Nick made some major life decisions this week! I am very proud of him.

Nick did not slip on the concrete basement steps today and break his fall with his tailbone and both elbows and spend the rest of the night hobbling around wailing that his "ass was broken".

You'll never guess who that was.

P.S. OWWWW

Sharing a podcast on the road to Columbus.

Today was the day where the cocktail of harrowing administrative setbacks, stress of this thorny monster-of-a-paper due in just one week's time, and the immutable monthly ebb and flow of stuff in my bloodstream found me in my advisor's office, crying like a baby, wiping snot from my face with my palm in absence of a tissue. Men don't keep tissues in their offices. At least babies are allowed to cry with their whole bodies, howling spasmodically until their needs are met. Us pseudo-adult women, socialized to know shame, are forced to cry in near-silence, chopping up our wavering speech with embarrassing guttural gasps.

Good news though: even if I magnificently botch this paper, even if I don't turn it in at all!, even if I am stuck taking classes in the summer, even if bills seem unpayable - there's not a thing I can fuck up that will keep spring from coming.

Ana drove to Athens tonight and we drank drinks and ate eats and laughed at things on the Internet. You guys, by conservative estimates, I am nearly two-thirds done with graduate school!

In graduate school drunk researching circles, the double-stemmed cherry is viewed as as a sign of good luck.

FINALLY. I am so sick of figurative bargains.

You have probably heard about Facebook's recent PR snafu with the ownership of information. They quickly retracted their policy of OWNING YOUR ONLINE IDENTITY FOREVER, but I'm pretty certain it's only a matter of time before they quietly reinstate it. It puzzles me how ANYONE will be able to run for public office fifteen years from now without pictures surfacing of them humping a life-size cut-out of Legolas from Lord of the Rings, teeth clenching a disposable red cup. I digress.

So yesterday, when I was trying to find that elusive crystal of focused productivity that hides somewhere in my brain stem, I decided to temporarily deactivate my Facebook account. I was annoyed with my tendency to sign in and absentmindedly click through pictures of tertiary acquaintances for a couple minutes before realizing what I was doing. Also. I was toying with the idea of applying for a job I'm not qualified for, but thought optimistically that hey, maybe just in case, I should make temporarily unavailable that fact that I list "riding my bike home drunk" as an Interest.

When I went to deactivate, all of a sudden I was met with a Come to Jesus message from Facebook: Think of what you're doing! They displayed photos of five friends that I was also tagged in. "Rita will miss you!" "Jon will miss you!" "You will no longer be able to keep in touch with your 461 friends!" Not only did Facebook select pictures of me and the friend together, but the five friends were actually close friends of mine! I'm convinced that they culled a sampling of all the people I interact with on the site with frequency, and from there chose friends that are tagged in photos with me. This was not a simple, careless effort. And its desperation and pleading led me to belly-laugh, in this house by myself, at its absurdity.

It reminded me of every time I tried to kill off "Characters". You see, my brother and I (who I don't think reads this, but if you do, Danny, I can make this story go away if it embarrasses you but I find it endearing! That is all!)played a game called "Characters" which involved twenty or so elaborate, absurd characters we'd invented. Each character had its own accompanying nuanced facial and speech indicators so it was obvious which person or creature you were being. We had a file on our parents' black-and-green-screen Macintosh that we frequently updated with information about each character as it unfolded in the improvised plots we acted out in the universe of the Characters, kind of like a Story Bible on a TV show. (Also, this is why you should just BUY YOUR KIDS A NINTENDO ALREADY, lest they become giant weirdos). I would occasionally get self-conscious of our imaginary realm and the imaginary people in it, "are we getting too old for this?", and have sit-down with Dan where I broke it to him easy that maybe playing Characters was immature. I think we were like 6 and 8, which in retrospect seems a reasonable age to doing this kind of thing.

To change my mind, Danny would craft a one-man farewell montage to make me feel bad for all the characters I was saying goodbye to forever. He'd act as all our characters, affecting them with a forlorn, disappointed expression, then wave a hand over his face saying "pshhh", to indicate their permanent dismissal, before changing into another sad character, etc. I think it's worth pointing out that this routine always made me cry and he would only be able to cycle through a few people before I was saying, "Okay, stop, stop, we can play Characters!!"

So, never you mind, Facebook, I'll be back to send links to Youtube videos to my friends in no time. Probably later tonight.

I feel I must channel my father's go-to admonishment from my childhood here.

Hey, Winter: "It's not funny, and it's not cute".

The seasons are a family, Winter, and your youngest-child, attention-pandering antics are really wearing everybody out. Sometimes being part of a family means taking a backseat while somebody else (like, I don't know, SPRING) gets to be celebrated. CAUSE WE'RE A FAMILY, THAT'S WHY. DON'T YOU SLAM THAT DOOR.

P.S. I lost track of the number of times I snapped out of a pensive thought-storm moment today to discover my thumbnail in my mouth.