to color in the cold grey night

Jeez, sorry it's been weeks since my last update; work's been keeping me pretty busy/tired. As I may have mentioned, sometimes undergrads work in our lab as an independent study thing, and as of this quarter, I'm in charge of three of them. Since each is there for fifteen hours a week, I basically have to find twice as much work to do, and be able to outsource half of it according to their respective schedules. It's extremely taxing; after an initial period of stress and not knowing what to do, I got to be pretty on top of things, but man does it still take a lot out of me. It continues to get easier, though, so we'll see. For now, my sleep, eating, blogging, and everything else schedules are all still kind of screwy.

In keeping with my current erratic eating habits (and new toaster), I've been consuming a fair amount of toast, and have therefore accumulated a decent variety of toppings. My favorite is this English stuff called Lemon Curd, made from lemon, eggs, butter, and sugar. Eating it is a little bit of a struggle; as I stand there munching on my toast, I enjoy the taste, but remain hauntingly aware of just how perilously close it is to hollandaise. There is a special kind of angst associated with eating sweetened hollandaise on toast and liking it.

I still have the two packs of Tim Tams that Stuart sent me, and am thinking about throwing a coffee/tea(?)/hot chocolate related get-together next weekend so that people can help me eat them.

If I'm not back again this time tomorrow

Happy New Year, blog. I always sort of cringe at the idea of New Year's Resolutions. On the one hand, they appeal to my sense of self-improvement/loathing, but on the other, I'm not very good at accomplishing them. And when one knows that one has broken one's resolutions year after year, it seems sort of dishonest to continue setting them, as though maintaining some pretense that this time, one is finally going to get it right. I imagine this is what it must be like to be Jerry Fodor.
That said, a certain amount of self-deception is necessary to get by in the world, so I resolve to:
--Implement a system of getting my life in order (I already have some thoughts about this, but I won't bore you with the details (at least not right now))
--Develop the mental focus to adhere to this system, by engaging in 30 minutes of a relevant activity (including but not limited to yoga, running, and piano) no fewer than 5 days a week
--Study for and take all the necessary entrance exams to apply for school
--Read more books

Okay, now that that's out of the way, who wants to hear about my break? Christmas was nice, and even though family stuff can get pretty stressful, it wasn't so bad. Afterwards we went up to Big Bear, where we ate really well and Phaedra and I skied for a day and another day we all slid down a terrifyingly steep hill on inner tubes, which was pretty fun. Katie has been rapidly turning into a human person. Then I returned to La Jolla, and went to Matt and Sabrina's party yesterday, which was also fun.
Oh and the Sindome thing doesn't seem to be working out too well. I'm supposed to submit a character history, but when it comes up to the various admins for review, each one finds some new reason to reject it. For example, they claim that the history is supposed to be pretty open-ended so that my character will have room to grow, but then they tell me that I haven't spelled out my character's (deliberately ambiguous) family psychiatric history in sufficient medical detail for me to roleplay. What. I was afraid to log in after two weeks of this back-and-forth over minutiae, because I thought my free public housing would have lapsed by then and I'd be evicted and stabbed to death in the street, but apparently not. It's kind of disappointing in a way; it would have been such a good metaphor for my graduate career.