Friday, November 8, 2002  2:24 am  <|>
<165> I'm just another ant: Of course once again it's late Thursday night (or really early Friday morning depending on how you look at it) and I should have been asleep hours ago since I have to wake up for dialysis at 6am, but of course I'm up despite this. I'm really tired too, it's been a long day, really long (but not exactly in a bad way). It's just that I've been going non stop since 7:30am, and that was on only a few hours sleep, so I'm just ready for the weekend and I'm in luck because it's almost fully here. Another great thing is I notice it's supposed to be near or in the low 70s starting tomorrow and going until Tuesday. This makes me very happy, I don't like the cold and since I have high blood pressure issues I'm on so many meds to keep it down when they are actually kicked in and working it makes me incredibly cold. I hate cold and hate feeling that "inner chill," like I can just be sitting in class and have a long sleeved shirt on and sometimes even my hoodie too and yet I'll still have this chill sensation come over me after I've been sitting in the room for a little while. It's annoying but I deal with feeling frozen most of the time because I'm too cool too pull on my heavy winter jacket in the middle of class where everyone else is wearing tshirts or normal shirts and not freezing to death cause they're not in the same predicament. Oh well.

Today I want to say was a pretty good day. It's odd because you'd think since Thursday is my longest and toughest day of the week that I'd be dragging all the day long and complaining about it once I got home, but yet there is something about it that tends to put me in a good mood, or at least a better and thinking one than I am in most of the time recently. It's not a fail safe or anything, some weeks I am just plain worn out and tired during the day, but today we not one of those days. I will say I was really tired when I woke up. I only got a few hours of sleep, first because I had to stay up and write a paper and our studio project plan, and second because I couldn't get to sleep right away once I did finally hop into bed. I hate not being able to fall asleep. But anyway, class today was pretty easy because it was just time to work in our groups on our final project. It's going to be a bunch of work between me and my other two group members, but I think we can handle it and hopefully pull off our project successfully as I would like to go out of this semester content with what I ended up with, ya know? Then came lunch break, but I didn't go home right away because I had my advising meeting first. That went fine, I already had my classes planned out along with a ton of backups so hopefully when registration happens next week nothing will fill up on me, but if it does I'll be prepared. I'm also signing up for 17 credits with the intent to drop at least one of them for sure next semester... maybe even two because I'll have 3 credits (hopefully) to apply from my internship that I just recently started with Campus Philly. Check it out, the only graphic I've done for it so far is up for the Philadelphia Big 5 article under the sports and rec section. It seems like it should work out pretty well. I might be writing for them too, but I have to get my act together with that because still haven't given the editor a writing sample to see. Yeah, I write a ton but it occurs to me straight up interest articles, though I think I am totally able to handle writing decent ones, haven't been something I've written a lot of in the past so I just don't know what to turn it and that is what is slowing me down. But hopefully I'll get that and a lot of other things together this weekend (don't I always say this?). I did have a short lunch break after my advising before I went back to studio until 4pm, and then to Modern Culture until 7pm. This is usually where my freedom comes, but I found out VERY last minute that a writer whom I've had to read for a past Multimedia class and who's work I've researched and read further since then, Stephen Johnson, was speaking tonight at my school as part of the opening of a 2 day conference on design in Philadelphia, I guess hosted by my school. I didn't want to pass this chance up to hear him speak since I do enjoy his work, so that took place at 8pm until sometime after 9:30pm. Time flew by while he was speaking, but it made the night a really late one (though if I keep my schedule the way its setup for next semester my Thursdays will be 8:30am until 10pm every week..). I really enjoyed his speech, more than any speaker I've heard at my school to date... and it was crazy because it was part of a conference I guess, which meant like 150 or more profs from around the country attending, all in there with name tags and I saw my prof. himself dressed up, so if you knew anything about him you'd understand this must have been an important function. Yet we had been invited...the students... I just couldn't find any. I swear I was the only multimedia student in there I think, and there couldn't have been more than 10 students total. We were definitely out numbered, but it felt nice to be amongst so many (profs mostly I'm guessing) people involved in the design community. Lucky for me though about 6 of these other students were friends of mine, all Industrial Design majors like my roommate Emily, so at least I had some people to sit with. We hung back sitting on the entrance stairway ledge (which is normal, just in the back off to the side) giving all those "important people" chairs which they seemed to almost completely fill which was good I suppose. I guess some of the speeches and talks involved in this conference are private, this opening talk just happened to be open to the public, but it would be cool if the whole thing was available to the students too. It's not like too many of us would take up the offer anyway, sometimes it really annoys me to see such a lack of interest for such things in my department, my grade especially. Tonight it was fair not to see many on one hand because we all found out so late, but to see not even one other person there from my department, when his book was even required reading for us... it's amazing! But anyway, like I said, I enjoyed it a lot and I waited his newest book before but now I'm determined to get it soon, I'll probably ask for it specifically for the upcoming holidays or something.. as if I had time to read books for my own personal enjoyment... sigh.

After the talk I went home to finally have my first real meal of the day, but instead of jumping right until that even though it was already 10pm, I instead cleaned up our kitchen a bunch. It's been a real mess for awhile now and I know it was starting to bother all of us. I wanted to do it earlier in the week but I had so much work to do almost every spare minute I felt like I was doing some type of work. I'm so glad the week is over and I can find maybe just a little down time. I really really need it I think. I did end up getting dinner though, don't worry. Once I finished putting away clean dishes, loading up a run of dirty ones, wiping down the counters, and dumping in more pots and pans and things back into the sink after I cleaned it out so they could soak, I went to Paolo's for some mozzarella sticks to go.. yum! I ate them at Concetta's place and then we headed over to our other friends, the "skater house" or the "boy's place" as I usually end up calling it... for a little while as we do essentially every single Thursday night. It's just turned into the thing we do and it's usually a nice way to end the week and begin the weekend in my book. Tonight I didn't stay that long though. Danne only was there for a second because he had to work at the labs. Jon was down in his room working most of the time that I was there. Joe and Femi were socializing with a handful of people that were over (funnily enough, mostly made up of some of the ID major people I just had happened to spend the lecture with), and Mike... well that's another story I guess. He was up in his room as usual (and yes I realized all these people I just brought up rather randomly... I do talk about them all a lot, it's just I usually don't bother to name names). Usually I would go up to say hi or something, but when I got near his floor I hear him and some girl talking and laughing while listening to music, so I decided not to disturb him. I just don't see enough of him anymore, and while some people around here would tell me that's more of his loss then mine, we used to be best friends practically and now I'm lucky to get a few words out of him.. that is when he is even around me. It's on my mind a lot and it's just annoying and frustrating. I don't know what I'm supposed to do, but I just feel like I've lost such a good friend on so many levels that I can't even explain and it just really, really sucks.

So now it's 3am and I really will need to wake up in 3 hours, but I'm glad I wrote, I don't think I would have been content going to bed without doing so. I don't write in my personal journals as much as I once did either. It's all from lack of time and the fact that I usually write right before bed or something and lately I just have to hurry to go to sleep as soon as the option opens itself because I'm usually always tired (even when I can't fall asleep for hours) and I usually go to bed so late that I need to get in all the rest I can. So with that, I really should get going. One last note, this passed weekend I did manage to spend some time doing something just for me... and the result of that is I finally finished my book! The text portion of it, meaning the poems themselves, yes as some of you might remember it's a book of poetry, had been mostly completed for some months now since I resolved to do it this summer, but the cover and little book description parts I hadn't completed and had been putting off, so it felt REALLY good to get that submitted. Right now I am waiting to hear back from my publisher as to what I need to take care of next (the next step being them putting the book online for me to proof and approve before they move on with it), but it's great because in about a month or so, I will be a published author!! I made the book more for myself, but since I've mentioned it to other people they have all for the most part shown such interest in obtaining a copy, some because they're my friends yes but others almost purely from the fact that they've read what I feature on this site (which is also featured in the book with SO many more). That makes me feel good even more about it. So we'll see how it goes, but the process from this point on seems simple enough and I'm sure I'll make mention of it from time to time. But now, I think I must try to get some sleep, because morning comes way too soon and just as Stephen Johnson talked about in his speech tonight (and discusses in his book that I've wanted to read for a long time now), I'm just like another ant following the path of life, picking up on signals from others, and trying to find the food that's closest to me and that will bring me the best it possibly can... goodnight.