i’ve been reading more i blame the patriarchy lately, largely because of erik, whose own blog is becoming one of the most heartfelt explorations of the responsible pursuit of gender equity that i know.
just in case he wasn’t already securely within the ranks of the coolest people in the world.
;)
*mwa!*

and yes, i recognize that i just introduced a post with a feminist theme by not only praising a man, but also by engaging in a cutesy display of girlish affection therein.

get over it.

i do not believe that the way to empower women is to exclude men from the conversation, nor to refrain from praising them when they step up, nor to shun all girlish impulses, and if convincing me otherwise is your goal, best stop now, for i am a lost cause to you.
please don’t shed too many tears for my soul.

whoa, this topic makes me snippy before i even start talking about it!
yikes!
:)

anyways, the last couple of days at ibtp have been intense.

stop reading now if you don’t want to be exposed to some rather radical feminism.

seriously. i won’t be offended, and i’ll be sure to send out a memo later if i change my mind.

…

ok, so some dude wrote in to ask whether he was raping his girlfriend because she didn’t ever initiate sex, and the ripping of the proverbial new one ensued in the comments.
summary of consensus: yes. and the fact that you wrote in to ask about it gives us the womanly willies.

which is an interestingly gendered term…
should i say the wilhelminas?

anyway, i haven’t decided yet what my short response to that discussion is, and i haven’t felt inclined to ramble through a long one publicly.

yesterday, though, there was a post that i took as a progression of the discussion, and it put forth the thesis that all heterosexual sex should be considered a criminal act by default, and therefore any time any woman felt inclined to bring charges against any man for sexual misconduct, the default conviction would be guilty.

if you are not glazing over and switching to lolcats already, you should read the post.

now, it should definitely be understood that the suggestion is not intended to be a stab at judicial fairness; it is more like an experiment in redistributive injustice, with the idea being that right now the cards are stacked so heavily against women because of the ease with which “she consented!” can be used to dismiss sexual assault charges, that it would do the patriarchy some good to have the tables turned for a while, with full vials of their own bitter, bitter medicine beside plates of their own scraps.

as you might expect, once again the comment floodgates were opened, and while i was thinking about what i might say this time, erik beat me to the punch.

this post started out as a comment on his post, actually, but then i decided to claim it as my own.

you know, given that it IS my own.

and i have been at a loss for substantive matter lately.

and it seems a bit funny to use my digital space as a platform for chip commentary while voicing my thoughts on feminism within the reactionary regions of a male slice of the blogosphere, albeit a male slice i deeply respect…

but i begin to digress too verily.

if you’re interested, read the original post, AND erik’s reaction, AND my reaction (it’s coming, i promise!), and contribute to the multitudinous pathways of discussion as ye will.

then we can be as an octopus that just keeps sprouting legs until it can’t move anymore and starves to death while tripping over itself and looking silly.
yay blogging.
:)

ok, so here’s what trips me up about twisty’s suggestion:

heterosexual intercourse?
not a crime.

if you’re going to disagree with me, i realize that it’s going to be there, right from square one.
i realize that the whole point is to consider the implications of the idea that this assumption is fundamentally flawed, and you don’t have to believe me when i say that i gave it some thought, but i did, and i will likely continue to do so, but right now i am documenting my intuitive reaction.
and i’m not buying it.
i’m not buying it enough that i think it’s worth sticking a stake in the ground and saying “nuh-uh. don’t Even go there. not even for fun.”

you see, i wholeheartedly believe that it is possible for an intelligent, aware woman to view the act of heterosexual intercourse as something other than the violation of the female body by the male body, and given that this is the case, criminalizing the act would not only perpetuate injustice against men, but against many, many women who choose to view sex as a joyous expression of intimate union.

and it is from that perspective that i am motivated to enter the conversation.
to figure out what respecting the feminist argument means to me.
so here we go.

but for right now, even if we can’t agree on the basic premise of criminality, let’s just take the fact that we all seem to agree that some level of injustice would remain a consequence of the new law.

countering injustice with more injustice?
bad form.

coopting the criminal justice system in order to make bold political statements intended to prompt reflection on the patriarchy?
there be dragons.

yes, the patriarchy results in many, many situations in which justice is doled out unequally based on what’s between our legs, and yes, it does us good to admit that, and i embrace creative means of jolting us out of our bubbles of privilege, be they gendered or otherwise.

and yes, it could be said that i am resorting to a cloud in the sky from where real action is impossible, and i should be challenged to provide alternative ways of bettering the situation.

but that’s a challenge i want to embrace.

i say we hold our standards higher.

i say we don’t fight back by oneupping the current rules of the game with smirks on our faces, but by figuring out new games entirely.

at the end of the day i want to put my energy towards the proliferation of happy, healthy human beings who are committed to a society of mutual love and respect, and i just don’t think the desire to feed people their own poison is a part of that picture.

the journey is the destination.
the means is the end.
the way is the way is the…

ahem

ok, lest i ascend too far into my pretensions, here’s a kickback to the old skool craig kilborn era moment of zen, because man, i would give jon stewart three camels a week and a giraffe on sunday, but sometimes i still misses me some o’ that slap me in the face zaniness, and that there be one of the best slaps i know.

that’s enough for today.

rock on, blue monster.
you won me back.

man, taxes are different than when i was a kid
;)

(that’s a joke because i’m not very old… hahaha… the irreverent nostalgia of the information age…)

anyway, after postponing my taxes for 75,000 years (all condensed into the past few months… it’s been exhausting) because i was worried about my overseas income, i finally realized that said overseas income translates to about 75 cents as far as the IRS is concerned, and the only real reason to dig up all the paperwork would be to talk to the UK about it because i could probably get money back from them. given that whole 75 cents bit (which is roughly 37.5 pence!), i’m thinkin the effort->reward ratio there is too small. or big. whatever.

NOT WORTH IT.

which means my taxes are easy after all!
and i only worked for 6 months!
woohoo!

after realizing this, it of course made me procrastinate further, but tonight, out of the small fear that something huge would crop up and i would enjoy at least a day to deal with it, and fueled by my first home-delivered pizza in portland (from this place. short review: “***! shows promise! but the white spinach pizza needs salt.”), i decided to tackle the task, and now thanks to turbotax online i’m done! less than an hour later! sweet!

i owe $125 because my withholding at IU was all messed up and i never got around to fixing it. it’s nothing close to what i owed last year, however, and i am better suited to deal with the hit, so especially after thinking that this year was going to be atrocious, it feels like a bargain.

indiana owes me $34 but i just told them to give it all to their birds and fishes fund because it seemed easier than telling them to send it to me.

my sense of accomplishment will now buoy me up as i spend the rest of the evening watching howl’s moving castle rather than writing some emails i’ve been postponing.

sorry mark and the f&l crowd!

since this year i will make more money than i ever have, save more money than i ever have, and give away more money than i ever have, it is reasonable to predict that this is the last year in the foreseeable future wherein my taxes will be simple.

i pause a moment to acknowledge this milestone before pushing aside the official paper pile beside me and skipping gleefully to refill my pepsi.

may all of you have happy tax stories as well this weekend. i know i always say this so you have no reason to believe me, but i really am going to write more soon. my mom wants to know what i do at work, and i bought a cactus!

we read slaughterhouse five in my sophomore english class in highschool, and the day i sat down on the couch to start the book i found myself so transfixed that i read the whole thing then and there. i didn’t know what to do in class the next day when we were only talking about the first chapter or whatever because i couldn’t remember what hadn’t happened yet, so i probably balanced coke cans on the windowsill or something. i was into that for a while in that class.

anyway after that i was hooked, and over the course of the rest of highschool and the beginning of college, when i lived in new york city and used paperbacks were for sale for a dollar or two from random street vendors scattered every few blocks throughout the streets around NYU, i worked my way through every vonnegut book i could get my hands on, which is a tribute i have paid to very few authors. i think i got a kick out of digging up the more obscure titles because, after a point, every kurt vonnegut book is really the same story, and there’s a bit of a geekout factor in recognizing all the recurring themes and characters. it’s also kind of like you get a chance to read the same great book over and over again from a multitude of slightly different angles, and you get to see the ideas evolve over time, like the favorite conversation topics of a close friend.

vonnegut’s wit and cynicism was the perfect fuel for the mindset of my late teens. mortified by the horrors in the world,

so it goes was a rather frequent phrase in my emails of the period.

as he aged, mr. vonnegut became more and more cynical while i became less and less so, and over time we grew apart. i still displayed every title on my bookshelf, recommended them to friends when they came up, and my connection to indiana was surely different than it would have been had i not known it to be the state that he was happy to no longer call home. but i still haven’t read his most recent collection of essays, and i only skimmed some of the speeches and short stories i have encountered over the past few years.

i felt like his trademark points boiled themselves down over the years to a few tired diatribes, and i admit that i grew tired of his crankiness.
i felt bad about this, and i haven’t let myself really think about it because i think i was afraid i would respect him less, and i didn’t want that to happen to someone who played such a role in my ideological development. but when i think about that even just a tiny bit, i know it is silly. i know that i’m at a point in life when things still feel somehow hopeful and idealistic, and far be it from me to begrudge a brilliant and socially conscious man like kurt vonnegut the cynical retreat of his old age. the truth really is that i’m probably afraid that the same will happen to me, but if that’s the case i should continue to embrace the wisdom that maturity brings to those i admire. in the name of not diverting eyes from lessons most needed and all.

this became a bit rambly, so perhaps i should finish my tribute in another fashion. a story, perhaps. a napkin drawing. a bokonon foot orgy. a quote from the headstone in breakfast of champions, which is an unoriginal tribute i am sure – “Not even the Creator of the universe knew what the man was going to say next-perhaps the man was a better universe in its infancy.”

i can think of no better tribute, actually, than just continuing to live and write, knowing that onward life shall go.

this is the kind of high-quality sap that youtube was made to deliver to a wider audience.

it’s a cover of coldplay’s “fix you” by the Young@Heart chorus, a group in Northampton, MA that is composed entirely of senior citizens and apparently tours around and gets NEA grants and stuff.

talk about schmaltzy, but i am always interested in things that are good schmaltz, because knowing what pulls our heartstrings can teach us a lot.

let’s just say this song was very well chosen.

for the curious, this link was brought to me via this blog, which, fwiw, is the blog that most makes me wish that feedreaders imported stylesheets. it’s purty.

my early days in portland are going to be characterized by a fair bit of acquisition, seeing as i moved here with a suitcase and a backpack, am starting a job that will require clothing other than my glitter shoes and sheep pajamas, and they are paying me more for this job than for anything else i have ever done in my life. the first two are really corollaries of the last, i suppose, and it’s not like i’m complaining. i will do my best not to go overboard and decide that i need a new yacht.

in that spirit, i was overjoyed to learn that my dear friend josh was visiting his parents in portland this past weekend, which means that i got to see him for the first time in over a year, and he got to take me to places that i would still have a hard time finding on my own, like the goodwill where they sell things by the pound.

i actually managed to find a pair of slacks and a jacket that will probably work as work clothes, as well as some good things for nights and weekends, a funny highschool-woodshop wine rack, and an old cardboard bucket with amusing advertising on it that i might use for a hamper.

but the most exciting purchases by far are these:

that’s a nearly new leatheresque suitcase that will work as my business travel carry-on and make me way snazzier than eddie bauer, a pair of bowling shoes that are pretty beat up and need a bit of lovin’ but fit and will make for some fun dancing companions, and, are you ready for this?, a champagne case. totally serious. it looks like it’s for a ukulele or something? but inside? it’s for a bottle of champagne. josh found this and i nearly offered to trade him all of my discoveries as well as rights on my firstborn child so that i could have it, but in the end he caved because i let him have the supersoft tshirt that i accidentally picked up out of the bin where my suitcase was. talk about a bargain.

i also managed to win rights to the awareness wheel, which will surely be a helpful addition to my decor as i embark upon my self-directed doctoral program, about which i will speak more soon.

first though, i have to tackle many errands before we leave on the longest business trip ever, which begins tomorrow and ends on friday the 16th. i am proud of myself because i am going to finalize the deal on my new apartment before we leave, which officially makes this the least stressful housing hunt ever. i got a studio about 10 blocks from tiffanie with a friendly landlord, a gas range, and free internet. and it was the cheapest one on the list.

so far i like portland.

i was just writing a post about blood diamond, which i saw this evening, and recommend, when a wayward slip of my finger on the trackpad led me to instruct the browser to go “back”, thereby erasing my work. the first time, i cursed a bit about trackpads that are too smart for their own good, and about how wordpress should autosave the way gmail does. i’m borrowing a computer, so i hadn’t thought about the stupid “smart corners” feature in windows because i have a mac now and when i was running windows on my previous laptop, i turned the damn things off.

then it happened again, when i was nearly done, and even though i had smartly saved the post at an earlier juncture, i still lost a lot, and i don’t have the stomach to rewrite it all right now, so i’ll have to risk it for later.

i will take the chance to vent my frustration at this feature, however, and to point out that another smart trackpad feature – the two-fingered scrolling that comes with os X laptops – is COMPLETELY different, and has now become a part of the way i expect all trackpads to work, which is one way that i measure brilliance.

the difference is that it is not at all likely that i will absentmindedly place two of my fingers on the trackpad and move them in concert while i am thinking about other things, and yet, when i want to take advantage of the feature, it takes very little brainpower to do so. once i have learned it, i can use it as easily as breathing; until i learn it, i am not likely to engage it on accident with disastrous results that seem to occur as a prank from god.

so don’t make it easy to do frustrating things by accident, folks. it’s no fun. it makes you have to read babble like this instead of hearing me talk about feeling older and coming to respect leonardo dicaprio. sucks, eh?

anyway, autosave in wordpress would be a good thing either way. i should see if it exists.

so the job situation here in london has officially pissed me off.

i know i haven’t talked about much of what i’ve been up to, because it keeps changing and i keep thinking i will get to the Final Version^TM soon. but no. so here’s the quick rundown:

on arrival i applied for four christmas season jobs, one of which was at harrods, the uber huge department empire for whom christmas is a Serious Business. they called back, i jumped through several hoops (along with hundreds of other christmas hires), and two weeks after i got to town i was offered a full-time job in the meat and poultry section of the foodhall for £7/hr. not bad, really, but i had also been talking with a guy at an office temp agency that had postings for part-time presentation formatting positions that paid £25/hr, which sounded much better, albeit a bit less… festive.

at first, the office job guy had not been impressed with my CV, which made sense because it had been geared towards getting restaurant kinds of jobs and i had forgotten to change it. i changed it, he still said he was worried because i didn’t have experience using Office in a corporate environment, but i told him i could handle it and he was impressed by my enthusiasm so he agreed to meet.

that was where things stood when i went to accept the position at harrods, whereupon i learned that they weren’t going to pay me for a month, and suddenly the thought of leaving my flat at 6 every morning to pay to sit on the tube or a bus for an hour so that i could sell people lamb chops didn’t sound very appealing. i decided to risk it and declined the job so that my time would be free to pursue other things.

then the office temp agency guy didn’t reply to my emails, and it was a week until christmas, so nothing was going anywhere.

at this point, i realized that i should have signed up with hospitality temp agencies immediately because i was frittering away the two or three busiest weeks of the year waiting for a job when i could have been earning money pouring wine at paul mccartney’s christmas party.

seriously, i met someone who did that.

i went to a temp agency and they said they were done with holiday recruiting, but i made them take my cv anyway, and as a result they let me fill out the forms and gave me two jobs – selling concessions at a football game and bartending on new year’s eve.

both of those were fun, and they kept my spirits up while i continued to hope that an office job would materialize in january.

meanwhile, bruce put me in touch with an IU grad who lives here in london and works for a big firm that does temping, and after talking with him a bit, he referred me to a place where i could take an online Office test. i passed, it said that someone would contact me, and my hopes were renewed. i emailed the other temp agency guy to ask again about whether anything would be available in january and to tell him that i had been talking to this other firm, in case that impressed him or allayed his doubts.

today, both of them called me back. the first one – where i passed the online test – was very friendly and wanted me to take another test on monday, but after talking with him a bit more it became clear that it would take a few weeks to finalize things and most of the jobs want someone to stay for longer, so it’s probably not worth it since i’m leaving soon. ditto for the second guy when he called, except that he was still careful to say that not having corporate experience would probably put me in for an uphill battle with his clients.

so now i am having to admit that i probably won’t get anyone to pay me £25/hour to format their powerpoint presentations, and also that i will probably have a very hard time finding any other job for only a few short weeks, and that makes me sad… :(

on the upside, i have greatly enjoyed the time to read and work on other things over the past few weeks. that was really what i wanted to do with this time, which is probably part of why i was not wholly motivated to take any job that came along.

at the same time, however, i have started putting things on my credit card, and some of the things i hoped to do and see before crossing back over the big blue may be impossible this time, and both of those things suck.

the hospitality temp jobs aren’t over, so they should lead to a few more gigs at least, but all in all the whole experience has made two things clear to me:

• i am going to have to keep traveling because the thought that i might get it all out of my system in this go and then feel ready to settle down is kind of silly.
• i want to be more creative about finding ways to earn money while i’m on the road.

as for the second point, i’ve already had a few ideas about cooking for people and building websites for hostels, and i’m going to think on it all some more as i make my next plans, but in the meantime, i refer you to the next post.

and thanks for listening to me vent a bit. :)

man, finding free wireless internet in london is a pain.
i mean, it’s true that i actually just thought of googling “free wireless london” and in so doing, i learned that there is a full square mile in islington with free wireless for all.

and that’s cool.

but given that i thought there was wireless included in my flat, and there KIND of is, but it’s very patchy, and the place down the street charges £1/hr., and i don’t have much cash at the moment, and i’m sometimes out and about in the city, and i was excited to learn of a library right across from the bus stop this morning but then i was annoyed to discover that, not only is there no wireless in this library, but you have to PAY to use the wired internet… in a library!!

the whole ordeal has been making me feel tired.

i want one of those little keychain clickers that tell you when you’re near a hotspot, the ones that i laughed at when i saw it in skymall a few years ago because it seemed so silly, but now they seem wise. except that to get one that actually tells you whether the network is open or not costs a lot, and then they are less pocket-friendly, and you know what? i still kind of resist on principle because i firmly believe that wifi should be free, and more than that, i have faith that it soon will be, so i would rather not put too much energy into developing workarounds for a world that is not going to last very long.

but still, it’s annoying now, and today i had a flicker of sympathy for starbucks because i thought, “well, at least they have the right idea in always HAVING wireless, and making it easy to use just one account at all their stores…” so i looked at the login screen for the 75th time, and decided that it is just way too expensive for the 75th time, and groaned and left.

why doesn’t some big chain just offer free wireless everywhere? or even free wireless with Purchase everywhere? isn’t there a market for that?!

but it’s all ok, because you know what?
there is free wireless at the apple store on regent street.

ahhhh….

and so apple, even though just a couple days ago i was cursing at itunes with david, and even though i don’t know why “enter” should mean “edit name” instead of “open”, i just wanted to tell you that sometimes you do get things right, and i am grateful.

so after i get a paycheck, i’ll come back and buy myself a christmas present.

last week’s episode of this american life is phenomenal.

apparently it’s a year old, but i didn’t hear it the first time, so yeehaw podcasting. :)

it tells the story of a fundamentalist preacher named carlton pearson, who rose through the ranks of the charismatic movement and led a huge pentecostal church in tulsa, oklahoma that was one of the stars of the fundamentalist christian world.

then, a few years ago, he decided that he didn’t believe in hell anymore, which is a rather startling move for a pentecostal preacher.

he was the kind of guy who thought about things, though, especially when they seemed to be coming from god, and the more he thought about this one, the more he decided that, in fact, the damnation of the pure at heart simply because they didn’t know about christ was anathema to his understanding of god. he had a sort of epiphany where he saw hell not as something that god would ever do to his children, but rather as something that we create for ourselves by not believing in universal forgiveness.

these ideas ran counter to the very foundations of what he had been taught, but he knew that sometimes god had reasons for not revealing everything at once, so it just felt to him as if god was saying that people were ready to advance to the next level, like in mario 3, where suddenly in level 6 it makes sense to use that suit that lets mario turn into stone, but in level 3, where there’s a lot of water, that suit really didn’t make any sense, and actually it sucked hardcore because you just sank to the bottom and sat there like an idiot. but that didn’t mean that level 3 didn’t have it’s place or it’s own wonders. who doesn’t like that frog suit? people just work with what they’re given at the moment, mmm-k?

ok so that’s my analogy, not his, but maybe you get the idea.

anyway, he was used to preaching what felt true to him, so he started talking about changing the charismatic doctrine. he didn’t feel like he should leave the church, and at first, he was just met with disbelief. people did this awkward kind of throat-clearing “how’s the weather?” kind of song and dance because they didn’t Really want to believe that he was serious, and you know, maybe it would pass.

but eventually, his ideas went further and he began to say things like: if you think about it just a little bit, you realize that it’s the Spirit of the word that matters, and not necessarily a literal adherence to the translation that happened to make it into the king james.

round about there he crossed a line, and it wasn’t long before he was shunned and officially branded as a heretic. his church attendance plummeted, he fell into debt, he was asked to leave the board of oral roberts university, and eventually, he was forced to reinvent his church on a much smaller scale.

about 100 of his original members stuck with him through the whole ride, despite being shunned themselves, and today he preaches to about 400 of what may be the world’s only pentecostal universalists, with his numbers slowly growing.

and remember, this is in oklahoma.

i believe that this is an incredibly important story for anyone concerned about the outcome of the faith and values debates that are raging in contemporary america, and it is also the 53839th reminder of why this american life is a great show and i miss out when i forget to listen (so again, yeehaw podcasting!).

it is important because these are people who looked at their long-held beliefs, looked at the world, saw a discrepancy, and realized that they had the choice to either push the discrepancy away as a threat to their way of life or embrace it as a chance to learn more about what they truly believe, even though what they found might be different from what they always expected.

and they chose to take the chance.

bishop pearson’s former colleagues and friends saw this decision as a failure of faith; a failure to trust the bible without question, even if (or especially when) it might seem to contradict itself. the idea that there are compelling reasons to not believe in hell is seen by them as proof that it is a particularly pernicious temptation meant to test them, and they just need to be strong.

but bishop pearson chose a different interpretation of faith, and i think this is important, not because “follow your heart” or “live and learn” are particularly new ideas in this world of ours, and not because, in this case, the people involved happened to have a change of heart that made their beliefs a lot closer to mine.

whatever we believe about damnation and salvation, and wherever we think faith comes from, i think this story is important because, in general, the idea that, when our way of life is threatened, faith could be what leads us to embrace change rather than resist it, is a Big Idea. the kind of idea that changes the shape of our world.

i know it doesn’t sound that revolutionary, but bear with me here, because i’m not sure we really get it.

the world around us right now is a pretty scary place.

at the end of the day, we are frightened that the way of life that we cherish is being threatened, and, in one way or another, the weapon we wield against this fear is our faith.

faith in god. faith in democracy. faith in ourselves.

but what are we really asking that faith to do for us?

are we saying “give me THIS! NOW! prove that you love me!”
or are we saying “give me the strength to grow and remember that love is never in doubt.”

because big and grown up and developed as our civilizations might be, we’re still pretty young in the grand scheme of things, and in some ways i think we’re just a bunch of kids with superhero suits that we refuse to take off even when we sleep. we wear the suits because they make us feel invincible, or invisible, or strong or smart or brave. we think the suits are part of who we are, and we’ll fall apart or disappear without them, so if anyone suggests that we might actually enjoy wearing a t-shirt and jeans, or a pinstripe suit, or maybe a sari, we just yell at them and run away and hide under the bed, consoling ourselves with dreams of flight or xray vision or whatever other power we are sure we will have just as soon as our true nature is revealed.

now i’m not a parent, or an expert in psychology, but word round the campfire is that the best thing to do in this situation is let the kid wear the suit as long as they want. that 9 times out of 10, if we come to believe that we are safe in our superhero suits, after a while we just wake up one morning and decide to wear something else of our own accord, confident of the fact that any superpowers that we really need are still with us, and always will be.

what i’m saying is that it’s important to remember that, wherever this world of thinning and shifting borders takes us, and however much it might not look like we thought it should look when we were little kids, we have a choice about how to respond. we can either make our decisions out of fear of losing what we thought we were, or out of faith in finding what we know we will become.

i tip my keyboard to bishop pearson and his church for that reminder.

you can stream the episode or pay a buck to download it here, or sign up for the free podcast here or, as lucy was lovely to announce to the world, through itunes. i still have numerous problems with itunes, but right now i am using it to keep up with this american life and this i believe while i’m abroad, and, as a portal for those progams, it brings me moments of joy that almost balance out the overwhelming sense of fatigue that overcomes me every time i think about all the hours i would have to put into organizing and annotating my music in order for itunes to live up to its distant, barely visible promise of flexibility and power.

i said almost.

if you have an hour while you’re making dinner or something, i hope you’ll give the episode a listen, and i’m all eyes if you wanna let me know what you think.

i warned you i was gonna write some this week, right?
;)

this post took a wicked long time.

and that downloading music. it didn’t take any time at all.

nope.

i still want to go work on that paper, but i might just have to sleep a bit first…