wasted days

I go through these phases where I just listen to Modest Mouse and want to sleep all the time. I really wish I could indulge that in that desire; I don’t want to do most of the stuff I’m doing right now. I did spend some quality time Friday night making a kick-ass Flash app, though. If Micah and I have our way, Agora Days is going to look awesome this year. It’s not clear yet what we’re going to be able to pull off, though.

College applications are getting tedious. I would happily fill out my name and extracurricular activities over and over again, but I don’t really want to think about essays. I have to do enough thinking as it is, more thinking is not what the doctor ordered. Rather, more time to read. That would be all right. A happy medium of intellectual activity.

In the meantime, however, I busy myself building things for the play (spent over eight hours working, mostly just building two doorflast [which should not take so long, but inexplicably do]) and amusing myself at home in the evenings. It’s not a bad way to live, really. Just need a little bit more time. But I’m not complaining, everything gets done. Yea, not complaining.

Whoa! Financial aid stuff was due two days ago! Shit!

And I haven’t yet even bought the English book. The play’s going better than expected, though, and things aren’t so hectic. Just a little cramped. It’s going to be a crazy weekend. Friday night I’ll try to fix the Books to Prisoners inventory system and/or get something done for Agora days; Saturday it’s off to the wireless network, then spending four hours building doors for the play. Saturday night, perhaps something fun? If it is permitted. And Sunday, well. I don’t think that far in advance.

background noise: the mountain goats, lots of it!

p.s. and, if only I could slow down, I would notice how absolutely beautiful it’s been lately. The trees are turning and I’m spending all my time inside; it’s no good.

Aaah things are happening! No one knows their lines for the play, but that’s fine and I expected as much. I am going to attempt to learn act II in one fell swoop tonight. I do not have high hopes for success.

In other news, I still spend most of my time at the house, except when I’m working. But the result of that is that I have a ladder in the car that I don’t know what to do with and my effectiveness is limited.

Despite all of this, however, things are looking up. Up up up. I realized today that I don’t really have nerves anymore, they’re sort of shot. I still get nervous and react to things, of course, but I used to worry much more than I do now, and used to panic much more easily. I am liking this new Hakuna Mattata way of living, but it does mean that some things that used to be little thrills no longer really are. But so it goes.

Well Northwestern was nice enough, but cold, so cold! I want very badly to move to California. It is unfortunate that the way things are looking, the chances of that are not too high. So it goes, I suppose.

On the bright side, I have a lot of old Mountain Goats CD’s to keep me company. I’m messing around with the Agora layout more, trying to make the page title dynamically load into images. It worked last year, I’ve just got work out the details for this year’s layout.

Speaking of which, keep your eyes peeled, because by the end of the weekend that should be going up!

Today I’m going to Northwestern to prove to them that I am, in fact, interested in their fine university. I have other ways I would rather spend the last day of the four day weekend (not least of which doing all the homework I ignored for the past three days), but no matter. I’m a little disgusted with the whole college process at the moment, but hopefully at least the weather will be pretty and the campus will be nice. If 60 degrees and partly cloudy can be called pretty.

On the bright side, things are progressing nicely with Agora Days - I’ve taught myself the beginnings of Flash ActionScript, mostly at this point just to mess around and make a navigation bar. But I have an idea for a way to use it in the larger project, and if it works its going to be absolutely awesome. It’s probably going to take me weeks to get it working, though. This weekend all I want to get done is a layout.

But the driveway’s clear
You pray for silence
Step into my quiet violence
Do you see pictures in my words?
Standing still, I’m moving faster
Searching out my next disaster
You’re gonna get what you deserve

I suppose there is a degree of romanticism in my exile. I sit at home all the time, teaching myself things. I finished All the King’s Men, and I think today I might start the last Harry Potter book, which I never got around to. I slept for ten hours, worked on all the projects I’ve been neglecting, and now I’ll take a shower and go to the Brown meeting (for somewhat dubious reasons). One of these days I’ll write a book, and then I’ll be happy with myself.

so instead I spend my days reading “Annabelle Lee” and watching the geese above the fields and feeling my spirits rise and fall like waves against the shore in our kingdom by the sea.

Ah! How the time flies.

I have found myself slipping casually between the cogs of uncetainty and indifference, resulting in an almost blissful kind of uncaring. I dare not call it apathy. My days are occupied thinking about where the fuck I’m going to go to college (early action Stanford, and another list that I might intimate later on if the whimsy strikes me). My weekends are spent working and delicately seeking out oblivion in small quantities. My evenings are spent doing nothing, because I get home and want to go to sleep immediately (put off for a couple of hours only by miscellaneous tasks and idle chat). I feel a little warm on the inside — at once many things, all negating one another and leaving behind only the trace of themselves in some heat.

Luckily, however, I can still ramble like a champ.

With my probing psychological excursion finished for the time being, a list of places that I could probably spend four years:

• Stanford
• Dartmouth
• Princeton
• Brown
• Northwestern
• Pomona
• Oberlin
• Haverford
• Amherst
• Yale

What does one do with such a list, which I scrawled and folded and carried around in my pocket for several days? I don’t know.

background noise: “The Middle (Acoustic)” Jimmy Eats World [no kidding]