Adventure 17 - Drop in Productivity

There are three main causes for this: lack of interest in the activity, a puppy and stinking Thanksgiving Break. Good god. I read a little and that was about it. That's pretty sad, considering I also had a 9-hour bus ride (that turned into an 11-hour bus ride but I'll get to that later).

Last week was just crazy because everyone wanted to see me all at once. In short:

• Getting home itself was an adventure. 6-hour car ride with a friend to Boston filled with Celtic folk rock and killer barbecue, then a roughly 2-hour ride from his end of the city to where I was meeting my stepdad (in the middle of this is where my boyfriend met me and we had a sushi date on the T and it was awesome), then getting lost in Pawtucket trying to find a place to eat and not getting home til after 11.
• Sunday I crashed. Too tired to really do anything.
• Monday I hung out with "the other one"'s ex-boyfriend, who I had met online when the whole polyamory bullshit started but hadn't met in real life 'til then, and we got kicked out of the library for talking too much.
• Tuesday I had a boy date with one of my guy friends who had recently gone through a bad breakup so we went to Five Guys and saw the 3D Christmas Harold and Kumar movie, plus we accidentally drove into the exit of the movie theater complex which was scary as hell but hilarious.
• Wednesday I went back to the high school to drop off a magazine to my journalism teacher and say hi to all my other teachers, and it was really cool 'cause they all let me interrupt their classes.
• Thursday was obviously chaos because it was Thanksgiving, and even though there are only 10 people in my immediate family, we had some extendeds over at my aunt's house so there were 16 but I didn't have to sit at the kids' table so I didn't really care.
• Friday I hung out with my boyfriend, complete with a trip to a local bookstore, MarioKart and lots of laughing about random things.
• Saturday was a point of contention between my mom and my dad/gramma because my gramma came out from Washington (state) and is one of those people who expects the world to stop when she visits, so they had a pissing contest over who got to see me, but I got Heath bar pancakes and a new outfit out of the deal so I'm not that concerned.
• And Sunday was the nonsense of getting back to school. Home to NYC was no problem, but they overbooked my bus back to school so they had to have two, plus we took the really bizarre route through Scranton (even though there was no stop there) and of course the stupid Pennsylvania part is where we hit massive traffic, hence why a trip that was supposed to end at 7:20 didn't end 'til about 9:30.

And during that time, I got nothing done. So now I have 30 pages worth of essays due on the 16th. Hell month, engage.

Adventure 16 - Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

(Not like that, you asses.)

Thanksgiving Break is supposed to be just that, a break, but it's not looking like much of one. It's unfortunate, I could really use one. As you can see, I have been extremely lackadaisical with my posting, and not only that, I'm also in the process of trying to get back on track with my NaNoWriMo story because this past weekend both knocked me off the bandwagon and ran me over with it several times.

Without going into too much background, I feel this can be best explained by an email I sent to my boyfriend last weekend (while he was, ahem, "busy") asking, "Why do boys have to be so fucking difficult?" It fits because it indicates my problem (boys) and the fact that I was angry about it.

What basically happened was that one of my guy friends (the one I went pantyhose shopping with) recently broke up with his girlfriend two weekends ago, so we had kindof a singles' appreciation dinner last Friday, since my SO was also elsewhere. It was really nice 'cause we hadn't really hung out since the weekend we met, and we BSed about all sorts of stuff. Long story short, things happened and he kissed me at the end of the night, which was quite honestly awesome but left me horribly confused in several ways.

Fast-forward to last night, I have a girls' night dinner with one of my dorm friends, who is convinced that everything is going to work out like yet another cheesy rom-com, and I'm finally able to get ahold of my guy friend to drop off some cookies I was supposed to give him last Friday after I left. I'd get up the confidence to spill the beans, and then his roommate would conveniently walk in, and eventually my friend had to get to studying for an Italian test, so I asked if he could walk me out and did confession time outside the building. I had to, it had been bothering me for almost a week and if I had waited any longer, I probably would've exploded from the angst.

It was awkward, of course. I mean, asking someone out under any circumstances is inherently awkward, and this was even more so considering his recent breakup and my current situation. He politely declined, which I kindof expected, but it wasn't so much of an outright "no" as the fact that he wasn't ready just yet. As he put it, he was used to being a housecat and just got thrown outside, so he'll go feral eventually but it'll take a while. It made sense (I really like the metaphor), and obviously I respect him for it, but what followed was probably the world's most awkward hug and then me feeling like an ass for asking even though I know I shouldn't've.

So I think we're ok now, and I feel better now that I don't have to live with not being able to state my case, but it's still kindof embarrassing. I just hope this works out somehow.

Adventure 15 - Losing Track

I had to check to see what number post this is because I honestly forgot, it's been so long since I blogged. And now that I know I have at least one reader, I suppose I should put in some amount of effort to post somewhat regularly.

I apologize for not having blogged in over a week and a half, but I can explain myself in one word: NaNoWriMo.

For those of you not in the know, NaNoWriMo (a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month but that's just too long to have to say) is an annual competition to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. I tried it last year, got about 6K words in and ran out of things to talk about. So far this year I've written 11,039, so I'd say I'm off to a good start.

NaNo has actually been a pretty neat experience for me because it got me to do a lot of things I normally wouldn't've. I went to the city write-in at midnight that first night and stayed out 'til *le gasp!* 3am, on a school night nonetheless, and that's only because I was about to fall asleep right in the diner. My other write-in so far was at this loungey cafe place on campus I had never been to, and if you can't appreciate a few hours of writing with fun people, tiger brownies (squares of brownie and chocolate cookie stripes and absolute deliciousness) and Disney songs (as a result of a bet between the supervisor and the barristas), there's something wrong with you.

As a result of this madness, blogging will probably be light, especially considering I have another theme paper (the 5-7, 6-8 or 7-10 pager) due after Thanksgiving Break and a 15-20 page research paper due in December. Some people have No-Shave November. I have No-Life November.