#anyway. did anyone need this post? probably not. what is a perblog for if not luxuriant omphaloskepsis tho.

[aeide-thea]

like [in re plastic article i posted earlier] i'm currently wearing one of my fave tees that's, god, i don't know, a good five years old now anyway, and it's a triblend which means it's got some polyester in it, and while i've appreciated the way that's enabled it to straddle use cases over the years—e.g. (1) bicycling to class and then (2) looking like a normal person once i got there—at this point it's starting to pill a little, as poly always inevitably does, and getting rattier and less comfy as a result? and like, i guess i'll try using a fabric shaver on it and see if that helps some, but like. not an issue with 100% cotton tees!

[aeide-thea]

i probably should have written this post earlier, i.e. before i had more of a bottle of rosé than i’m quite willing to admit to, but! i did not! so you are getting the not-not-drunk version! on the bright side alcohol’d me is very nice, mostly they are just Friendly and Happy albeit a little overinclined 2 inform you about how sad it is that they and A— are passing like ships in the night, that is, without any kissing...

anyway! today was a Day omg. i was very stupidly nervous about my german exam for reasons unbeknownst to man or otherwise nonbinary person, except i guess that i wanted it to be painfully apparent to A— that i’m good at this, which, uh, if he didn’t know that already he’s kind of oblivious and also my quickness has yet to cause him to be overwhelmed with love for me, why is that honestly! but anyway i was pretty excruciatingly jittery, like, we were all sitting in our formal rows and there were Extra Non-Classmate Strangers joining us for the proficiency exam and like, everyone else was being quiet and normal and i was, like, making dramatic woeful faces at C and telling her to pat my head and tell me it was going to be okay, which, jesus, self, calm yr tits! unclear if A— was observing this, he was there at this point but also my stratagem has mostly been to assiduously avoid any chance of eye contact in case my face somehow says ‘hello i think yr beautiful and would like to grammatically bump faces,’ which frankly seems like a likely thing for my face to say! anyway we did our exam and like, babe, i love you but also when you write a thing and then go back and add an introduction you’re supposed to make sure that e.g. people are introduced the first time we encounter them, rather than the second? and not repeat yourself? so that was a little lol. anyway we had a choice of two passages and i went with the one that was about wolfram eilenberger’s zeit der zauberer, which is not important except that the ““conclusion”” on this passage was, like, ‘and then mussolini and hitler leveraged the economic and political crises of the period—’ [at which point a nice friendly dazu compound, hello, how nice to encounter you here in the home stretch when i thought perhaps i might be free and clear!] ‘—to build up their movements, which led to fascism/nazism,’ the end. dear A—, i am very bad at conclusions but i’m pretty sure that was not one! anyway that was the first mention of mussolini in my day but not the last.

then C and i went to the grad cafe, which, sadness, who is going to let me into the grad cafe now! i will have to rub elbows with the general populace once more! which is especially a thing bc holy shit is campus swarming with literal high schoolers rn, i mean, good for them but also i have a solid decade on these children and it makes me feel ancient, remember when i was this ignorant of how much the world was going to bruise me!

anyway we went to the grad cafe and hung out with C’s boyfriend L for a while, who is like. a quiet really lovely italian potato? jesus i come up with the worst most insulting similes to describe people i actually like, i said to C this morning that i was the neurotic cheetah friend and she was the sensible dog friend which i meant as, like, ‘yikes i need a keeper, i am very grateful for yr well-adjustedness!’ but i feel like was probably kind of insulting although i apologized later and she was like, honestly i’m just amused! you were so zany this morning! which. yes. yes i was.

anyway we hung out and did postmortems on our respective exams and then went for lunch at Local Thai Place where i haven’t been since... maybe since i brought R there? is that possible? anyway in a long time, so that was kinda nice.

and then A emailed me to say,

A—

which like, sry abt the humblebrag or whatever but i’m just. how fucking typical honestly, jesus. i’m so absurd.

also he wants a ~contact in my department~ bc literally everyone else in the class was a grad student who needed to pass the reading proficiency exam as part of their degree requirements, except, uh, i am a baby dork who just thought it would be interesting, so i don’t think there’s anyone to notify particularly! i mean i guess he could let Prof V— know, but she would definitely be like, dot dot dot thanks, glad K— is out there jumping through random unnecessary hoops??? or, you know, whatever the equivalent of that is in german, since she’s also a native speaker, so presumably they would conduct this entire exchange auf deutsch...

anyway then i had more class, whoop whoop, which for my sins was a second class on the fucking aeneid, goddamn, i have spent a truly staggering amount of time being lectured on that poem considering how much i hate it! i mean parts of it are flooringly good and parts of it are workmanlike as shit and parts of it are shamefully propagandistic and the latter two aspects make me real frustrated with it even though the first aspect is also very real. anyway i decline to let drunkme have the final word on vergil so like, maybe someday there will be more things to say. although also my main feeling about him is intense apathy so also there might not be.

but so anyway that led to the second mention of fascism in my day, bc the fasces came up somewhere and then we got into Modern Reception of Same, which admittedly in diesen finsteren Zeiten is not nearly as remarkable as it might once have been, but i still was, idk, amused that my life had arranged itself in such a way that both my classes raised the topic! although i guess maybe a different way of saying that is, thank god classicists and germanists are acknowledging some historical culpability here, this is kind of an important time to be doing that...

but anyway back to some more frivolous notes, bc at the end of the day this is a perblog—

as i said to E earlier, i retract any aspersions i had previously cast on my baby mythology classmates, one of them asked for an extension on the paper and so we all got one, thank fuckin god honestly; and

A— emailed me as [different subset of my legal name than i have been using in that class all semester] and i really don’t know what to make of that, like, in the system i’m [full legal name] and my email is [firstinitial lastname] so unless he’s been doin some pokin on facebook or something i d fuckin k honestly! A Mystery! probably the actual answer is that he has paid insufficient attention to get my name right but also he got it right in class on multiple occasions so ????

anyway on that note i am going to end this inexcusably long post so i can go to bed and then study a bunch and then take another exam tomorrow evening and then help Baby Sister move and then somehow produce a dauntingly-long paper out of currently-nothing, yikes yikes yikes! 

in the meantime we can all take bets on whether A— will give me the A+ that quite frankly my disgusting aptitude and enthusiasm deserve, or the significantly more dubious grade that my total failure to hand in any of the more boring assignments has technically probably consigned me to... i mean, to be clear, the grade is not remotely important! except for the part where i'm obviously going to use it to decide whether he liked me at all, because that’s obviously what grades mean! welcome to this embarrassing illustration of the ways in which my brain is in certain ways very good but also in other ways very very crazy!