30 September 2001

Well. Things are looking up. We got the lease renewal notice, and it turns out that if we want to keep living here for the next year, we'll have to pay $100 less a month in rent. Oh, alack. Oh, woe.

Somehow I think we'll manage.

And you know what? It'll still be enough rent to have a mortgage on a very nice house anywhere else. Ah, the joys of the Bay Area. But we take what we can get.

Yesterday, I went to the post office, but nobody gave me any candy. I don't understand. When I've gone to the post office on Saturday mornings before, there has always been candy involved. Growing up stinks.

(My father used to check his PO box every Saturday morning, and I would ride along and we would talk in the car and get candy afterwards at the little convenient mart next door. It was one of those rituals that doesn't have to be fancy to work.)

Actually, I think part of my problem has to do with growing up, specifically in my time sense. I've been doing all kinds of grown up things, but I've still been thinking of time like a little kid, subconsciously. Two years ago today, I hadn't even started writing Fortress yet. Two years ago today was my first day of grad school. Two years is a long time in little kid years, but for grown-ups, well...I just haven't been doing this that long. I don't have to be patient. I just have to change my entire concept of time.

It occurs to me that some people might just want to be patient here.

I hope my new concept of time doesn't have to involve today/tomorrow/yesterday word/concept matches. I don't like those.

Hee. Journals are a beautiful thing. My journal from today, two years ago, notes, "It's a bad sign when one's first day of course notes concludes that it's a vast commie plot, especially when one is a physicist." Well, yes, it was a bad sign. A very bad sign. And that was two days before my back injury showed up.

Also, in class, I wrote:
"God does not play dice" --
This should not be a problem.
Dice do not play God.

Is it any wonder that I quit physics? Some people have a hard time recognizing the people they were. I recognize me just fine. Sometimes my surroundings look a little weird in my old journal entries, but me I know. Still, it feels like a very long time in a lot of ways.

Heck, this week feels like a very long time.

So anyway. Yesterday David came down and got lattes with me, and we talked about what we want out of life and other important topics. And then we came home and played Catan with Mark, which was nice, although it was kind of a weird game layout. Timprov woke up in a pretty good mood and wanted to go out for dinner. I had a mighty craving for lettuce cups, so off we went to the Chinese place.

I'm trying to eat more, this week. If I continue to eat as I have been, I will continue to not feel quite right, and I will catch hell from my Aunt Ellen when I see her next. My father threatened to sic her on me. This was utterly unnecessary. I'm really hungry. I'm just bad at eating. It goes like this:
1) Hmm, I'm hungry. My hands are shaky, and my head aches from it. Perhaps I'd best stop working and eat. (Note: I always have regular meals. This is only if I get hungry like this outside of regular mealtime. Has been known to happen. Some people criticize what I eat for my regular meals, and in what quantity, but that's another story.)
2) Looking around, I spy raisins! (The raisins and the banana chips are the two foods most visible from my desk.)
3) I eat raisins!
4) I get bored with eating raisins after, meh, some. A couple dozen, maybe a handful or two.
5) I put the raisins away and go back to work.

My sense of what one ought to eat when needs to be tempered by the occasional fact of a calorie deficit, I realize. I'm just not so good at making it happen. I'm more likely to repeat the raisin thing than to actually say, "Hmm, perhaps I'm hungry enough to go outside the norm and have some M'rissa Chow" or something like that. Timprov wrote a couple days ago about teaching me to walk, or more properly, to stroll. I never learned to eat lots, and I never learned to walk slowly. Timprov claims that he'll gladly take these skills if what I got in exchange for them was legible handwriting. Hmmph. But I'm trying to learn to eat and stroll, whereas...well, I suppose Timprov's extensive use of the computer counts.

(The really sick part is that in the middle of writing this, I got hungry and thought, oh, hey, raisins, those sound good! Sigh.)