"excitement"

It's now officially February 2009. Fuck. A year ago I was anxiously packing, unpacking, repacking, checking on my visa, my bank accounts, my passport, and overall getting ready to go across the world to the land Down Under.

How can working at Culver's and fretting about how I'm going to pay for tuition possibly compare? Yes I was a bit nervous about going to Australia but that paled in comparison to my excitement. Now I'm nervous about paying tuition, nervous about what I'm going to do this summer, nervous about what I'm going to do about my life, and nervous that I'm so incredibly lazy that I'll never figure it out! And what excitement do I have to dull that nervousness? The excitement of going back to finish 16 years of non-stop education, homework, reading textbooks, writing papers, and last-minute cramming for exams. This, my friends, is a sarcastic version of "excitement."

I'm so wound up all the time worrying and thinking and planning and replanning that eventually the way I cope is to ignore it. Maybe if I don't think about it it will just go away and my life will just figure itself out. That is not the correct way to think about things. Doing this will land me working full time at Culver's for the next 5 years, and while I like the people there well enough, I refuse to become a lifer.

I need to take drastic control of my life and get it in hand. Or maybe I will tomorrow, or the next day, or I'll do it over J-term, or I'll do it when I go back to school. Dozens of delaying tactics I use time and again to avoid doing the inevitable.

I need to work on my resume, start figuring out plans for myself, potentially studying for the GRE, finishing my Teach for America application (even though I'm not so keen on that anymore). And instead of doing all these things, I work at Culver's, sleep, watch movies, dink around on the internet, and most of all lately I've been reading. Reading tons of sci fi/fantasy books, and mostly fantasy if I'm being brutally honest. Dragons and magic and war and strife and love and romance and heroes and heroines. And sometimes I really really wish life would just take control over me like it does for these characters and force me into some sort of action or situation and then it wouldn't matter anymore that my resume sucks or that I didn't apply to grad school because I didn't know what I wanted from it.

I saw Underworld: Rise of the Lycans on Thursday with my dad. We both thought we sat too close to the screen because it was a huge screen and the action was so fast and intense it hurt our eyes to try to follow it. And it was a very action-oriented movie, not so much dialogue but plenty of special effects and gore. It was only an hour and a half long though (seriously, the previews started at 5:30 and the end credits were rolling at 7... really short).

Then tonight after work mom and I went to go see Gran Torino. Now that was an excellent movie and Clint Eastwood was politico-incorrectly hilarious. Being the one white guy surrounded by a neighborhood full of Asians reminded me of someone... :P

Drove to the cat house tonight after that. Caught a glimpse of the moon, just a sliver on the bottom half of it, hanging low in the sky. It was very pretty, and with the stars around it in the clear winter air it made me very contemplative. Staring at the stars is always a wonderful experience for me; it's peaceful and awe-inspiring and gives cause for introspection. In other words, I like stargazing a lot.

Once I got here I set up my computer for a bit of Pandora-supplied tunes and then sat down and finished the Dragonvarld trilogy (by Margaret Weis). Now, I'm updating my blog as I've intended to do for awhile. But really, when there's nothing new or exciting happening in your life it's hard to give enough of a damn about it to type it out.