From the Columbus Alive's website.

You know, me and Ana, total paparazzi darlings. Man, this is hilarious to me, as someone whose finger is not on the pulse, someone who is not part of the scene.

Tonight, at Thursday Family Dinner, Christina explained the unique Winter Intersession at the high school where she teaches. Federal Hocking is the poorest district in Athens county, which is among the poorest counties in the state of Ohio. Appalachia can be a hopeless place to grow up, and Christina's school has taken several unconventional approaches to engage students who are cynical and often fatalistic. After Christmas break, the teachers get to showcase their non-teaching talents in a week of seminars. Leather-working, improv comedy, scrapbooking, macrame, you name it. I felt troubled upon realizing that I couldn't come up with a hobby or skill that I could teach. Do I not have hobbies? Sitting on my friends' laps at bars doesn't count.

My cohort meets Wednesday nights for drinks at this bar. I am still adjusting to the notion of compulsory drinking with my colleagues. I don't usually get buzzed with people with whom I should maintain a professional relationship.

I think a lot can be learned about a city from the bathroom graffiti in its dive bars.

Athens is a very follow-your-dreams kind of town. This is either annoying or totally refreshing depending on how much coffee you've had.

When I worked lunch at the restaurant and served people who ate their salads with just the company of their book or BlackBerry - I'll admit it - I felt sorry for them. Time spent alone didn't seem like time spent at all to me. It was always a social purgatory, waiting for Jenn to get done with class so we could lay on the couch and giggle like morons. Waiting for Nick to ride his bike over so we could get dinner. It sounds creepy spelled out like that, like the Orwellian "ownlife", where going for a walk by yourself is considered suspicious.

Something weird has happened in Athens. I've sort of fallen in love with being by myself.

When you're in a relationship for a long time, you get swept up in collective thinking. You haven't really done something until you've told your partner about it. Do we behave the way we are, or do we perform what people expect of us? Being in a new place, then, can be as freeing as it is frightening. Who am I without my context?

Am I someone who makes an elaborate pancake brunch for myself, drinks an entire pot of coffee, and lights sparklers while Barack Obama takes the oath of the presidency? Yes. Yes I am.

(Happy Obama Day!)

Today was my first time actually observing MLK Jr. Day as a National Day of Service. In the past I have always paid homage to the civil rights leader by...sleeping late. While the government's official MLK Jr. Day website listed lots of volunteer opportunities in the southeastern Ohio area, I wasn't quite sure I had the stones to show up to some church basement twenty minutes away in capital-R rural Ohio and meekly ask if there was anything I could do. Also, B. is parked behind me.

However, there were several blood drives on campus and I talked Sjan into accompanying me even though she has teeny tiny angelhair-pasta veins and the Red Cross workers basically had to make Swiss cheese of her antecubital before they struck oil. Since I bleed like a stuck pig, we were on our way to Bagel Street for celebratory bage-wiches in no time.

Also is it really "service" if you get free cookies afterwards? Because if there are snacks in it for me, here, have a lightly used kidney.

Not to get all meta, but sometimes my silly blog bothers me. I worry that I come off as unbalanced, miserable, bratty. I don't seem to document the moments that I'm walking to school and I stop dead in my tracks in awe of how good the sun feels on my face. When I zombie-shuffle downstairs in the morning, slept-on bangs sticking straight up, eyes puffed shut, and the sound of the coffee percolating is like a string quartet. When my roommate catches me fist-pumping the cold air in the kitchen when the coffee's finished brewing. There seems to be a fallacy that marries well-being inextricably to contentment and satisfaction. I think that notion can be simplistic and misleading - for me, it's about sunken, bottomless pain and intoxicating, frenetic pleasure. Beyond that, well-being is not binary. It's every boring little aspect of your life buzzing in different, wonderful frequencies, the wailing dissonance you hear when someone asks you what you're thinking about, the knowledge that you like that sound, that sound is home, but it's okay to be honest with yourself when your heart hurts and you don't know why.

Instead of taking gray awful winter quarter off emotionally, I'd like to take this quarter on. Toil my little grad student heart out, be eyeball-deep in research for my thesis, and so annoyingly productive that I won't have anything in common with myself anymore. And then I'll wake up one day and it'll be April 1st and Nick and I will be riding our bikes downtown to see Morrissey at the Palace Theatre.

Winter is a drag. It always is. February is worse than January. Today, though, with the sun rising over the snow-dusted tile rooftops, fat bluejays and cardinals bouncing along the oak bough outside my bedroom window, I had a thought anathema to my typical winter-hating, morning-cursing self: I can't wait to get outside.

Every year, Columbus Alive, the free weekly, picks a couple of local music stand-outs and labels them that year's Bands To Watch and there's a concert showcasing the bands the week the paper comes out. The title itself is sort of strange - "I wish we were a Band To Listen To", "We're all God's bands to watch" - but this year they picked Tin Armor and it's pretty goddamn cool to see my friends' faces in full color on all the newsracks around the city. The guys usually play in sweaty basements sans-sound guy, so seeing them on stage, lit up for all creation in front of a crowded-ass house - pretty excellent. The night ended as all good evenings out for me end - Ana cooks me food and I sleep so hard on her couch.

Brenda, your boyfriend is adorable. Even when his face is looming three feet tall on a banner hanging from the balcony at Skully's. And everyone misses you all the time.

I love the shit outta some old people games.