Halloween rules forever, the end.

B defended the shit out of his thesis today. Well done, man.

The highlight of the evening was the group of black guys who paraded past the bar with McCain-Palin banners, shouting "Keep the White House white!" When we clapped and cheered, one guy perfectly deadpanned, "you think this is a joke?", pausing before he betrayed himself with a grin. Brilliant.

I just can't seem to get on top of my work. I feel like I'm in shitty time-management quicksand, and every time I hoist myself up a couple of inches, I slip three more feet.

Today I resolved to shackle myself to a chair at the library and disappear behind my laptop and my textbooks until I got out of the woods. I decided to go via moped before it gets too cold to ride, but that wasn't in the cards. Laden with my enormous chain across my chest like a ten-pound Miss America sash and my bulging backpack, I couldn't get the thing to start. In an unfortunate metaphor for how ineffectual I've felt lately, I was just pedaling and pedaling trying to hear the growl of the engine turning over, but nothing. My eyes stung with tears. It was a huge blow to my motivation. I took off my helmet, wiped my sweaty forehead with my icicle fingers and sat down in the driveway. I felt eight years old.

People who ride vintage mopeds can hopefully back me up here - a bad moped moment can sour an entire day beyond salvage.

Is my memory broken or is it not usually this cold this early? I had to adopt the squinty just-smelled-a-bad-smell grimace this morning to combat the icy winds. I don't usually have to do that until at least January. And I wore mittens, MITTENS, today. You know when it's so cold that you can't step outside without muttering at last five swear words to yourself? No amount of self-delusion works. I'm on the beach in Salobreña. Brenda and I are drinking wine straight from the bottle. Sonofabitchgoddamnmotherfuck. Nope, still in Ohio.

The law office I walk past each day on my way to campus has a life-size ceramic bulldog on the ledge by the window. I mark my progress in quotidian oddities along my walk to school. Tuxedo kittens crowding around a cookie sheet of cat food. Ceramic bulldog. Chained-up red Puch Maxi. "Squash the state" stencil graffiti. Parking meter with smiling boner Sharpied on it. And I'm at school. Today, on my walk home, I saw the ceramic bulldog in its usual spot. Then, in the lap of the man who usually sits at the desk inside, was a real bulldog. Fat, panting, and being nuzzled by its owner. It slowed, if only for a moment, the steady stream of fuckshitmotherfuck in my head.

I'm gonna go crank the space heater to 11 and call it an early night.

Here, Empower paints "the wall" on campus to advertise the 5K a couple of weeks ago. In this picture, Sjanneke is just trying to hold up the cut-out, but she also inadvertently has her hand on Uganda.

She made me dinner tonight and I "interviewed" her for a silly feature I'm writing. It's convenient that the one go-to friend I have in Athens has a whole lot going on. Makes my homework easy.

Interviewing a close friend is worlds different than just regular, joke-y "status of your life" conversations. I guess I don't ask the right questions in everyday chatter. It would be awkward if I called her up and said, "What are your plans for the future of the non-profit organization you helped to create?"

But if I'd been asking her those kinds of questions, I'd know that while planning her own wedding for next summer, Sjan realized that American weddings have become outrageously costly affairs. And if you're gonna spend a zillion dollars to get married, why not have a portion of that zillion go to Ugandan orphans? And Empower: Weddings was born.

I'd also know that she is being made a board member of the Empower Campaign and will have the ability to travel to Uganda during the summers with the executive director of the organization. She'll get to meet the children being sponsored and work with the women's co-op that makes the jewelry.

At the end of the interview, I just looked up from my laptop and said, "You're so cool!"

This installation piece is either entitled "Xbox 360, Bowl, Foucault" or "B was here".

Moby!

B's best friend Crys is over a lot, often with her golden retriever. It's nice to have a big, panting, affectionate dog around, sweeping magazines off of the coffee table with his overzealous tail. Ever since my little dog went to pee on the Big Rug in the Sky in June, I've had a kind of hollow in my gut. Crys says that she works too much and that I'm always welcome to take Moby out for runs or car rides when she's not around. I really might take her up on it.

I had people from my cohort over to work on a project tonight and it reminded me that my friends, and my friends' friends, can't be generalized to represent society. I always forget that. The guy in my group was wide-eyed every time Moby came in the room and would loudly editorialize about how gross it is to have pets, and "why not just have birds and bears and raccoons in the house." I couldn't even be tactful about how absurd that was. Thinking the girl in my group would be similarly bewildered, I was shocked when she casually added that, "animal companionship sort of gives me the creeps."

Uncomfortable, I steered us back to our research project. But for the next hour or so, every time they talked, I'd just think, "Aliens."

I am that wood-burning stove's number one fan.

Matt used to hate the feeling of electric, artificial heat but to me, a space heater seemed as good as a campfire. I get it now, Matt. It's night and day, as significant as the difference between sunshine and buzzing fluorescent light tubes.

When I first moved in back in early September, it was so friggin' hot that B and I retreated to our separate rooms for breezes through open windows, oscillating fans, and privacy. It was very dorm-like. I mentioned before that I missed being part of someone's comfortable backdrop. The cold weather has brought us out of our meat-locker rooms with the leaky turn-of-the-century windows and down to where B's been diligently keeping the stove blazing. And I just sit there on the couch, textbook-laden, laptop glowing, while B plays video games. Occasionally, a log will shift with a thud, spitting out a little cloud of sparks. It takes two people a while to stop being clumsy with each other, to stop stepping on each other's sentences and being too careful with words. I think he and I have finally become domestically at ease.

There are words in relief on the cast-iron stove, and all year it's just been a silent, arcane cipher. Today I looked it up, and it's a Norwegian blessing often inscribed on wood stoves. It translates to:

I rake my fire
Late in the evening
When the day is over
God let my fire
Never burn out

Re: yesterday

Good news: This dude still manages to be impressed with me. Awesome.

This week in graduate study finds our heroine battling crippling feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing!

Self: I am gonna start being awesome at school starting tomorrow!
Self: You will sleep in until the last possible minute and forget a freaking pen.
Self: Oh. Really? I thought was gonna start being productive.
Self: Nope.
Self: Okay.

As always, straightening my life-space tends to help maintain that illusion of control. Oh man, I am gonna get so much research done on this freshly made bed with newly laundered sheets!

Grad school is 80% pee-your-pants hard and 20% junior-high-easy. The trouble comes when the brain-breaking abstract stuff masquerades as the Mickey Mouse stuff and vice versa.

For example, I'm writing a faux-bituary of J.K. Rowling for a class, which I took to be a straightforward task. You know, cursory research, zero analysis, some meaty quotes and then attaching sentences together like cars on a shitty toy train. Two hours, tops. Unfortunately, it seems that summing up with reverence someone's recently snuffed-out life is kind of a ballbuster.

It turns out I really admire J.K. Rowling which makes writing about her accomplishments challenging. I should've picked Jay Leno or Serena Williams or something. And, while I feel like a jackass comparing myself to her, I really identified with some things she's said.

To Harvard graduates in June 2008:
"What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure. At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers."

A drawback of raising your kids to be spazzy little nerds is that at a certain point their reading level spikes way beyond their maturity level. Thus, the books my 12-year-old self brought home from the library were very adult in complexity and vocabulary, but also "adult" like video stores by the highway are sometimes "adult." So by the time my mom put the first three Harry Potter books in my hands when I was 14, I was already years past C.S. Lewis and Dr. Doolittle and full speed ahead into John Irving and Sylvia Plath. And because I was kind of a brat, I tended to dismiss anything that was unapologetically targeted to adolescents. I thought that being naive and sophomoric was something to be ashamed of, which, in retrospect, was terribly naive and sophomoric of me.

So on a long car trip to Michigan, I gave them a shot and from the first chapter of Sorcerer's Stone, I was, shamelessly and without reservation, a fan. Yes, derivative, lame, overhyped, fleeting, whatever. I don't care. All I care about is all those made-up characters and their made-up feelings. I was in Paris the day the 7th book was released in English and as Jon and I walked around Montmartre on a cloudless July day, all I could see was Deathly Hallows in cafes. Deathly Hallows all the way up the steps of the Sacre Coeur. Deathly Hallows on the metro. I finished the book a few days later in a hostel in Amsterdam at 3 a.m. Jon was asleep and I just sat on the edge of my bed in the huge ballroom-turned-barracks and grieved the end of the series in the cold quiet. It was weird.

The days have been perfect this past week but the nights are getting pretty chilly. I'm talking long underwear and an electric blanket. I'm talking adhering myself to Nick at night like a snoring, covers-hogging barnacle.

Tonight B resolved to stoke the enormous wood-burning stove downstairs. Drinking a beer while feeling sorry for myself about the paper I have to write beside a flickering, popping fire is far superior to drinking and procrastinating and being cold.

My mom WALKED a MARATHON today, but I already knew that lady had patience. Did you know me at 14? Let's just say doors were slammed.

She said she was passing time in her hotel room last night, and was getting through some pages of What is the What by Dave Eggers. There she was, "relaxing" before her seven hour walk the next morning, and she gets to the part where the Sudanese refugees are trekking hopelessly by foot across the desert for months, many dying of starvation and illness along the way. "Suddenly I was thinking, maybe I should just see if Law & Order is on," she said.

I joined her for the last six miles. I'm embarrassed to say that I was hurting by the end.

Sjanneke's 5K raised FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS for orphans in Uganda and if I think about it too hard it makes my heart explode.

Sjanneke coordinated a 5K for the Empower Campaign. The 5K is tomorrow, but tonight was the pre-race pasta dinner.

I'd forgotten how much fun it is - the impreciseness of cooking in waist-high stockpots, preparing mass quantities of food on ancient industrial stovetops in church basements. When I was a kid, I would help my parents prepare large-scale meals at soup kitchens and I loved the frantic, joyful energy of it. I felt grown-up when I was put in charge of an entire task, like scooping fruit cocktail into bowls or drying off silverware and placing it back in the drawer. It was egalitarian - I wasn't in the way or useless just because I was a kid. Anyone with a pair of hands got put to work.

Whenever I get hit on, and it's rare, my first reaction is to assume that it's a joke I don't get, or that I'm being made fun of. Once I get past that, I feel 10% flattered and 90% annoyed because I am just trying to be a person and you come along and make me laser-focused self-aware. Maybe it's the whole Groucho Marx wouldn't-want-to-belong-to-any-club-that-would-have-me-as-a-member thing.

Chris Rock does a bit where he says that white women don't need to own scales, they'll know when they're getting big when a disproportionate number of black guys start hitting on them.

Time to hit the gym, then?

Happy birthday, Danny.

Here's a picture taken of my brother this summer in a temple in Thailand. I've seen this exact expression a million times. He appears to be doing what the middle child between two loudmouth sisters does best: quietly tolerating.

When I was in high school I read about how nostalgia used to be the name for a medical condition, and that in olden old-timey times people were actually said to die from it. It's just the sort of thing that sixteen-year-old me would cling on to. When I moved in September, I ended up going through all my poems and journals from high school. Man, did I ever emote some emotions. "Your eyes are the trash-can fires curling smoke signals into the smog-pink urban sunset." YES, REALLY.

Oh, I'd like to think I'm heaps more ma-toor than I was then, but I'm still the same crybaby ball of feelings. I gained some perspective. I learned to separate hurt from pain. And sometimes, I learned, even the pain isn't really so bad. Daniel Johnston said, "Got a broken heart/and you can't break a broken heart." Like that.

Still, sometimes I wake up here smelling the lovely, dying leaves and I'm so steeped in nostalgia I can't move. Mandarin oranges in a Jell-O mold. A fly in amber.

Seriously, though, by what alchemy does Autumn smell exactly the same every year?

This is what the fountain outside the library looks like when you finally finish your paper.

It's funny how suffocating feelings of incompetence and dread show up to the party as soon as I have a bunch of beastly work to get done. I want to tap my brain on the shoulder and say, "Just because work isn't fun doesn't mean you have to flood my bloodstream with feelings. Sack up."

These feelings tend to spike at 11 p.m. and increase exponentially as each hour of the night passes.

Nice fountain, though.

As my dad says, "Nothing's free but the sunshine." Free grad school isn't free. It costs $350 per quarter in cryptic "student fees." Rest assured there was much teeth-gritting and nose-wrinkling when I wrote that check today. I will exact passive-aggressive retribution by spending my monthly stipend check on cheap beer and tattoos. Take that, the state of Ohio.

Does anyone ever accomplish all the things they'd like to on their day off? When I go to Columbus for the weekend, I get nothing done. When I stay in town for the weekend, I get nothing done.

Also, because I spent the day looking up at the TV between staring at my books and the flashing cursor in my barren, barren Word document: Pundits! Stop referring to the election as a done deal! Quit suggesting that it will take a miracle for McCain to turn this around! You are freaking tempting fate! Haven't you ever heard of jinxing yourself? Cryin' out loud.

The birthday girl busts a move.

Sjanneke seems to know every African international student at OU. Last night was the birthday party of her friend, Joann, who moved here from Uganda for graduate school this summer. The birthday girl made a huge spread of Ugandan food for her guests, and set aside a special plate for us because she knew we'd be late. A party packed with perfect strangers has never been less awkward, all night people just approached me with right hands extended and big white half-moon smiles.

Sjan and I danced to thumping and wailing Afropop all night. Best party I've been to in years.

24 Hour Party Penguin.

"And so she said unto the people, Black Sabbath is just ripping off Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin is just ripping off T.Rex, T.Rex is just ripping off Donovan." -the Gospel According to Ana

Tonight I was invited to watch the Office at the apartment of a girl in my cohort. I like the dissonance between Kip's PTA president looks and her sharp, subversive wit. So, for those of you keeping score at home, Athens friend count: 2.

My evening ended in an impromptu yet cutthroat game of Pretty, Pretty Princess at Sjanneke's. In a Gollum-like lust for The Crown, we accidentally managed to forgo any sort of strategy in favor of maniacally usurping eachother. It sort of sickened us when we realized how twisted the game is. For example, the winner is encouraged to admire herself in the bejeweled mirror as the most "pretty,pretty" of all. So that children's board game is a sociology dissertation waiting to happen.

Shit gets downright majestic here in Appalachia.

This week, on the local public radio station, Nick and I accidentally tuned into a call-in show called "Sell Phone." Local listeners call in and candidly describe the item they're hoping to sell (" '92 Cavalier, looks good, runs good") and leave their phone number for interested buyers to call. Like some sort of analog Craigslist. Awesome.

INT. My house in Athens - mid morning

EVIE cracks the front door to find a disheveled-looking COLUMBUS standing there. There are dark circles under his eyes.

Evie: What are you doing here?
Columbus: I just... Can we talk?
Evie: This isn't really a good time.

Columbus: Please. Just..a couple minutes. I need to sort though some things.

Evie: Okay, okay, come in. But..being here is just going to upset you more.

Columbus: OU sweatshirt? Go team.
Evie,defensively, tugging at sweatshirt: What? Aw, c'mon, you know I like vintage-looking bullshit.
Columbus: No, it's cute. Um, very college.
Evie: Did you just come here to make fun of me?

Columbus, massaging temples: No, no, of course not. (looking around) This..this is what you want?

Evie: It's what I want right now. It's...easy here. Peaceful.

Columbus: So everytime life gets hard, you leave?

Evie: You're not being fair. I'm just..charmed, I guess. Athens recycles, you know? It's refreshing.

ATHENS, shirtless with messy bedhead, ambles down the stairs, scratching his bare stomach. ATHENS regards COLUMBUS and EVIE intensely exchanging words and pauses.

Athens, concerned: Is everything cool here, babe?

Evie: Yeah, we're just..talking.
Athens, to Columbus: You hungry, man? I was just gonna scramble up some frit-ta-taas with the eggs and peppers I picked up at the co-op.

Columbus: No, I just lost my appetite actually.

ATHENS leaves, enters kitchen.

Columbus, to Evie: Frit-taa-taas.

Evie: Stop.

Columbus: That guy is an asshole.

Evie: No, no, he's...uncomplicated.

Columbus: He's an asshole.

Evie: Look, I told you I needed space. Can we talk about this during the holidays? You shouldn't even be here.

Columbus: Yeah. Neither should you.

END SCENE

I like to count things when I'm running. It helps to silence the Kerrigan-esque scream of every cell in my body: "huhwhyyyyyyy."

Sometimes I count porch cats, who follow me sagely with their eyes as I jog past. I typically imagine them thinking, "Ah, the illusion of control. We're all gonna die someday, sweetheart."

Sometimes I count election signs. I usually lose track of the number of Obama signs.

Haven't seen a McCain sign yet.

My room has a big old-timey heating register. A metal shelf has been built encasing it, either to protect people from idly resting things on the white-hot coils or to create a functional surface out of an oversized bothersome structure or both. I hung a mirror above mine and used the shelf surface for makeup and jewelry, creating a sort of vanity table. It works.

When my mom was helping me move in, she was worked up over my choice to set THINGS PRECIOUS THINGS on top of the shelf and immediately pulled a tape measure out of her purse (cause you never know) and started making quick measurements and pensively biting her nails. I chalked it up to faulty circuitry from popping out three kids in three years and ignored it. But today in the mail, I got a package from her enclosing a beautiful quilted runner for the shelf in my three favorite colors. My mom has handmade me so many things over the years, from gluegunned hairbows to abstract Halloween costumes to my high school graduation quilt. As it turns out, motherhood doesn't expire.

Thanks, Mom. 'Cause when I said at 8 that I had to be The Blob from that '50s B-movie for Halloween, you could have said, "Are you sure you don't want to be a cat?"

Lauren attacks a post-race victory omelet while finding absolutely zero humor in her runner's number. Really nothing to laugh at there at all.

We ran a 5k for universal feline suffrage or whatever today. Participants could bring their pets. Let me just say, some aging black labs kicked my ass.

Upon leaving the diner, we realized that we'd parked in a handicapped spot. While wearing athletic clothes and runner's numbers. Because why just park illegally when you can be a dick about it too.

Brenda waves a branch felled by Ike at her going away party.

I got a letter from her today from Spain.

Those months in Dijon, I thirsted for reminders of my comfortable, distant life back home. My mom sent me simple postcards about weekend trips, yardwork, and could I believe the weird thing my dad said to her? My eyes would well up. I'd get short of breath when I checked my e-mail on campus. Tonight I'll get wine-drunk on the terrace of a centuries-old rowhouse watching fireworks over the lake, but right now tell me that you sat through six hours of a Law & Order marathon. Tell me you singed off your eyebrows fixing the grill. Tell me you think your new haircut's too short.

Sorry, Brenda. I forgot. I forgot how faraway it can feel, being far away. Keep an eye on your mailbox.

I listened to My Aim is True and Armed Forces a lot in high school (usually through my walkman-to-tape-deck converter speeding down my street cause fuck was I ever late for school), but other Elvis Costello albums that are worth a damn I didn't discover until college. The first gift Nick ever gave me (we probably weren't dating yet) was a 45 of "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down". I think it followed a discussion of why Mr. Costello, as given to parenthetical titles as he is, would choose "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea" but not "I Can't Stand Up (For Falling Down)". Then we took a preemptive puff from our inhalers and rolled for damage. Ha.

The bonus disc on the Rhino rerelease of Get Happy! has "Girls Talk" on it, but it wasn't until this past summer that I discovered this song and played it and played it and talked about it and put it on compilations for people and decided it would be in the opening scene of my screenplay that will never be written. I'm sort of....excitable. You don't want to see me at Kroger went they have bing cherries on sale.

While digging for studying-conducive tunes the other day, I came across that 45 I've had for a couple years now and discovered that the freaking B-side is, has always been, "Girls Talk". I don't know why but I felt warm, full, in good hands. Sometimes it takes me a few laps to catch up with Nick and vice versa but in the meantime we do okay.

Here we are, doing okay.

PBR from the future.

B and his friend Crys celebrated B's new tattoo and payday (freaking payday!) by getting me very drunk before 9 pm. They showed me another comfortable dive bar in Athens besides Tony's. Who wants to drink someplace where your shoes don't stick to the floor?

I guess a couple weeks ago they replaced the splintering, hardly-doing-its-one-job-of-being-a-horizontal-plane bar with this acrylic, illuminated number. So now I know what it's like to get bombed on a spaceship.

It's a Wonderful Election Year.