Why The Hell Am I Awake

Usually this title would indicate a deeply philosophical post, but right now I am just wondering why the hell I am still awake. It's 7:24 AM on Friday morning. I've spent the past five hours in a daze - I think I was organizing my iTunes library at some point, which is the intellectual equivalent of asking yourself rhetorical questions. I clicked and dragged cover-art, typed in names of songs, deleted and rearranged. And it's not like I was having a problem figuring out which song was playing - having a picture of Harrison Ford come up when I hear the "Raider's March" does little to improve my life. If I can't figure it out by the 40th listen, I doubt an image is going to help anything.

What the hell? Such mundanity should have obliterated any will to keep eyes open and forward, let alone awake enough to type a blog entry. No, I know myself well enough to know that if I *really* wanted to put myself to sleep, I would have found something I had to do, and then I would have fallen right asleep. Fill out financial aid forms? Whoa, I'm feeling a bit groggy. Pick out classes for next semester? Already fluffing my pillow, sorry.

Actually, the truth is I've been quite sick the past couple of days. I lost my voice, which people always seem to react to as if I'd just been hit by a car ("Oh my gosh, when did this happen?") I, myself, find it rather fun to lose my voice. Not the whole help-I'm-drowning-in-a-pool-of-my-own-mucous part, but the part where I go to speak and another person's voice comes out all rough and tumble, gruff and scratchy. I grew out my beard to match my voice, and now I'm rather disappointed to have gotten my old voice back. I was going to buy curtains and everything. Oh well.

Also, I might just have some residual energy from all the INCREDIBLE intellectual feats I accomplished this week. I knocked out 30 pages of papers and 2 finals in the span of three days. Yes. I may never be able to walk again, but the doctors are hopeful I'll still be able to fill out my financial aid forms. I'm really going to miss my classes from this semester. Maybe that's why I can't sleep - once I go to sleep, that means I'll have to wake up that much closer to graduating. I feel incredibly blessed - my Ancient Epic class was an orgasm a week. I took seven pages of typed, single-spaced notes almost every week, and I actually read over them for fun (I am a nerd). My other class, Arthurian Legend and Cultural Change, forever altered my view of Arthur and the Middle Ages. I now see him as a vessel into which we pour our own hopes and fears and ambitions - he is merely the frame through which we project our own colonialist image. I wrote the best essay in my life in this class - an examination how experience is a problematic rhetorical strategy for the Wife of Bath - and the professor was always positive and encouraging. I'm going to miss her. I worked harder on her account than on my own, I think - I wanted to achieve for her, to show her I had come a long way from the last class we'd had together.

small things. sometimes I have a maelstrom of self-consciousness where I wonder why I think anyone would remotely care to ingest my minutiae. and then, at 7:46 in the morning, I end up going "fuck it" and typing whatever is there, percolating. it's crazy time. how crazy? i am not going to capitalize anything in this paragraph. this is how hard shit has hit the fan. look at this. not. one. single. capital. Letter. dammit.

Alright, I'm going to lay down and see if anything interesting happens. Hope your pillows are always fluffy.

-m