feathered, flighted, winged

Latest senioritis-induced time-wasting exercise = learning hiragana. No particular reason, except that I finally got fed up with not knowing it. I mean, I can't really say I know French, or Greek, or Korean, but at least I can read the alphabet and sound things out sometimes. But Japanese has heretofore been mere squiggles to me. NO LONGER. Now it will be Real Letters interspersed with sticks and boxy things.

For some reason I am allowing this to distract me from the things I'm supposed to be doing, like writing for my novel-writing class. I have this perfectly glorious concept for a historical novel (working title: The Road from Serinda) and even about twenty pages of writing, yet cannot actually bring myself to work on it. SHAME. Instead I have been working on Zither and the outline for a giant presumptuous Twelve Kingdoms fanfic in two parts (working title(s): Brightness of the Sun, A Wind from the Sea.)

Daniel's playing the piano downstairs. I don't know the song. He's only practicing, but the house is empty except for the two of us. He keeps stopping and playing the same section over and over. It feels like he's playing it for me.

Huh. I have not updated since halfway through November, and here we are halfway through March. On the one hand I think this represents a crippling failure to be active on LiveJournal. On the other hand... my last entry was about Nanowrimo, and my Nano story Zither grew to 40386 words in my LJ absence. (I think I am actually rather more impressed with myself for having continued to work on it, than I would have been for finishing it in a month. As it stands it's going to be more like 100,000 words anyway.) So at least I have accomplished something?

I think I am coming down with an awful case of senioritis. No motivation to do anything class-related. I think I'm glad I'm taking the summer off to recoup before grad school. Most of the summer.

... It occurs to me that I have not posted about grad school since before the applications were submitted. O_O And I have not posted about the Amazing Jessie-and-Daniel Europe Trip that is to occur after graduation. O_O. These are definitely things that need posting about. But I think they are important enough to require their own post? So not right now.

Things to post about later:
- Amazing Jessie-and-Daniel Europe Trip
- Grad school visits
- Amazing Classes I have this semester

In short, easy-to-mention news, Daniel and I have been working out together. He is helping me learn to do pull-ups! I cannot even do one yet, but SOON.

Working title: Zither
New Words: 7495
Total Words: 19088/50000

Like I thought, the week was basically a bust. Most of those words are from my Marine Ecology paper, which I decided to include in order to stay alive. Which means I'm pretty behind. I did manage to get at least 50 or 100 words of real writing in most days, though, so it's not like I've pushed it all the way to the back of my mind. Just most of the way.

On the bright side I think I've figured out what needs to happen next. But on the less-bright side I really need to work on grad school applications this week.... hm, what to do...

Working title: Zither
New Words: 2928
Total Words: 11593/50000

Falling behind again. I think this week is going to end up a bust, really; it's just work work work until the Chem GRE on Saturday, and then I have my 10-page review article due Monday that I should really at some point start. Fortunately I am counting the review article in my wordcount; unfortunately it needs editing, etc. Also at some point I need to finish my grad school apps; like, I need to edit my personal statement, etc.

To do:
- edit personal statement
- request transcripts for schools
- find Important Historical Events for my HIV/AIDS class
- finish organizing my data for thesis
- finish doing a literature search for thesis

And at some point I need to figure out what happens next in this story. I've gotten to the political intrigue bit, and I've never been any good at political intrigue.

Working title: Zither
New Words: 3702
Total Words: 8665/50000

A few more words caught up; 350 or so. I've been listening to Al Stewart's "Roads to Moscow", like, nonstop. It has this absolutely gorgeous war-atmosphere thing going on, and it's super depressing, but also really really pretty.



Studied a little organic chemistry today, going to study a little more tomorrow, and finish reading approximately one billion papers, and take my Greek quiz. Greek's a wonderful class; I don't think I've talked about it before. The professor is apparently the leading authority on Athenian pederastic relationships, which is sort of awesome. I really wish I'd had room in my schedule to take a language class before senior year, but what can you do?

Working title: Zither
New Words: 3396
Total Words: 4963/50000

Still behind. Marginally less behind, though -- I'm sixty words more caught-up than I was. And the weekend is coming up, and an extra hour to write/sleep in. Also, in the past week I got way, way caught up on grad school applications. I need to edit my personal statement kind of a lot and take the Chem GRE (Nov 13, hopefully), but that's really basically it. (That said, I still have the 10-page paper to write, so...)

I really love writing this story. It's going horribly slow, but I can feel it picking up momentum. I need to break away from these all-dialogue scenes and make the characters do something that isn't talking...

Working title: Zither
New Words: 1297
Total Words: 1297/50000

Look, I'm back.

I'm already behind on this NaNo thing, since I didn't even decide to do it until, like, two days ago. But I've decided to count my grad school personal statement and my ten-page review article for Marine Ecology in my total wordcount, so I don't completely fall down and die. Also, I hope I don't get bronchitis again.

I feel like I should update this before May runs away from me. So, I update.

I'm not even good at updating my Twitter regularly. I think once a week has become more or less standard. And it's bad, too, because when I go back I look at the Twitter thing and think, "hey! I went to an art museum and saw the wonders of Ancient Egypt! that's pretty cool!" based off of a two-word tweet: "pharaoh pharaoh". And then I think about all the awesome stuff that happened over spring break, and how I'll probably forget it someday because of not having blogged about it, because my memory is like a sieve.

But I don't usually have anything interesting to talk about, so it's kind of hard to establish a habit? But maybe it'd be good to establish a habit. You're supposed to write every day if you don't want the Font of Inspiration to dry up, right? I don't even read every day. This is how you know school is busy: you no longer have time to read things that aren't textbooks. Oh, except I read C.J. Cherryh's "Forty Thousand at Gehenna", which was a very lovely bit of old-fashioned scifi worldbuilding.

Summer is less busy, at least for now, so maybe I will have time to habit-form. In ten days or so I go back to Mudd to work for the summer. According to Prof Maloney (research advisor) I am going to be spending a lot of time on the lyophilizer, at least at first. The lyophilizer is a sort of massive freeze-dry-thing. It's quite interesting. But after that I will be spending time grinding things up and popping them into solution, and then running them through an LC/MS to take profiles, and running them through an HPLC to collect fractions. Forever. And the LC/MS room is loud, because the LC pumps have to always be running to keep the column wet. But I like white noise.

This is the other reason I don't post a lot. What do I have to post about besides lab? "And then I measured the specific rotation of the compound and it was chiral!!! even though it was also inorganic!! OMG!!!!" I mean, no one else gets the excitement, right? (The excitement, incidentally, is simply that chirality -- mirror-image-ness -- is usually the domain of organic chemistry, because carbon is so versatile. Cobalt(III) is one of the only non-carbon elements that is inert enough to hold chirality, but reactive enough to make things with. Your chemistry lesson for the day.)

Mina is graduating today, so no more for now. Maybe later. In another month.

Usually the Writer's Block is stupid, but today's is actually kind of witty and amusing. Well done, LJ.