I can't handle alcohol the way I used to be able to. One beer and I'm pleasantly warm. Two, I want to curl up and go to sleep. I don't bother with liquor any more, really--it's too expensive and too easy to drink just a little more than I should and get dizzy (the point of dizziness happens much earlier these days, as well).
How did I get to be so domestic? Maybe it's just the after-effect of extreme busyness in my everyday life, and the feeling of laziness that sets in immediately upon returning home. Sometimes people ask me if I'd like to go out and, honestly, I'd rather have a nap. I've been more regimented about my schoolwork lately, especially this final research project which is taking over my life. I've set up a system of rewards for manageable tasks, such as, "You can go get a glass of orange juice once you've finished reading this scholarly article," or "When this outline is finished, you can watch another hour of the new BBC adaptation of Emma." I try to keep fruit and granola and yogurt in the house, because that's what I crave when I'm stressed, but if I'm especially hungry, I can be bothered to manage a passable tuna curry couscous. I ought to knit more--I've just sold another hat on my Etsy shop this weekend and one of the baristas at the coffee shop I was in this morning came over to mention that she loved my fingerless mittens and asked if I had a card so she could possibly order a pair as a gift. I was on a tear this winter when I had so little to do, but now my life consists mainly of sleep-coffee-work-research-sleep, so I might need to block out more time to make a significant dent in my stash before I have to move.
(And I just stopped typing for a full twenty minutes to look at intarsia charts on Ravelry. Nerd, nerd, nerd.)
The arduous process of job- and apartment-hunting has begun again, well in advance of my cross-country move. To do this week? Revise resume. Write cover letter. Send resume and cover letter to prospective employer. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. And as for apartment hunting, I'm talking to friends who either live in Seattle or know people who do, and hoping to find a room-share, because I never want to pay $800/month for an apartment again, as long as I can help it. At least not while buying cheese is an activity which demands a substantial amount of financial planning-ahead (cheese is expensive).
And in the meantime, there's this bloody research project to worry about. I have promised my adviser two to three completed lecture outlines by Thursday, which means that the next two nights are effectively blocked off for study-times. How do I work Libby Larsen's Try Me, Good King into a lecture about female composers in the 20th century? What are the notable features of Poulenc's Tel Jour, Telle Nuit? How on earth am I going to frame an argument that Hugo Wolf's Lieder are composed with minimalist sensibilities? At least identifying and cataloging Baroque ornaments won't be terribly complicated, and there's a substantial amount of research that's already been done on the construction of a 19th-century operatic Mad Scene. Good grief, academia. You're going to kill me.
The anxiety dreams are back, of course. Two nights ago, I dreamed that I murdered someone who had been harassing me on the street, and then had to hide the body by burning it. I am sure that my subconscious is trying to alert me to the fact that I feel trapped in a bad situation, and extremely limited in my abilities to deal with it. I woke up knowing that it was a dream, thank goodness, since I'm barely capable of crushing a spider (I usually try to trap them and free them outside, bleeding heart that I am), but the feeling of having been forced by circumstance into doing something far outside my moral code haunted me all day yesterday, and made it difficult to sleep. I don't know what I dreamed last night, but this morning my quilt was all askew, and one of my socks was missing. I keep saying to myself, you're standing on third and there's just ninety feet between you and home plate, all you need is a base hit to right field and you'll be able to make it home. The anxiety, and the dreams that inevitably accompany it, has an end-point, and the expiration date on this emotional mess is 3 July. So this is me, pushing through the final six weeks of my graduate degree and hoping to God that I don't lose my mind before I'm a Master of Music.
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