the morning after...

Things I've learned lately:

• It's not really a good idea to gamble over a video game with a man who wants to write a dissertation on video game music. Because you might end up owing someone a meal at a restaurant. That is no small stake for a graduate student!!! Apparently my drunken memory concerning Donkey Kong is flawed. And other video games I played under the influence of various intoxicants in college. In my memory, I was so awesome!!! Go figure. For the record, when I get that super nintendo I will get all those Donkey Kong games and the whole world will see the bees that get mad and turn red. They exist; I know it. No matter how insane it sounds!!!


• I should really not wait until the last possible second to start papers. I'm getting a little bit better about this. I'm at least able to write papers about things I give a shit about now, and I've learned a lot in the last couple years about how to write good (or at least, better than shitty) papers, so that's good. But making myself write is hard. I'm terse in papers, and things never take up as much space as I want them to. Maybe I should just accept that and try to get the ideas across in my *special* terse way.


• Frozen hash browns are really never very good. At all. And to make up for my hash brown disappointment this morning, I think I'm going to have to make a hash brown cake Ruth Reichl-style (recipe in this book) very soon to make up for it. And I plan on using an entire stick of butter. Because I hear butter makes potatoes taste good.


• In the realm of knitting, I never finish anything. Or, I rarely finish anything. My mother reprimanded me over email last week about this. She's a good knitter. I taught her a couple of years ago, and I'm not sure if she's surpassed me skill-wise, but she's definitely produced more actual finished items than I have. I have knitting ADD. I get easily distracted by other yarns and patterns, I get halfway done with something and realize it's going to be itchy or boxy and ugly in some indescribable way, and so I tear it out. Or I let it sit around for years and years in a box in my bedroom, moving it from one apartment to the next (hey, half-finished knitwear weighs less than my millions of books, alright) until finally I rediscover it, with no emotional attachment to the work I've put into it, and tear it out to cannibalize the yarn. I'm like one of those insane artists who destroys all their work or something. Only my work isn't brilliant!