Laughter Through Tears

Writing shitty love poetry in the AMs:

LIKE A BOSS.

Late last night I made the mistake of trying to read some of my old poetry.

All my tears.

Not in a good way, either.

It depressed me so much, I don't even feel like talking about commas, or metaphysics, or any of the other writerly thoughts I've entertained lately.

Yesterday (Sunday) after a long weekend of increasingly difficult breathing, I hauled ass to the emergency medical center. I saw a nurse and a doctor, got ventolin inhalation that made me shakey, and got a chest x-ray that showed no spots. By tonight (Monday) the inhalation has pretty much worn off, although I'm not quite as badly off as I was on Saturday, for example. Anyway, I only need to make it through tomorrow and then on Wednesday morning I get to convince an allergy doctor to prescribe me something that will let me sleep at night and function during the day.

I've been watching TV and reading Narnia fanfic and rewriting the DC universe in my head. Good times. Not that I won't be unbelievably grateful when I don't get tired just from standing, and can do things like go to the supermarket, cook a decent meal (something better than mac & cheese), go out with friends or, heaven forbid, get back on track with the Pilates. I've also (sadly) been too tired to write, which leaves me way behind on my writing goals. At least my schedule for the next semester is pretty much set, although I do have to figure out the research project oh noes.

My rib muscles hurt from coughing a bunch.

Whoops. I lied. I guess this story had a few more pages in it after all. I was rereading the beginning and it occurred to me that it made several promises that I hadn't kept, so I went back to the end and tried to figure out a way to make it less final. The scenes are short, but I'm on the fourth already and I think I might need a fifth and sixth. Eek. On the other hand, I got a surprise!supporting character who I love.

If anyone is reading these entries and curious about the story itself, junetide starts anonymous posting on the 21st, and reveals are sometime in July. I don't even want to say how many page it is (too many!) until then, because it's supposed to be a surprise.

For Shavuot it is a (relatively recent) tradition to eat lots of dairy products. I like this, because I love eating dairy and cooking with it, I do a lot better with it than with meat, and so sometimes I volunteer myself for holiday meal duties. Last night I made spaghetti in pesto sauce, a filo pie with cheese and onion, and fresh rolls with yeast. The pie recipe I improvised after not finding anything that was quite what I was looking for, and it came out great. The rolls were a pain because yeast has to rise overnight, and it was my first time baking with it. In the end they came out pretty good, though. Sadly, the pesto was under-spiced and thus too mild. Too bad, it smelled really great.

In other news, my junetide story has gotten completely out of hand. And I absolutely have to finish it this week as soon as possible, because I have two exams coming up for which the volume of material is absurd. The idea I came up with, it sounded like something I was up to. Only when I actually sat down to write, the story wouldn't go where I told it to. Man, the editing on this will be awful.

ETA: What the everloving fuck. My computer has sprouted the strangest bug. A whole bunch of programs just, like, swapped icons with each other. I could not figure out why there was a Sims icon on my taskbar, since I never pinned it there. I unpinned it, and it turns out that icon was leaving to Firefox, of all things. Adobe Reader has the MS Paint icon, MS Paint has something that looks like OpenOffice, what the fuck.

Dedicate a day to editing and polishing unfinished original fic.

Spend day writing nine pages of fanfic.

Apparently I've left my restraint in my other jeans, because I signed up for remix_goes_wild. Ignore the fact that I committed to anon fills, I just started a text adventure, I haven't started my help_japan fic, plus junetide for original fic and, oh yeah, didn't I sign up for mundane_bingo fifty thousand years ago?

Also I have a test Sunday, two lab reports due, it's the holidays etc. etc. non-writing obligations.

But no, no. What's really bothering me now? The fact that I don't have enough fandoms to offer, and maybe I should go through some of my old fic to see if it's still any good. (I'll let you in on a secret, most of it sort of blows.)

ETA: It got worse. For some reason I decided to look up my bingo square while I was reading up on translation initiation, and I'm pretty sure I've got a horizontal center for the Homestuck exiles, and a vertical for the exiles. I am even pretty sure I'll do a free square fill that includes both.

Holy shit! It's February!

My physiology exam is tomorrow morning. It's the next-to-last in this round, and after it's over I'm giving myself a short break before throwing myself into five days of x-treme biochemistry cramming. It's amazing how I can go from mostly pretty confident to feeling totally unprepared and shockingly ignorant in under an hour, often several times a day. I've learned I have to sort of just plow through it and accept the role of random chance in what topics the lecturers choose to focus on in the exam.

I have so much shit to do in terms of chores. I have so much non-chore shit I want to do but have been putting off. I haven't written in what feels like centuries. Not just the dropping of little vignettes with almost no editing, like my Homestuck ficlets. Real, honest-to-fuck writing that takes time and effort and produces discernibly awesome results. I want that. And movies, and parties, and meeting my friends just to sit in a coffee shop and gab like nosy poultry. And going places.

Anyway NC has 51 followers and I figure I'll make either chocolate balls or rice crispy treats to celebrate, but that's on Friday. First I have to do the stupid test and get some chores done, including doctor's appointments because I am getting sick of wheezing, and a well overdue package. Oh noes. Once that is over and done with, perhaps I'll read the actually fascinating articles for next semester's seminar?