Prepoceros

If you go by the size of my inbox, I’ve actually regressed today. I got nine or ten emails, of which I’ve kept two: a picture my mom sent me from my cousin’s wedding which I plan to save somewhere, and the hours that registration counseling is open at the community college at which I’m taking summer courses. This brings me back up to fifteen.

BUT. Today I *also* got through my first day of summer school without a hitch, tutored a lesson, visited three apartment complexes, and pretty much settled on the one I like best. Barring any catastrophes, I plan to sign the lease tomorrow morning.

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Well then. After deleting one email that turned out to be a near-duplicate of another as well as an invitation to a high school alumni happy hour that I won’t be attending*, I decided to tackle the most urgent message next: the notification of my tuition bill’s coming due, which I’d saved to remind myself to figure out what classes I needed to take this summer, which in turn would require me to sort out my degree plan for the next year.

I’ve put this off for almost a semester now, ever since I finally decided to go back to the Physics and Math majors. And oh, was ignorance ever bliss. Switching schools, the year I spent as a “Classics major,” and the silly, silly idea I had that I’d do the double-BA (worthless!) instead of the double-BS will make my senior year a bitch. Not only will it be tough to do, it’s tough to figure out *how* to do it, with all the rules and schedule conflicts.

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I decided yesterday to set myself the goal for this weekend of completely emptying my email inbox. I haven’t cleared my inbox to zero for months, maybe years, maybe as long as I’ve had the account. Generally I leave emails in my inbox when they contain something I need to deal with but don’t feel like doing right now. There they fester, reminding me several times a day of all the things I *should* be doing, but not resulting in the accomplishment of much actual work.

I try to clear out emails as they come in, dealing with simple or urgent stuff and deleting the rest, but over time the to-do-later category starts to fill up. I realize that this is far from the ideal way to Get Things Done. While it keeps certain tasks I might otherwise neglect from falling through the cracks, it also contributes to the constant low-level stress of having a long to-do list hanging over my head, pinging me in the face every few hours. Most of the things in my inbox aren’t even that important, it’s just that they came into my life through email, so that’s where they’ll stay until I “find the time” to print the page or set up the account or whatever.

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It has just dawned on me that I will be entirely without internet access (or even a computer) for at least twenty-four hours, starting tomorrow morning.

Um. Erm. Rrrrrrrrrr. Rmrm?

I, uh, are there things I need to do right now? How should I prepare? Why didn’t I do those things yesterday? No one’s checking their email on a holiday weekend anyway, silly. Erm. Humdiddle.

::twitch::

As a (female) YouTuber, I’ve gotten my fair share of “friendly” private messages. I’m not flooded with the rain of love/hatemail that falls on the popular people, but I get maybe two or three a week. Very few of these messages are from people I actually know (in the internet sense of the word)—my YT pals leave their comments directly on the videos, where everyone can see them. The private messages I get from strangers range from a quick “I like your videos, make more” to detailed critiques of particular videos to blatant “i think you’ll enjoy my hilarious videos” spam to less-than-subtle suggestions that we “get to know each other better.” I’d say the split between friendly and “friendly” is about half and half (give or take ten percent for the haters).

For your voyeuristic pleasure, I provide a few samples spanning the range of weirdness. I hadn’t heard from any of these people (that I remember) before they started messaging me.

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Last November, as you may or may not recall, I was interviewed over the phone by a pleasant woman for her book on women in science. She told me she’d be writing the book in the spring, and that she’d let me know if she’d be using any material from my interview, so that I could approve it.

I hadn’t heard from her since then, until I got the email today, with the proposed text about me attached. I was expecting to see a couple of quotes from my interview, reworked to get rid of the “like”s and “kinda”s and make them into sensible sentences. But, um, my whole life story is in there. It’s not a long story, granted—maybe 500 words—as not much has happened in my life, but pretty much my entire college experience to-date is there.

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Today, on my way across town, I stopped at Starbucks. Not because I was craving sugar and calories and sweetsy goodness, certainly not, but because I have decided to use my blog for a little community service. For my community of readers. Yes, both of you.

Here’s the plan: I try the crazy seasonal things Starbucks invents, I tell you about them, and you don’t have to waste your time and money on the yucky ones. I provide this service free of charge and free of bias (though if SB wanted to comp me a few lattes, I’d sell out superfast). If I ever wind up in court on some minor public nuisance charge, perhaps the judge will count this hour as time served.

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I don’t know if it’s the stress or what, but I’ve been having an exceptional number of dreams that I would really rather not have, thank you.

A few days ago I dreamt that I was being chased by bats. They couldn’t fly, and they hobbled amusingly slowly, but there were three of them, they were clever, and they were definitely rabid. One of them blocked the exit to the room I was in, and the other two tried to trap me in a corner. I kept feeling pricks and scratches on my bare feet, but I could never see any bite marks.

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I’ve just submitted my final paper in Roman Historians. The three assignments together came out to 8309 words, in the end, most of which were written in the last 24 hours, of which I slept almost two. Let it be known that I do not recommend this experience to anyone.

It occurs to me that I am now done with spring semester, as my last final was yesterday. That’s a weird feeling. I’ll have more time to appreciate it in the morning—right now I’m drained, and my achy eyes can barely focus on the screen. I’m going to go email my professor my apologies for my tardiness and then crash. Kerrrrrrrplunk.

Today, writing about Polybius, I have seized an opportunity to casually refer to a certain stage in a government’s evolution as a metastable state.

This is easily the high point of my day. I have written about 2300 words of this assignment so far, and it has taken me five days. I have about 5000 words more to write in the next 25-ish hours. I have a final this afternoon, so even if I don’t sleep, that’s still only 20 hours or so. I wish I would write faster—I can do the math on this one, and it makes me want to punch things.

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P.S. Wouldn’t it be nice if metaphory (second-syllable stress) were a word?