The following conversation was recorded INSIDE MY HEAD last night at approximately 12:30 am:

“Ummph. I can’t sleep. Why can’t I sleep? I’m tired. My room is dark. It’s quiet. I didn’t drink caffeine today. I’ve tried counting camera lenses that I want and everything. What’s the problem?”

The problem is probably that your hyperactive brain won’t shut down for the night. You should try rolling over to the side on which you normally sleep. Maybe it will get the hint.

*rolls over *

“AGH! The pain! In my abdomen! What was that? Why did it only hurt when I rolled over?? Am I dying???”

Uh oh, here it comes. Here comes the senseless worrying. The countless scenarios spun out past all probability. Please, let’s just avoid all of that and go to sleep.

“But, I mean, what could it be? It couldn’t be, like, my ribs poking into my heart, could it? I couldn’t be internally bleeding right now, could I? Or could I be… having a heart attack?”

No, that’s silly. Good grief, don’t let the darkness and your fatigue get the better of your common sense. You know everything seems scarier at night. It’s probably nothing, anyway. Remember that one time when you were like eight and you were in the shopping mall with your dad and brother and kept screaming, “My tummy hurts SOOOO bad! Dad, I feel AWFUL!” And he said back to you, “Erin, it’s probably just GAS.” Do you remember how that shut you up? Do you remember how crimson your face turned? Well, that is probably what is happening to you right now. So I recommend that you forget about it and go to sleep.

“I suppose you’re right. But, now that you’ve got me thinking about it… isn’t it scary to imagine all the little things that could go wrong in your body? I mean, if any one of the hundreds of tiny processes that sustain your body stop working, it could very easily cause a chain reaction leading to your death—or, at the very least, your severe discomfort.”

Oh please. Don’t start with that one again. You did enough of that in your Biology class.

“No, but really, think about it! There are so many things that could go wrong! How can you possibly just go on existing without trembling in fear?”

Hold on there. Don’t forget who’s controlling this whole operation: it’s not you, and it’s not nobody. It’s God, and He is a whole lot better at it than you ever could be. So if He says your body’s going to keep on working, it’s going to keep on working. And if He says it’s not going to, then it’s not going to. And remember, this world is not what it’s all about, anyway. Death and discomfort are not the worst things that can happen to you.

“Thanks. I needed that. Sorry for whining… the dark must have addled my brain.”

Told you so.

“Well, goodnight, then.”

Pleasant dreams.

*zzZZZZzzzzZZZZzzzz… *

So, I got myself a new toy.

Because I am not only a poor, starving college student, I am a poor, starving, college student in desperate need of her photography fix.

It is the ridiculously inexpensive Canon 50mm 1.8 lens, which translates into sharper pictures with a shallower depth of field than either of my other lenses could hope to accomplish. Oh, and also it means better pictures in lower light. Yay for me!

I can’t wait to try out some portraits with this baby.

1. My hair was doing that thing again. I threw it into a ponytail approximately 0.5 seconds before I had to be in my car driving to work, took one look at the way that it was coiling and flipping all around itself like some kind of mad snake and said, “All right, hair. You win this round.”
2. I poured super glue all over my hands in such a way that for the greater part of the evening my palms felt like sandpaper. I was actually on the phone when it happened… and in my fidgety way I happened to pick up a tube of super glue which happened to be slightly unscrewed and happened to spill out all over my hands and my apron and the floor while I mouthed silent terror at it. Now the patches of dried glue are finally starting to wear off, but it makes typing a little awkward.
3. I forgot to brush my teeth this morning. That’s bad enough—it meant that I had bad breath today. But you know what’s worse? Brace yourself—I didn’t brush them last night, either! How could such a travesty happen to a human being, you ask? The answer is too complicated. Suffice to say, that was enough to elevate my breath from bad to super-gosh-awful bad. I’m sure the customers appreciated that.
4. I am getting a cold. This is probably the optimum thing I could wish to happen, ever! Especially during Christmas break. But it led to the rather unintentionally funny side effect of my not being able to talk for the first half of today. I just tried, and… not much came out. I managed to interact with customers, but it probably sounded like I was standing on the other side of the room. Inside an aquarium.
5. But only for the first half of the day. Because, later, as I was standing in the back room drinking from my mug of warm tea, a funny thing happened. I discovered that the reason I could not talk was not actually because of my sore throat, but because a GIANT WAD of PHLEGM had wedged itself in my throat—a fact that I only discovered as I SWALLOWED said giant wad of phlegm. Which inevitably led me to the realization that there is nothing quite like the feeling of having just swallowed a giant wad of phlegm that you did not even know was in your throat. And, yes, you are welcome for that mental image.

So, basically, this afternoon I was a messy-haired, super-glue-handed, bad-breathed, mute, phlegmy-throated employee.
*sigh*

I can’t wait for the Google searches on that one.

NEWSFLASH: Everything they ever told you about college finals week is TRUE.

Well. Maybe not everything. (I don’t know what they told you.) But the ramp up to my very first finals at Gutenberg College was an entirely singular experience—I have never been through anything quite like it before.

It’s not that I’ve never been under a major deadline before. It’s just that throwing a stew made of my own tendency to procrastinate and my perfectionism into the pressure cooker that is Gutenberg during dead week… well, let’s just say that free time, sleep, and peace of mind ran dangerously low while surliness, procrastination, and worrying ran dangerously high.

I had some pretty dark moments this week—moments when I felt sure that Gutenberg should never have accepted me and that I was going to fail the whole program. Now that I’m on the other side, I can see how irrational I was being. (Although, no promises on the “not failing” part—I haven’t gotten my grades yet. ) My tests went better than I expected and, although I am not satisfied with my papers, I did get most of them turned in.
Unfortunately, I do have a few late papers that I have to finish in the next day or so. So I’m not even completely done yet. But I am a lot closer than I ever thought I would be this time LAST week.

And, of course, once I AM done I will still be busy. But right now, juggling Christmas shopping and web and photography jobs and hours at my undisclosed retail location sound a lot more attractive than writing another paper about Plato.

(Oh, and I appreciated the break from blogging, too. From now on, I hope to blog, if not every day, at least more often than… ‘never’. How’s that for a promise? )

By now, most of you have figured out why, for the last month, I broke my usual blogging pattern and posted EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. But in case you haven’t heard, I will explain.

In the month of November, I participated in NaBloPoMo, or “National Blog Posting Month.”

I know this may have seemed like a poor choice, considering how swamped I was feeling by schoolwork, but as November approached I decided to join for a number of reasons. One, I just really wanted to blog more. I felt like a lot of things were happening that I never recorded anywhere, and that I would eventually forget about entirely. Two, I really wanted to prove to myself that I could actually do something… that I could make a commitment like that to myself and actually stick it out.

I also decided, as I was beginning this challenge, that I wouldn’t tell y’all about it—at least not right away. I have a bad habit of announcing things that I’m going to do and then not doing them. So, here I am, not telling you that I’m going to do NaBloPoMo, but that I did it. Ever so much more satisfying.

So, I did it, but was it a success? I’m not exactly sure. This challenge surprised me in a lot of ways. I think the easiest way to debrief will be a simple list of Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• I wrote every day. I really did have to exercise the discipline that I talked about above.
• Readers had fresh content every single day.
• I recorded a lot of little moments that I would have forgotten about otherwise.
• I gained new readers. I’ve noticed several new faces around, probably people who found me through the NaBloPoMo Randomizer. I hope you stick around, folks!

Cons:

• I wrote every day. It was not very many days into November before blogging started to feel like a real chore.
• Readers had fresh content every single day. Honestly, I think this was probably a little overwhelming. Because I have so little time to read blogs, I usually prefer when they update every couple of days. But maybe that’s just me.
• My posts dropped in quality. Often I had to write my posts in the ten minutes before I went to bed, and usually I was grasping at straws to find topics. All of this made me feel like I was giving you scribbles instead of finished paintings.
• Readers (understandably) left fewer comments because there was less time to digest each individual post.
• The posts in turn seemed to lose a little bit of their unique identity, becoming instead “part of NaBloPoMo.”

Oh, I forgot one big “Pro”: I captured one month of my first quarter at College in a time capsule. I can only imagine what it will be like to look at this two, three, twenty years down the road.
All in all, I think it was a good experience.

But I’m sure as heck not doing it in December.

In fact, starting tonight, I am taking a week-long hiatus from the internet. Finals are next week, and in order to help me concentrate, I will not be checking my bloglines feeds, checking MySpace or Facebook, surfing the web, or getting on at all except to check my email. I’m already starting to feel a little bit twitchy from withdrawal, but I think it will be good for me.

See you next week.