I write livejournal posts in my head while I bike around. About how much I love biking, about how lovely it is to bike through my neighborhood now that the leaves have come back in and the streets are green tunnels, how not only did I bike all through the winter for the first time but I can feel how much stronger I've gotten, how I call on my legs to get me up a hill that used to slay me, and they just do it: no pain, no slowing down, like I secretly got superpowers. I've never felt that before, except maybe from rowing. Such a lovely and unexpected thing to develop this more positive relationship with my body on the verge of turning 30, at the same time as a much less pleasant narrative with my body is also playing out.

Then I get home and have too much to do to ever sit down and actually write any of it out.

It's been one of the hardest years of my life. Coming back to school has been tougher than I ever imagined, and I've continued my downward spiral of handling stress less and less well, in the face of being blindly panicked at every second of every day about all the things I'm behind on, for months and months and months. And ( the nasty health news was just icing on the misery cake. )

But last week I finished the semester-long nightmare groupwork evaluation project. Last night I finished the fellowship research paper that's been hanging over me all year. I finally got a summer internship. Everything's falling away, one thing at a time. I never, ever felt like I'd get here.

I still have four finals to go -- ten more days in the pit -- and then -- and then! -- we're getting married! This month! I'm so happy and excited and astonished that it's so soon and worried about all the bits and pieces I haven't done yet but mostly I just can't wait. So especially excited to see all the amazing people coming in from out of town!

And then almost immediately afterward: I'm spending the summer in Indonesia, doing an amazing internship. I'm incredibly excited about the scope of work. I'm incredibly bummed about having to flee ~*~married life~*~ so quickly, and how lame and lonely I might get. It's just happened and it's all so huge I can't really think about it yet. One thing at a time.

I've been trying to figure out how to make next year different; this has been a ridiculous way to live, but the only way out was through. I had to fulfill my research fellowship conditions. I had to take the ball-busting required econ classes. I had to obsess over grades and extracurriculars because all my funding next year is dependent on them. (And there's a new program-wide grading curve, to make everything extra competitive!) I had to plan a wedding. Next year a lot of that will change, and I want to figure out how to set the boundaries that will mean I get my life back. I'm sorry, I know this is all so tedious to hear about (it's been tedious to live!). But I'm trying to be more deliberative about everything given this break in the clouds, in my ceaseless to do lists.

Tonight we had a study group at my house for my favorite class, the one where we get to talk about development theories and fascinating projects, and a bunch of my friends came over and we had my new fav pasta sauce and my go-to chocolate cake and laughed a lot with the doors open and the warm air coming in. That's what I want more of. Feeling okay in my own skin again. And maybe every once in a while having time to write an LJ post or two.

Whaaaat! Yes, it's that time again, when I spam you daily with a poem for the whole month of April. If you're not already on board this train and would like to be, here's how you can make that happen.

SIGN UP TO GET A DAILY EMAIL

Or alternately there is also:

an LJ feed
a Twitter account
a Tumblr and
an RSS feed

And here you can see the last seven(!) years worth of poems if that's your jam.

I have literally no idea how I'm going to pull this off this year with everything else on my plate, but I am ultra excited to get to spend time on poetry again. I have a good feeling about this one.

In a sudden flurry of organizing, I came across the notebook I used last March when I lucked into a poetry writing workshop with Thomas Lux. And thought I should write my notes up for posterity/those that like this sort of thing.

( Thomas Lux on unicorns, etc. )

Good weekend: party on Friday night, followed by dancing around the bus stop to keep warm in the frigid air. (Winter has shown up abruptly.) Yesterday I also made an amazing discovery, which requires ( backing up to explain that I'm a douchebag who spends far too much time hanging out in coffee shops ) I am going to move in and never leave.

Today I worked on my econ reading over French toast and new coffee, then we biked over to the farmer's market for eggs and apples and brussel sprouts and mushroom soup. I've spent the afternoon belatedly getting organized for the semester and cleaning up my desk (is anything nicer than a clean desk?), then we kicked the soccer ball around the playground behind the apartment in the cold and falling dark. And now: repurposing the leftovers from last night's homemade fish tacos for huevos rancheros.

In Louisville airport, where I started writing this, they kept wearily paging people who'd forgotten something somewhere in the airport. They also kept accidentally leaving the PA on while talking to each other. Kentucky is kind of adorable.

I was in Louisville because I just spent an awesome couple of days visiting annakovsky, talking every second and having a rad time. We managed to find the world's awesomest bridesmaid dress in under two hours (it has pockets! and a swingy skirt!) which freed us up to catch up on Portlandia and Daria and other important items. We also went into downtown Louisville, where I've never been, had lunch at a cafe with mason jars for glasses and then went to the Muhammad Ali Center, which was fantastic. I learned so much! I wanted to Wikipedia so much more! It was really well done. Plus we had brunch and hung out with her family and it was so relaxing and amazing.

The weekend before that in New York was also awesome. A and I spent Saturday afternoon and evening wandering all over the Village and lower Manhattan stumbling on things: the Housing Works Bookstore where I bought an Ursula K. LeGuin book (I am obsessed), an entire storefront dedicated to selling overpriced rice pudding, the MoMA store and Mango and an amazing dinner with an old friend from high school at a Croatian-Jewish restaurant. A perfect way to end and start a year. I'm going back to NYC for a school trip in a few weeks, but I want to go again for fun soon and spend the whole time in Brooklyn, I think. Brian Williams knows why.

And now I'm in Chapel Hill, where I've never been. A is here for a conference and I am here for the grits. And the sunshine oh god, the weather has been amazing this weekend. I think I may have actually gotten a sunburn. I've also managed to get my unprocessed emails (dating from July! augh) down from like 300 to 30 -- I'm racing against the clock to get caught up on everything before the new semester starts on Wednesday (oh god). I also just found one of those prohibitively expensive wool Icelandic sweaters for $11 in a thrift shop. Well played, North Carolina. I like college towns. I like Yelping my way through them and their used bookstores and fancy sandwiches and vintage stores. Although I do think I'm the only person in the whole town today not wearing that UNC blue, and that's not an exaggeration. It's like being the new-to-town outsider in a dystopic novel after the cult takeover.

And oh -- I haven't mentioned the best part of Christmas this year. I saw my brother at Thanksgiving, when he'd just finished reading Dune and was in the middle of On the Road (the Original Scroll version! "you get kind of anxious if you read it before bed because there are no breaks," he said), so I gave him Slaughterhouse Five, sine Vonnegut seemed to kind of straddle the divide between scifi and …. midcentury counterculture whatever. And he loved it so much he stayed up all night to finish it. The 100% best gift response possible. I remember being so impatient in elementary school for him to learn to read so we could talk about books together, and here we are now. (I also got him the first Octavian Nothing book, since he loved Johnny Tremain when we were kids, so we'll see how that goes over.)

Finally, speaking of books, a rec: The Reapers are the Angels was recced so wholeheartedly by so many awesome people (jolielaide, annakovsky, witling, care_says) that I started it on the plane and finished it in about a day. It's like a True Grit apocalypse: Mattie Ross fights zombies! Or as swmbo said, Buffy meets The Road. What was most delightful was the main character's worldview: if it's always been a zombie apocalypse for you, you spend much less time wringing your hands over it than everyone expects. (Tho' if you find grating the way people talk in True Grit or, say, O Brother Where Art Thou? or Firefly, it might irritate you similarly.) But man, I loved that awesome girl so much.

Anyway. I'm going to try posting more during January -- my lofty goal is once a week! -- inspired jointly by mouthsopen (Occupy LJ!), _swallow's January daily posting project, and a pact with annakovsky. If this entry's any indication, apparently I have a lot of unfocused things to say.

I'm in New York! We abruptly decided to take the bus down for a friend's NYE party, because we live in DC so we can totally do that kind of thing! And the bus ride gave me just enough time to pound this out before the end of the year.

End of year meme, year 9, disco party dance time!

( The navel gazes also. )

I love watching all of you come out of the woodwork to post this, too! Hurrah for our years, hurrah for the next one.

Are mp3 mix tapes out of date? Do we all just listen to Pandora all the time, like my brother who doesn't even own an mp3? Let's pretend that's not true, so I can post these badass tunes.

( Muzaks. )

How sad about Steve Jobs, eh? I know being sad over a dead celebrity (who was apparently kind of a jerk) is silly, but I remember the day we got our Apple IIGS with the clarity of a major life event: I was six and it had dust covers for each part, and that's really how everything began. (I … have the same kind of memory of the first time I saw an iPhone ad. ::coughNERD::) I feel like I did when Diana Wynne Jones died earlier this year; no more wonderful things from your brain? Really?

Other things: we signed the contract on a wedding site! Holy cow this is actually happening. We did a whirlwind visit of sites in Atlanta back in August, saw garden after expensive garden (and one antebellum house sadly mourning the fallen glory of the Confederacy: veto!), and as our very last stop found a super cool contemporary art museum that rents out their space. It's perfect: way more our speed, with lots of indoor and outdoor space so we can plan to be outside but have a backup in case of rain. I love it so much! And we finally managed to pick a date after navigating the unpleasant waters of extended family Bat Mitzvahs/Jewish holidays/Catholic holidays/my school schedule/my internship schedule. Everything's going down at the end of May. I am really excited, and really nervous.

School has been absolutely kicking my ass; the work load is unreal, far heavier than anywhere else I've gone. Luckily, I'm doing all right with the content in most of my classes. The exception is Trade, which is going to be the death of me. Having to spend, say, three full days on one problem set is not a good way to keep up on anything else. The water is up to my chin and midterms are coming. LUCKILY:

Magically and fantastically I have a four day weekend, which I know is going to fly by, but I am so unbelievably excited to have this time to catch up on homework-and-everything-else. The weather is amazing, finally, after a month of rain: warm and fall-crisp all at once. This morning I got some reading done in a sun-drenched coffee shop window, then -- I can't tell you how decadent this felt! -- went grocery shopping and did laundry and cleaned the kitchen. How very old I've become. Maybe I'll bake something. Before the two parties I've agreed to go to tonight, oh lord.

So! I'm in grad school now? This is roughly how the first week went:

Thursday: happy hour.
Friday: happy hour.
Weekend: all happy hours canceled on account of hurricane (remember that?)
Monday: happy hour.
Tuesday: happy hour.

Etc. Until my bloodstream was at least 50% beer. Then classes started, so it's been nose to the grindstone. ( Classes! )

Well, that got long. BUSY YEAR AHEAD etc.

On Friday I spent four hours at the ER in the middle of the night because I had what turned out to be a lovely case of iritis, which feels wonderfully similar to being stabbed in the eye. (Um, I realize it sounds ridiculous to go to the ER for an eye problem but the on-call campus doctor said to go in immediately. Also it hurt like a mofo.) Iritis means your immune system attacks your eye for no particular reason, and it's the second time I've had it. Hooray. The most likely cause is that it's just how my body reacts to stress, which means I have really got to start managing my stress levels better. I am so bad at this, even when there's nothing particularly worth stressing out about; it's become like a habit. (My current strategy, more or less.) So I'm soliciting suggestions: how do you guys process stress/get yourself to CHILL THE FUCK OUT?

**

In other news, I super love DC, even though I've only seen little pockets of it so far. But how it caters to my douchey ways! Land of microbrews and pour-over coffee! Cupcakes and empañadas! Nerdy people and flags I should probably recognize!

My commute is lovely: an 8 minute walk through my bougey neighborhood of embassies and gas lamps and tree-lined streets to Dupont Circle, then the 20 minute (free!) bus ride to campus. So strange to be on a campus again, and actually be part of it. I'm ferreting out good study spots and learning how to dodge undergrads.

I love love love living the pedestrian city life. The other day on my way home I accidentally bought a book of Franz Wright poetry for $5 and a loaf of bread as big as my head; just like the old old days commuting through Harvard Square.

God, this entry's gotten long, and I haven't even talked about the apartment! (It is fantastically located and fairly charming and incredibly small. Getting rid of furniture is currently the number one priority. Also the patio has rats.)

It's feeling like fall here: so melancholy! So exciting! Best of all it means time for pumpkin beer. And pumpkin everything else.

Livejournal, it is crucially important that I write this post today, because it's on this day an entire decade ago -- 10 years! -- that I joined the hallowed halls of LJ. Here's to the site that's seen me from 19 to 29, my home of homes on the vast plains of the internet. And cheers to all of you for still being around through DDoS attacks and the distractions of shiny new social networking platforms, the true, the proud, etc. Y'all are my Tom Riddle's diary: a supportive, probably evil companion for pouring out my heart and soul.

TO CELEBRATE, drop me a comment and I'll give you something in return. Maybe a gif or an mp3 or a link I think you'll like. Maybe some old gum.


IN OTHER NEWS, I went to five more countries, moved back to the States, found an amazing apartment in the dead center of DC, and maybe locked down a wedding site in Atlanta, all in the last three weeks. COLLAPSE.

And oh, at last at last at last today got a new computer, because my old one's hard drive failed, oh, a month ago. A MONTH, GUYS. I HAVEN'T HAD A COMPUTER FOR A MONTH. I'm sorry, I should probably have put that behind a cut tag for its graphic nature.

Ten years, guys. Who knew.

The things that have surprised me the most about Israel are how small it is, and how complex.  It's one thing to know the whole country is the size of New Jersey, but it's another to drive almost the length of it in half a day.  In the north we could easily see towns in Jordan and Syria just on the next set of hills.  And everything's more full of shades of gray than the news makes it sounds: Muslim and Jewish families having cookouts side by side in the park along the water in Tel Aviv, the Arab-owned restaurants with amazing hummus and friendly owners, Muslim families staying at the kibbutz with us in the Upper Galilee, Christian Palestinians with Jerusalem residency cards working in the West Bank, Lebanese families with Israeli citizenship since the borders changed in the '60s, the Armenian and Yemeni neighborhoods, and on and on.  Nothing is clear cut.  Not to mention all the German, Russian, Arabic, French and English everywhere.

This is going to be very long, because I want to have it written down somewhere.  ( The day-by-day, two weeks in Israel, unedited. )

And now I have GOT to stop writing and go to bed for a couple of hours because we're leaving at 1am for the flight back to Europe.  I'm so glad I wrote this all down, though.  I don't want to forget any of it.

How how how is this my last week in Paris already? It's also the fourth and final week of my French classes, which have turned out to be brutally hard. They put me in the advanced class, and it's been truly overwhelming and discouraging. It's too bad, because I've always loved French, I did all those years of it sheerly for fun like a Hermione Granger of the passé composé, and lately it just makes me feel sick and frustrated. It's made it very evident I'm not going to be able to test out of French classes when I start school this fall, so my schedule's going to be that much harder on top of all the finance and stats and whatnot. I want so badly to be good! But it's so hard!

On the plus side, I can feel myself getting every-so-slowly better on every front: both my listening comprehension and my reading have definitely improved, plus I'm way less petrified of having to strike up everyday conversations. If I had a couple more months here I think I'd be flying. Ah well; if nothing else, it's screwed my resolve to the sticking point.

On the other plus side, it's still Paris, and we've been running rampant over the city with the afternoons and weekends, details I need to write down. This weekend cheapmetaphor came to visit and we went back to the cave of a sangria bar where we went together the first time I came to Paris, almost a decade ago. Also featured: Mexican food, Italian food, picnicking on cheese and bread and raspberries and beer, wandering through the Marais and the Tuileries and making fun of TNG. The good good life.

( Random Paris Instagrams. )

We're here through Bastille Day on Thursday, and then we take off Friday. We've finally pinned down the rest of the summer:

Geneva
Israel
Oslo
Berlin
Copenhagen

! And then home: we've moved up our tickets to return a week earlier. I'm sad to lose the travel time, but hugely relieved to have more time to apartment hunt in DC and swing back through Atlanta and do other important life minutiae before school starts.

I'm surprised how much I'm looking forward to getting to DC and settling into the everyday routines of life: not just all the exciting new school stuff, but I want to grow herbs and make soup and eat more apples and cook with lentils and bake bread and read books. 85% of my daydreams are food-related, apparently.