Yo, I'mma Let You Finish.

Boom! It's early morning again and I've unwittingly picked that same sticky keyboard that I used here at the library a couple posts ago. I can tell because of the distinctly stubborn attitude borne me by the letter "o." If I'm wrong and it was another letter, or this never happened at all, I cannot recall my words. But I think my habit of pounding the "o" will translate pretty soon to increased vocal intensity on that letter as well. It's not a speech impediment; it's a speech enhancement.

I made a budget last night to let me save up for my first yacht. All I have to do is obtain a yacht, and I'm done. I also made a daily living budget, which I am heroically choosing to eschew for the moment because I really want a brownie from the vending machine. I'll be getting that a little later today. Lap of luxury, my friends. All it takes is reckless disregard for financial planning.

I'm just kidding. There's no way I'm touching that brownie. No matter its predilection for instilling a pre-diabetic lifestyle. In fact, dare I say because of that predilection? Indeed I daren't. I know the brownie in question reads this blog. You can't be too careful. Although I guess talking about this defeats that purpose.

There's a reasonably famous young lady, renowned as a pop-country crossover sensation who treats men the same way I treat the aforementioned brownies. She sends me texts and messages and voicemails all day long, and it's really awkward. I mean, we had our chance. Please, just move on. Hush; it'll be better for everyone if we just went our separate ways: you to your public misery, and me to my relative obscurity, maintained despite my sensational rise to fame a week ago after I saved that metropolitan area from that Doomsday device. Secret identities. Crucial.

Happy Best Day of the Week.

Bam. Week over, Saturday commenced. And just like that, the land of hyper-fructose be-corn-syrup-ed breakfast cereals and cartoon marathons is my domain. I formally renounce my claim to these noble traditions of ancient date, however, in lieu of my need to do laundry and a little homework.

But Saturday is Saturday. That can never be taken away from us.

That's... actually all I have to contribute at the moment. Be grateful you even got a single word out of me. It's Saturday, friends.

Let's Get This Started.

All right Internet, let's do this.

I walked up to campus today, apparently, with the largest section of my backpack zipped wide open like the Great Pit of Carkoon. Not a big deal, since all of my textbooks and notebooks were in that pocket. If they'd fallen out I would have been revealed for the naive fool I am. The only thing that would have kept me from looking like a common freshman (note to futurity, and in particular my numerous descendents: I have real derision for neither the term nor the embodiment of "the freshman," and you kids are going to do great at college)—that side note, I dare say, was long enough to warrant starting over from the beginning. The only thing that would have kept me from looking like a common freshman (remember our talk?) would be my complacency as I walked away from the piles of books and study materials on the ground. A book's a book's a book, and I could check out a baker's dozen of a baker's dozen at the school library.

Fun fact, though, there's a collection agency out against me from the local public library. Because of some hefty fines I incurred over the summer from checking out two bakers' dozens (note the apostrophe; these are two individual bakers we're talking about here) of books and keeping them a couple baker's dozens (this post is a syntactic nightmare; same baker here) of days late. That is not a joke, but you'll think it is, so I'm fine disclosing that so openly at the moment.

In case this is used in a court of law: Your Honor, it was the stenographer.

My Ore, My Wood, Migraine.

Yesterday was one of those unique days where I come home at the end of the day with a spot of migraine, so I take some medicine and put in some silly-looking earplugs and conk out until the early morning hours. The later morning hours would have been preferable, but I was so wide awake (and thankfully devoid of migraine) that I went to go get groceries before my roommates were even awake.

Skee-wompus: the state of my internal clock as a result.

There is the most obnoxious ad on the radio for McDonald's. I feel it's the only ad they ever play, all day long. It's like I'm being held hostage for my custom; if I get some chicken nuggets, maybe they'll take it off the air. Paying for ad-free radio or appreciating the monetarily-free radio are not valid options.

Kind of a Live-Blogging Experience.

So that was conference. I've decided to spend the rest of the sessions alone, because it's usually a pretty private experience. Once I went up and watched it somewhere it was broadcast without any other people there (that I knew), and I just loved it. It was the "parable of the pickle" one. Very memorable; I'm going to try to do that for the rest of this conference, and probably some of most conferences in the future alone too. You know, except for kids and a wife. But I'm going to go ahead and cross that bridge if I get to it.

Fine, you caught me. When.

I feel like the commercials right after the broadcast are all using cultural celebrities and slightly quoting adapted scripture. Is this our culture's Super Bowl? I wonder how much it would cost to advertise on this channel at this state at this time of year.

Was that Simon Cowell? No, it wasn't. But one day. One day.

It's Like I'm Not Even There.

It's been another one of those days, folks. You know, the kind where every station on the radio is either playing commercials or Bruno Mars. But this too shall pass.

Life is actually literally fabulous. And I don't have anything to say. I'm going to have many, many slices of pizza tonight for dinner. I'm gainfully employed at a secret job I love, and I'm on track to graduate in my field of choice within a year. Also lots of stuff is neat, and such.

Onto the two most enraging points of news of my life at the moment. Who knew so much joy could be unraveled by one rogue fly? I've killed ten in the last week or so, thanks to roommates that don't appreciate the consequences of having the door open all day just because it's "beautiful outside." (Yes, the italics were to indicate a thinly-veiled threat. I guess the italics themselves were revealing the already thin veil, rendering it even thinner. Thinner, if at all existent. So the italics may have altogether eliminated the veil. So if there's no veil, and it's obvious, why do I have italics there to highlight the veil? Is that a Catch-22? Did I just crash existence?)

I promised you two annoying things. Here's the other one: the "o" key on this keyboard is sticking. I think the gentleman computing adjacent to me must think I keep emphatically concluding arguments on extreme political forums. Which may not be a bad idea: I just need to find some politically relevant words ending in "o" that I can enlist as calls to action. Politico! Go! Edgar Allen Po [sic]!

Cough, Cough, Sneeze, Sniffle.

I just read this quote and I loved it. A brief search for its authorship returned either confusing or disputed results, so I'm just going to quote it and leave the detective work to you, my friends: "Days may smile and may not; but you can smile anytime. Just smile." Note that this is with my own adapted punctuation. I didn't like the original's punctuation the way I found it. If I'm to believe that Unknown truly wrote it, I don't feel so irresponsible changing it to my whims.

It's obviously been quite some time since I've written here. Some highlights of the last month or so involve supernova-inducing stress-related stomachaches, the the breakage or loss and replacement or recovery of nearly all of my electronics, and I made brownies on Monday. They were to take to an activity, but I didn't bring a fork or anything so they stuck to the pan. My compatriots were good sports about it, though.

Can I say, I love this weather? For some reason, the darker, danker, wetter, and more miserable the weather appears, the happier I am. Maybe I'm some kind of meteorological misogynist, where I enjoy watching the weather suffer. I don't know if I'm allowed to use misogyny to refer to ill-will toward anything but women. I feel like I've heard it that way, but then, I may be making that up. That was alliteration a few sentences back, folks. Look it up.

I also love being sick. That's a little bit of a joke. But between this weather and coming down with a cold, I do feel slightly more justified ending my grueling days on the couch covered in blankets watching Netflix and drinking hot chocolate.

That's just fifteen hours away now. Just like the Little Engine that Could, I could get going and chug along all day through arduous adversity, or I could go back to sleep now and wake up when I wake up. I'll let you know my decision when I wake up, I guess.

When All of a Sudden.

So there I was. Relaxing happily at home and having a spot of vacation in between terms. Swimming in the pool. Watching whole seasons of TV shows. Eating chocolate things. Perfect.

Then, flash! and I'm back at school. It was short-lived but utterly necessary. Now it's time to take my last pure breath while the memory of peacetime survives before I plunge into a three-term series of super-semesters.

This morning I had two slices of bread with butter spread and strawberry jam on them. How many more twos of slices of bread with butter spread and strawberry jam on them will I start my days with before I graduate? I'm beginning the count. I'll get back to you a few months shy of a year from now.

Also. There's this TV show in its last season that's going on right now, and I am utterly nailing the plot's twists and turns with my predictions. I am metaphorically ablaze here.

I'm a Survivor.

Heavens to Murgatroyd, man, but I am exhausted. It's hard work trying to relax when you're predisposed to panic at all times. And no, I did not know the proper spelling for Murgatroyd before I spelled it just there. Nobody's perfect. Well. Almost nobody.

I just interviewed a world-famous violinist I've seen in concert several times, and whom I admire greatly. "Exhausted" is the word for how I feel just now after having hung up and sending a thank-you note to his publicist. (See, Mom and Dad did teach me some manners. It just takes extraordinary circumstances to yield any fruit.) I prepare for all interviews basically the same way: I have some ideas for questions in my head, I read everything there is to read about the person and their field as a general overview, I see if there are any new or revised ideas for questions I've thought of while researching, and then I write out several dozen questions for them, and rewrite them several times.

It's like training for an interview that way, so that when I'm overwhelmed by the glow of my subject's sheer fame, my mouth can form the questions my mind cannot. Then, once we're on the phone, I start naturally and kind of navigate the questions I want to ask organically from there. That way I can deviate and ask new questions as they come up, and I have a good feel for the overview of the interview. It always has a really casual feel to it and I really enjoy talking to them. It's a generally good experience and I'm really grateful. Apparently Eisenhower once said something to the effect that D-Day went nothing as planned within ten seconds of its commencement, but it wouldn't have worked without the planning process, even though the plans themselves were rendered useless. It's kind of like that.

Yes, well, this time I basically just felt like an idiot. Any time I asked a question, I basically mouthed, "What the heck?!" to myself while squinting my eyes really hard and bracing myself for some kind of physical reprimand. I would squish three unrelated questions together whenever I looked at my notes because I just couldn't handle the agony of trying to maintain even an ostensibly lucid facade. (In case you have a silly image in your mind, it was a phone interview. I wonder if he's going to start reading my blog when it's famous in the future, look back on this, and have a whole different view on things?) It's like a slug trying to take a nap inside a salt lick and pretend it's no big deal. It's more like a single kelp among zillions trying to communicate with the whale by whom he's just been ingested. (Do kelp have gender? I don't know. But I do.) (Do those analogies represent the feelings I had? Don't ask me now. Not right now.)

I don't know when in human evolution our mental self-sufficiency was selected to be abandoned in times of social panic, but I'm calling shenanigans on it having anything remotely to do with my social or biological fitness.

Anyway, I'm just unwinding now. That might have been a smidgen hyperbolic, but there it is, on the record, for the world to see. And that's how facts are made. I was literally kelp earlier today. Dispute me. I defy you.

I Have Never Been Hungrier.

I had a crappy (sorry, there's that PG rating rearing its ugly head again) week this week, due mostly to being overwhelmed by my frankly overwhelming capacity for failure. It's times like these when I unfortunately turn most to video games and stomachaches for my solace. I say unfortunately because it doesn't really do much to alleviate the craptitude of the time as it crawls by (and sometimes teases me by convincing me it's going backwards). I had hypnosis performed on me today, as a side note, which at the very least was incredible at making me want to feel peaceful forever. Not recommended for participation while driving, though. If the reasons are not obvious, then perhaps driving itself ought not to be recommended in your case.

Speaking of having my best friends leave me forever for the East Coast or go on missions to Central America or Western Europe, a fourth best friend of mine got married today. Like the others, I feel less abandoned than the victim of others' forward progress. But gee whiz if that reception didn't make want to get all kinds of married as soon as possible. Oh, and the ice cream. Did you know there's a wedding cake flavor? There is. Enough said.

You might be wondering why I didn't blog this week until today. Well, just like printed newspapers of yore (those things aren't around anymore, are they?), my blog is apparently printed in issues and volumes. Oh, or rather, an opus and a number. Maybe each post here can get something like its own Kochel number, like Mozart. I just need to be studied on a university level and be considered a major contributor and my blog a contribution to the field of art and academia. So this is season or volume or opus the second, episode or issue or number the first, in increasing order of potential for airs of snootiness. Maybe I am the Great American Novel.

Speaking of which, it's about that time of life (specifically, after a quarter of a century) where it's time to get cracking on my memoirs. The main contender for the title at this point will have to be something like Megalomania: Why the Rest of You Might as Well Quit Trying.

Also went to Temple Square today with some friends. Now that place is just a recipe for tender memories. Not to mention there was some fresh bread being baked somewhere nearby that I could not stop smelling. Nor did I ever want to. Gracious me, am I hungry now after writing this.