We’re somewhere in Oregon.  Athena is driving, and I’m indulging my geek side with my laptop, music-saturated hard drive, and net through tethered phone.  Grooveshark is a little slow, I’ll admit.  But this inverter is the nth best $30 I ever spent.

I just realized that Me First & The Gimme Gimmes is going to make great late-night driving music.

We’re on the way down from Seattle to Chico, about halfway through the eleven hours it will take.  I’m really looking forward to seeing my family over Christmas.  Twice a year is a little too rarely, for me.  Then Athena returns to the north, and I spend new years with the Quakers.  I expect a lot of reading, hiking, good conversation, and being cold.

And I survived my first quarter of grad school.  I say “survived” to be arbitrarily melodramatic, as anyone might, but it was actually pretty rough.  Not exactly what I expected academically, but then I do have this tendency to pick vaguely defined, multidisciplinary fields of study.  Still, I remain intrigued, and I feel like I’m pretty well up to speed.  Give me another quarter and I might even know what I want to focus on.

Cat mentioned a few days ago — in passing, of course, certainly not intending to suggest any action on my part — that it had been three months since I’d last updated this journal.  This is, of course, a large part of why I’m making myself write now.  I enjoy the process of writing well enough once I start on it, but like anything that isn’t video games or late-night rambling philosophical conversation or um actually a lot of other things, it’s hard to get started.  Sorry, that sentence sort of got away from me.

I haven’t been spending as much time lately with Cat and Wolf as I’d like, but I’ll be seeing them — along with Rain — at new years.

Renaming my friends feels comfortably self-indulgent.

One of the awkward bits of adulthood — at least my current version — is that even when I have downtime, I’m quite aware of how limited it is, and how busy I’ll be when I return to work or school.  I feel a compulsion to make sure my leisure time is highly efficient; I feel frustrated when the hours seem to slip away without me making good use of them, relaxation-wise.  (There’s a Calvin & Hobbes comic that’s about precisely this — you know the one.  Let’s pretend I tracked it down online and linked to it, and we both had a good nostalgic laugh.)

The answer to this (I mean the answer other than a personality overhaul) is for me to cultivate a lifestyle that doesn’t oscillate so wildly between busy and free.  Dimensional wasn’t so bad, although it had other frustrations; I think that once I’m out of grad school I should be able to sort this out.

Procrastination and rationalization.  Check.

Also, notice how many semicolons I’ve been using?  That’s grad school, right there.

My turn to drive.  I hope you’re all well.