Why do I never sleep the night before I travel?

Going home for three weeks. Well, Pittsburgh and home. I'll probably post from home, but that's the sitch. Later, folks.

International conspiracy / Making fun of college fashion.

You know how you work on a paper for a really long time and become committed to your topic even though after a certain point you realize you really should have written on something else? I now see that if I wanted to write about Colombia, I really should have focused on this:





PABLO ESCOBAR AND DANE COOK ARE THE SAME PERSON. That's right; the U.S. military didn't kill him. He hid out for ten years and then became a comedic pop culture icon in the United States. Bold move, Pablo, but I'm onto you.



Also, I posted this on Facebook already but couldn't resist also doing so here.


Does this not remind you of all the undergraduates in Ugg boots, stretch pants, and short puffy coats with huge hoods? Because it does me.

Graaaaaading.
<3.

Procrastination and photos of my apartment--for those who haven't been here.

What do blogging, baking, and laundry have in common? First, they are great ways to procrastinate. Also, I am doing all three of them right now.

Okay, Kevin made the pie. And he will be very upset if I do not give him his due credit. But I am watching it in the oven, so now going into the kitchen every five minutes is my responsibility. Oh no! I have to abandon my shitty project to tend to a pie! You can't ignore the dinging of the timer. It's very important. So is laundry. That constitues an every-35-minutes interruption. And then there's the blog, the final nail in productivity's coffin.

I hate this project. I hate this class. If I worked for the next two hours without stopping I would be done. But so strong is my aversion to working on it that I will likely make only sporadic progress spaced out over the next six hours, thus accomplishing the feat of letting this one minor thing ruin my day. That's how I roll.

Plus, I have to do laundry. And bake. And blog. Have to.

I finished my first term paper. It was called, "Multitemporality, Hybridity and Violence: Cinematic Identity in a Simultaneous Colombia." It was about how Colombian film both expresses the violence of its national identity and the anxieties of Latin America as a whole, which is both premodern and postmodern simultaneously. And how this hybrid identity tells us it is neither useful to talk about Latin America as a whole unit nor about nation-states as independent from regional influences. Yeah. It was kinda cool. I liked doing it.

And yes, I used the mandatory "_____, ______, and _______: Nonsensical Juxtaposition" titling format. That's Eric's joke, by the way. Look at me go, giving credit to other people. I felt I had to use this format for my first term paper. It's a rite of passage. Also, I thought up my title 2 minutes before printing and handing in the paper.

I should do another 15 minutes of work on my project. Then I will need a break, so I will come back and post the apartment pictures I keep promising. Ready, go.

And I'm back. I think three paragraphs, another load of laundry, and taking the pie out justifies my continuing the blog. Right. So where was I? Oh, right, pictures of my apartment. Here you go:


This is our badass living room. Note the badass hardwood floors and the badass fireplace and the badass built-in bookshelves. (You can't really see those, but they're on either side of the fireplace.)

This is another view of our badass living room. Note the badass bay windows and the badass curtains.

Yet another view of our living room. That glass door in the back leads to the study and the sun room.

This is our badass sun room. It has those windows on three sides, but I couldn't get them to fit in the picture. It's also got a lot of plants. We've only killed about half of them. Check out the sweet hanging pot that makes fuzzy pink caterpillars. It's called a chenille plant. It's badass.

This is our main hallway. To the right is our living room, study, and sun room. The doors on the left lead to our bedroom, library, and kitchen. I'm standing in the bathroom to take the picture. Kevin likes to slide down this hallway in his sock-feet, a la Risky Busines.

This is our bedroom. It's kind of plain. But all we do in there is sleep. I will decorate it next semester.

This is our "library." We had so many extra rooms we didn't know what to do with them, and this one became the miscellaneous room. It's not really the library. Most of our books are in the living room. But it has a sofa and a bookcase, our music, my photography supplies, and my clothes. I use the closets in here, and Kevin uses the ones in our bedroom.

This is our kitchen. It's my least favorite room. It doesn't match the rest of our apartment. It's like someone had an extra bucket of white paint and nowhere to use it. But it is spacious. And we're going to get a bird feeder for the window.

The bathroom. Claw-foot tub. Weird.

The study. Ahahaha, it is always this messy.

The end. Hope you enjoyed.

24 pages down; 6 to go.

Oh my god, I am so close to being done with my term paper. This is the part I hate. I have systematically worked around all the technicalities like citing, preferring instead to let my brilliance stream forth uninterrupted, pausing only to insert things like (CITE THIS LATER) and (WHERE THE HELL DID I READ THIS). Now I have to go back and fill all that shit in, and I don't wannnnnnaaaaa. Oh, and I also still have a chunk of it left to write, but it's the easy part. I even have a conclusion already. You might say, Hey. How do you have a conclusion when your paper's not done. I say, Fuck coherency. Better to take a bunch of extra shit that isn't really fitting in, throw it at the bottom, and call it a conclusion. Tah-dah! Jessie's guide to paper-writing.

I really wish I didn't have a full day of other things before this class tomorrow. I could use going to bed right now followed by five or six hours of work tomorrow. But alas, I teach and then have another class. So, boys and girls, what does that mean?

ALL-NIGHTER!

Also because I'm posting on my journal right now instead of working....WTF.

7 pages down, 20 to go.

Davita, in the process of opening her birthday card and spreading birthday cookie around the office like delicious confetti, found the following on the floor: a folded-in-half note, addressed to no one, that read...

It is in your best interest(s) to meet me upstairs in (3) 17-19 minutes.

*What's in (parentheses) had been crossed out with an X.

Where upstairs? Meet whom? What was wrong with 3 minutes? Why the specificity of 17-19 and why not just say 18? More importantly, what was happening upstairs?? It is now the office mystery.

It's sad that I think the middle of the day feels warm. The middle of the day today was 20 ("feels like" 12), as compared to the morning temperature of 6 ("feels like" -1). About 2pm it was downright balmy. I stopped clenching the muscles in my back.

And so begins the weekend of work. Term paper, ahoy!

Come on. Really?!

Time: 7:24 AM
Status: Sleepy, getting ready to teach
Temperature: 5
"Feels Like": -11

That's right. -11.

One more week of school. I can't wait to sleep in and watch movies.

Procrastination for dorks

Ohhhh, Megan. Screw you for getting me hooked on this website. Just a very few of my favorite words.

Dammit.

It's early.

Time: 7:43 AM
Currently: Getting ready to go to school allllll day.

Temperature: 5
"Feels Like": -4
Forecast: snow.

Wisconsin snow removal = D, in danger of failing.

Wisconsin is really disappointing me so far this winter. It snowed again on Friday--and I have to say, it freaked me out, because not only did I not see it snowing, but I also didn't even know it was supposed to snow. So I woke up on Friday morning, and as I was wandering through the apartment in my sleepy state, I noticed it was a bit brighter than usual. Because there was fresh snow everywhere. I have a feeling this will become normal.

So the point is, it only snowed 2-3 inches. But yet, TWO DAYS LATER, the side streets were still totally white. I fishtailed in Erinn's car (cover your ears, E, everything's fine) while driving to my super-secret Saturday morning thing.

Come on, Wisconsin. Aren't you supposed to be, like, the champ at this sort of thing? Isn't this kind of what you DO? Who do you think you are, Delaware? Get on it.

The real temperatures have been hovering around 25/15 (high/low), and the "feels like" temperatures at around 15/0. Here we go, winter.