#fucking off to the bosom of the family on tuesday wish me luck

[blysse-and-blunder]

in lieu of a housemas holiday gathering

7:50pm, sunday, dec 12, 2021

am i 100% ready to fly home on tuesday? no! am i spending today entirely on recreational movies / dnd / meals with friends? yeah.

reading god i have no idea what i've been reading. trying to continue and finish the sunne in splendour, there's a slightly weird romantic scandal subplot happening. also trying to keep an eye on the ebook loan of terry pratchett's sourcery, which i got as a filler comfort read for bedtimes.

watching been watching more succession (up to 2.03 so far, sorry @raulsparza! will alert you when i hit 2.04!) and wheel of time (that 1.05 made me so emosh wtf), but no thoughts on these apart from the continued enjoyment. we made our housemate who hadn't seen it watch the grand budapest hotel with us today. it's always so interesting to revisit things you first saw years and years ago, and frankly this held up for me in a lot of ways-- the twee aesthetic combined with sudden irreverent or wry or absurd or dark humor is, like, my catnip. this remains a moment of delight:

"You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant... . . ...oh, fuck it."

listening revisiting some old playlists from the last two years which are rich in stomp 'n holler and new americana and shit, because they feel like old friends and also get my energy up without distracting me too much. having the worst time trying to track down whatever song contains a certain line about frames of mind-- this is the problem with shuffle/spotify radio suggestions-- but this ivan & alyosha song has been speaking to me this week a lot, the group-sing vibe in the chorus, the high-energy combined with the jaunty (and arguably kinda well-adjusted attitude to failure) in the lyrics "searching for my trouble, but my trouble finds me/ everybody breaks, everybody breaks, everybody breaks sometime" have just lately been very good to me, personally.

playing i'm literally at dnd right now, and while we've been in the same combat for three sessions and are taking hours to fight through some draugr, i never laugh harder than i do with these people. it's the last time we'll be able to play in person for probably a month (maybe longer bc omicron hahahahaha fuck) and it's...it's good.

making i said earlier today 'i've sort of gotten off the baking train,' and my housemate was like '... you literally made a pie this week.' and i was like :shocked pikachu face: oh yeah. i did do that! it honestly didn't feel like it counted in my head, because it was so little effort. i had frozen pastry ready from thanksgiving, and (i discovered) frozen pie filling leftover from the summer. and i was wrangling student participation grades and mourning the possibility of having to fail some lovely folks because they hadn't submitted their shit, and the best answer to this did seem to be to make pie about it. which was great, because then there was strawberry-rhubarb pie in the chill of december, a glow of warmth and breath of summer.

working on three more projects in one class to grade, probably 20 essays in the other one. four late essays already graded, 40+ participation/comprehension grades already entered, which only took like 10 hours because the busy work system worked out by this prof should be outlawed by the geneva convention tbh.... but one way or another it's almost over!! i have a three+ hour flight on tuesday to spend grading, and...i would ideally get my diss proposal sent to the faculty concerned before i take off fuuuuuuuuck but that's a problem for monday me. i do feel like the high intensity switch flipped on wednesday last week, where i stopped panicking and started just... going, and if that keeps up at least until the end of the week, i'll be so fucking grateful.