whitish latex log, managed to brown a little in the oven. My mom made the stuffing with chicken broth but I ate it anyway. How many vegetarian Hail Marys is that? Let's call it five. Pass the Jell-O.

Beavercreek.

On a mission to replace the battery in my grandfather's stopped watch at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving eve, my dad and grandpa ended up at a diamond store by the mall. It's one of those places where they offer you a bottle of water and do everything short of a hand job to make you feel pampered as a valued customer. From the way they talked it up afterwards, my dad and grandpa really took the bait. While his watch was being fixed, the sales lady offered to have their rings cleaned as a complimentary service. The two of them came home with glittering wedding bands that flashed like new. When my parents compared bands, it really looked as though my dad was newly married.

My mom and grandmother starting maybe-joking-maybe-serious insisting that they too needed their rings cleaned. My dad, who excels at taking things too far, popped all of their rings, five total, onto his stubby hairy digits, many of them not fitting past the first knuckle, and wiggled his fingers meaningfully at us as he grabbed his car keys.

We heard the garage door go up and the door close, but before long he appeared in the kitchen again looking downtrodden. "Well, I don't wanna go by myself."

So, after a suggestion from my grandfather that certainly sounded more like a fiat, I found myself in the passenger seat next to my dad's bejeweled hands gripping the steering wheel. At this very early point of the Family Weekend, I had Good Sport dripping out of my ears and I was buckled in and forcing an amused grin as we wound around the dark, rural roads.

As we approached the jewelry store, I was stunned motionless by a surge of teenage embarrassment. Show up to the jewelry store he was just at, to demand a free service for his absent wife and mother's jewelry, not dropping a dime, and waltzing out the door? It seemed tacky, bizarre, but mostly, embarrassing.

I stopped in front of the glass doors, regarding the many illuminated cases held within.

"Dad, this is really weird. This is a really weird thing."

My dad paused and examined my face. Stroking his chin with a gold-spangled hand, he said, "I'm a weird guy, Evie. I do weird things."

And when we got home, he presented the sparkling new/old rings in velvet boxes, and my mom and grandma ooh-ed and aah-ed. My parents' wedding bands had equivalent lusters and I disappeared upstairs to read my book in my childhood bed that seems to shrink with every visit home.

It didn't take me long to fall back into old habits. Drinking, going to bed in the morning, waking up in the afternoon, drinking. These routines are indulgences, but they don't really make me feel very good.

Last night at the bar, the interchangeable conversations with acquaintances, the catty gossip for gossip's sake, girls dressed to the fucking teeth - I felt like I could turn to vapor and everything would go on and on and on this way forever. I felt like I hadn't left town but wished that I had.

Because I get annoyed by the self-paparazzi at bars, because I just don't want to bother, because it doesn't usually seem worth capturing, I haven't been taking many pictures this week. My days have been defined by my evenings. My evenings have been fuzzy, dark, disappointing and they leave a ringing in my ears. Mostly, I just forget to pull the camera out. So this picture is from my birthday two years ago. Because, I don't know.

The unhappiness you carry inside you isn't tricked by zip codes.

My mom was the nurse at my high school, and I used to occasionally grab lunch with her at school when I was home on breaks. Walking those familiar cinderblock halls, smelling that unchanging cafeteria smell, I felt I was treading on verboten soil. Surely, narcissistically, I thought, everyone there could sense that I didn't belong. As I got older and the recognizable faces in that building dwindled, it became less uncomfortable, but I still avoided eye contact with the more forgettable teachers.

I usually find comfort in clear divisions to guide me through transitional periods. You don't sleep with your exes, you don't move back in with your parents, you work one job at a time, lest your delicate liminality get all muddled and confounded.

Today, I drove through the drizzly, suffocating gray to the restaurant where I worked for two years to get my shitty job back. It didn't feel like I was throwing everything in reverse.

It's nice to have guidelines for things, but I'm being a little too linear about my life. Like when you give a child specific rules to follow because you can't just say, "do the right thing". Sometimes it's not about evolving personally. Sometimes you are just in Columbus and broke.

I filled up for less than $20 today. That hasn't happened since I was smelling those cafeteria smells as a legitimate high school student.

Winter Science Reading Club!

Beer, bread, cheese, implications of HIV denialism in the Internet age.

But mostly, Guinness bread with honey butter, OM NOM NOM.

The good news: Columbus buys me shots.
The bad news: Columbus buys me shots.

These dudes are letting me squat at their place for six weeks. Let the slacking off begin.

Being alone
It can be quite romantic
Like Jacques Cousteau
Underneath the atlantic
A fantastic voyage
To parts unknown
Going to depths where the suns never shone
And I fascinate myself
When I'm alone
....
I'm rambling on rather self consciously
While I'm stirring these condiments into my tea
And I'm so lame
I bet I think this song is about me
Don't I, don't I, don't I.

Done.

Sjanneke and I celebrated my triumph over fall quarter by going to Casa and getting appetizers AND drinks AND food AND this ridiculous dessert.

Sitting across from her at the restaurant felt like I had woken up out of a long strange dream. It was like when we used to go to Casa together when I would visit her from Columbus when we were in college. Does that mean I felt like myself again? Or that I still hadn't slept since pulling an all-nighter the night before and was sort of delirious?

All-nighter.

Like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, I'm gettin' too old for this shit. Papers: they do not write themselves.

So this is going on outside.

You know sometimes when they hit the lights at last call and suddenly the warm wash of incandescence that's bathed the place becomes unkind doctor's-office-lighting and everyone is back to their ugly selves, teeth and guts and skin and too much makeup, and suddenly nothing is more important than being home, washing your face, being in your own bed, anything to get out of this godforsaken bar.

Yeah, last call in Athens was about two weeks ago for me. But getting "home" is always problematic for someone my age. I feel welcome in Columbus but I pay rent in Athens but my parents live in Dayton, but not in the house I grew up in.

I'm tired. Grad school feels like life suspended, and yeah, "journey not a destination", but I've always been terrible at carpe-ing the diem. It's never been a cinch for me to just be where I am.

But mostly, I'm sick of all this navel-gazing. I hope the six week vacation that starts Wednesday at 10:00 am will remind me that life is doing things and loving people, not talking about doing things and loving people.

This is a 20 page paper, completed two days before it's due.

I know, I keep looking over my shoulder for the four horsemen.

Voluptuous breakfast spread, made possible by Ana and Lauren.

They headed back to Columbus and I'm supposed to be writing the crap outta some papers, but the dreary, cold Novemberness outside has me slouching in my PJs listening to Andrew Bird and Beirut and bumming myself out on purpose.

I gotta cut this out. No more wistful or melancholy tunes. In fact, nothing with violin or accordion.

I'm gonna change into some pants with hardware and get my sadsack self to the library. I mean it.

(I don't mean it.)

Today I made Sjannie breakfast, researched my little heart out, wrote eight pages of my paper, cleaned my room and then Lauren and Ana drove from Columbus to put some color in my cheeks in the midst of my finals week doldrums. My late-night indulgence, the kind that comes in both red and white, was, for once, not tainted by the guilt or anxiety of academic unaccomplishment.

I want to hug both them forever. And I want to help with their exciting, charitable, empowering, badass new enterprise.

Today is my sister's birthday. I wish I could have been in Dayton to celebrate, but grad school is a double-edged sword like that. For every five times you use it as an excuse to get out of something, there's that one time where you really wish you could jet out of town but you're hopelessly shackled to this alien, college town that sometimes feels about as lonely as a Martian desertscape. How many days until winter break again?

So, Rita. Thanks for putting up with the fact that I ripped off every single one of your interests and hobbies from ages 4-15. Mom used to tell you that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, which did not magically transport your cool new clothes from my grubby mitts back into your closet.

Sorry. If you weren't flattered then, I hope you at least feel admired. Happy birthday!

Maybe it's just me, but every time I have to scour my wardrobe for something remotely biz-cazh, I have a small-scale identity crisis.

Today I gave a half hour presentation for my research methods class, but the writing the paper and the snazzy powerpoint and the research that went into it, let alone standing in front of the class, sweating like a televangelist; these were small matters compared to the way I feel clomping around in sensible flats and tailored trousers.

It's just that it seems like a joke. Like heels - why enslave myself in footwear that I can't wear riding my bike home drunk*? Part of me is still nine years old, playing Keep Away in six inches of backyard mud with my brother's friends. At heart, I'm still sixteen, cutting Suzy's hair in the garage with kitchen scissors. And, yes, I'm still nineteen, smoking pot out of a hollowed-out mango on a school nightmorning.

This is the girl who's never been on time to anything in her entire life. This is the girl who ducks behind a bush instead of waiting in line for the port-a-john. This is the girl who smuggles home beer from the wedding she bartended (but not without an accomplice). This is not a girl to saddle with responsibility. This is not a girl who gets things done.

This is a girl who "didn't hear her alarm".

And while I'm sure I'll get used to the way I look in business-casual, I certainly hope I'll never take myself seriously.

*I have tried this, it is not recommended.

Let's crunch some numbers.

Number of days until my winter break begins: 7
Number of days I've been in grad school: 69
Number of all-nighters required thus far: 0
Number of miles run this week: 0
Number of hint o' mint Newman-O's I had after dinner: 6
Number of days until Obama's inauguration: 70
Number of pages I have to write before next Wednesday: One 15 page paper + one 20 page paper=35 pages
Number of days until ritual Black Friday Ajanta meal: 15
Number of courses to be completed in Fall 2008: 5
Number of courses to be completed in Winter 2009: 3
Number of days until I begin observing the Karaoke Sabbath again: 11
Number of hint o' mint Newman-O's I will eat after posting this and before going to bed: indeterminate
Amount that I miss Columbus faces and places: a shit ton

An unequivocally shitty dinner.

In general, polar fleece sort of offends me. I don't really think one should leave the house wearing it, unless one is going skiiing. Sorry.

As someone who is easily uncomfortably warm, I am wearing the following things to bed at night: cotton shorts, long johns, sweatpants, t-shirt, sweatshirt, fleece pullover, two pairs of socks. Not once do I wake up feeling too hot. Also, the space heater is cranked.

I found this fleece pullover from my high school swim team days among the unpacked garbage bags of clothes in my closet. I feel silly mulling around the house in it, like I'm keeping my muscles warm behind the starting block for a 200m relay that happened seven years ago.

So, function over form, I guess.