ugh

I am running on empty.

I'm pretty sure this is my maximum output. I was going 100% last night and tonight its close to that but I'm losing steam really fast. I'm exhausted. After 13:00 tommorow I'm more or less done for the week...it couldn't get here any faster...

St.Valentine's Day

As cliche as it is...I never liked the Vday until I departed from singledom. This year was nice, flowers, dinner, gelato, and a shopping trip sometime this weekend. Love should be expressed everyday in a relationship but its nice to have an extra reason to celebrate. The biking tights I got for Matty fit so I was happy. Don't want him getting cold during his rides or races.

papers papers papers papers papers papers papers

Hopefully going to Western to see Matty race Apr. 8th and visiting Katie.

Playa del Carmen and relaxtion in eleven days.

I don't think I ever need to talk to him again. This is a temporal opinion, one I can honestly say won't last for another ten, twenty, fifty years. Currently, I don't care. Our relationship will never be the same even if we do try to reconcile and I don't really think its worth it. I've always (by always I mean since late high school) thought he was an arrogant, ignorant, close minded, racist, insensitive hypocrite anyways. It makes me anxious and frankly I'm too damn busy and otherwise enjoying my life far too much to allow him to get in the way of things. Some people just aren't worth it.

As for tonight...I have nothing I have to do. I should start my Shakespere paper, but I think I'll do my outline for Ren art, the reading for Women's lit, and maybe bust out some Latin. It'll free up Wednesday and Thursday night...so I can do my paper then. I really like Shakespere, I want to read a bunch of his plays this summer. I have a date with Brandie Thursday to go see Mrs. Henderson Presents. Yey.

Being the Partins' babysitter this summer isn't going to fly...I'll have to find some shitty job at home to supplement working at Art 101. Barnes and Noble would be ideal...ugh. Maybe I'll try to be a waitress and make some money. Damn it. I could get a job out here but they start when I'd be taking classes. The spring and summer makes me very very anxious.

Goodness.

Beheading the heads

"Authority over others is indivisible from the right of those others to have you climb the scaffold and do away with you, one day in the not too distant future...What authority would a leader have without the aura of this destiny around him, if you couldn't read it in his eyes, his sense of his end, for every second of his mandate? Civil insitutinos depend on this dual aspect of authority; no civilization has ever used any other system,"
-Beheading the Heads, Italo Calvino (from Numbers in the Dark)

I like Calvino's short stories, this one especially. It was an unfinished novel beginning that was to revolve around a society who killed their leaders at regular intervals, instead of waiting until they needed to be killed. It was interesting, the idea that it would refrain the the merely power hungry from seeking power.

Babysitting last night was fun. I love kids. They're hilarious and their dog is so cute. We played video games and foosball, and I'll admit that I lost and I was trying. The parents came home earlier than expected so we talked about the possiblitiy of me working for them this summer. I had a lovely phone conversation with Jendavis and got to watch Silence of the Lambs, which is pretty awesome. I really want to go see Matchpoint, Transamerica, and Mrs.Henderson presents. Maybe this week I'll make time to go.

Jen and I were talking about how we'd like a break but when we get time off, after about a day or so we get so anxious that we crave something to do. I guess that's why I'm bringing a bunch of books on spring break...I won't be able to just chill out. I guess a week of being idle by a pool would get boring after awhile though. I don't think people today really know how to relax. It seems sad that most households need two incomes to function. I think someone told me that maybe the Renaissance or maybe earlier...maybe later...but anyways at some point in time where there was a middle class, the average person did about four hours of work. Between families and jobs, there seems little time for anyone to really connect. Sure there are more methods to communicate but I think it promotes a wider not deeper experience. I think there's a lack of depth in most people, leading to unfulfilling relationships with lovers, friends, family, literature, music, etc. America seems unfulfilled. Desperately unhappy and not really knowing why.

Agenda: running, shower, paper on the Lais of Marie de France, Michelangelo reading, hopefully readig some more Calvino.

The extent of procrastination

I'm doing my normal Friday night thing...pretending to do homework, papers, and scholarship stuff and instead finding ways to entertain myself until Mattison gets off work. I like blogspot's layout, there's something clean about it.

I'm currently working on an outline for Italian Renaissance that I forgot to do for today mostly because I can't read a syllabus, I'm also enjoying the dulcet tones of Sufjan Stevens. I've slowly been rebuilding my music empire after the Christmas crash, but I mostly just want to get a bunch of stuff from Mattison in one fell swoop and not have to hunt every obscure piece of music down on teh internets. I really need to do the study abroad app tonight. They only take thirty one people to Florence and I would much rather be there than Rome, just because the Rome program would do nothing toward my majors. Blah. I hope I get in.

The weeks are passing faster and faster, it's getting a little ridiculous. Two weeks from now is spring break and I'll be sunning myself in Playa del Carmen with Mom and Grandma. I think I'll take down Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Tipping Point by...someone. I'm considering taking Salinger's Franny and Zooey just in case because I think I'll be sitting by a pool for a week reading...which is cool but I can devour words like it is my job (I'm hoping one day it's my job). I hope I can relax. Lately I've been finding myself way too worked up about this that and the other to really let go of everything.

Most things are at least settling down. I'm probably not handling them correctly but what can you do? I've got a life to live and I'm not about to get weighed down...which is a nice theory. I'm considering dropping my last name and just being Layne Ashley until I get married. It looks kinda cool. Maybe I'm taking this too far.

I wonder how one becomes a professor. A girl in my women's lit class told me she got accepted to do her master's in art buisness in London...that sounds fucking awesome. I want to go abroad. Maybe I'll decide to do art and not English and live in Florence or Rome for my masters...so many dreams. That's after I come back enriched from Peace Corps or Teach for America...

Too many degrees of freedom to know now what will happen.

I get to babysit tommorow night for my favorite family. I think I'll be their "household assistant" this summer in conjunction with working at Art 101. I need to make moneylike mad to help out with paying for the house next year (yey Adam, Bran, and Margaret), going abroad, travelling about Europe, and a ticket or two for summer trips to Baltimore. I saved some money because Ben Folds sold out so fast this morning and I didn't get tickets...a blessing in disguise perhaps.

Alright. Reading about Pope Julius and Raphael and doing all sorts of awesomenss.