goodbye, gatorsexpress

after much consideration, i have decided not to delete this blog. instead, i am moving to a new blog to chronicle the new phase of my life, now that the whole "gator" thing doesn't apply as much anymore. so, if you're interested, you can follow me over to http://moveableblog.blogspot.com/. i thank everyone for their input and hope to keep hearing from you.

all the best,

gatorsexpress

i'm thinking about deleting this blog

i don't have anything to say anymore.

domestic disturbance

sorry to complain once again, but i am so damn sick of having to live around college kids and put up with their stupid drama. it's nice that the idiot boys across the hall have disappeared for the summer so i don't have to call the cops on their dumb asses another 9 times before i move, but that doesn't make up for the loudmouth girl next door. for the past year i have put up with listening to her barking dogs and slamming door at all hours, not to mention her drunken phone calls in the hallway in the middle of the night. tonight was the last straw.

i'm up at 6am writing this because her stupid drunk ass came in yelling at 2am and never stopped. she and her boyfriend have been over there fighting all night. shouting at each other in the house. shouting at each other in the hall. shouting at each other while taking the dogs out to the courtyard. finally, at 5am, i decided i'd had enough. i walked down the hall to find that the reason i could hear them so clearly in my bedroom at the back of my apartment was that they were fighting in their living room WITH THE FUCKING FRONT DOOR WIDE OPEN!! so, i stepped in the door and asked, "is there a reason why i have to hear your mouth at 5 in the fucking morning?!" she starts going on about how she and her boyfriend have had a 3-year relationship and telling me to get out of her house. i told her i'd step out of her house when it was clear to her that it was time for her to shut her door and shut up so i didn't have to hear her in MY house, because she'd been violating the sanctity of my space long enough. if she can't bother to treat her neighbors with some respect in the middle of the night, she's not going to get any in return. moreover, people who value their privacy don't fight with the door wide open. she babbled a bunch of shit. i kept telling her that if she didn't shut the hell up and let me go to bed, i was calling the cops if i heard another freakin' peep out of her or her boyfriend. she threatened to call the cops if i didn't leave her house. i reiterated my order to shut up, her boyfriend apologized while holding her dumb ass back (at least one of them has a brain in his head) and asked if he could talk to me. i told him i'd heard enough of his mouth for one evening and to fuck off, because i was going to bed. i'll be filing a complaint with management later in the morning.

goddammit, i've had enough of kids. i just want to live amongst people who aren't idiots again. is that really so much to ask?

officially too old for this

i did what will be my final drive alone back to florida from virginia yesterday. left mom's at 230pm and walked in my door at 130am. i'm freakin' exhausted. in fact, i've yet to fully unpack the car. all i've been able to do is lay on the couch and watch the episodes of Rome i have on netflix. thank god it's a stormy day -- making it perfect for being lazy in pjs. i just don't have what it takes to keep doing that drive on my own anymore. i feel like i've done it a lot lately, too. granted, all i'm doing is sitting on my butt steering a car down I-95, but it makes my body hurt all over, and my eyes and mind are tired for days. someone's got to help me make the drive back north again at the end of the month. no way i can do it on my own after packing up an apartment in the florida july heat and humidity.

i think i'm going to take a nap now. the 7 hours of sleep i got last night just wasn't enough to slough off the nearly 800 miles on the road.

got accepted

i'm visiting mom right now (heading back to florida tomorrow), and we went out for a late mexican dinner. i checked my email when i came home, and lo and behold, there was a message from a professor out at utah state notifying me that a paper i submitted to the american journalism historians assoication back in may has been accepted for presentation at their annual conference! it's just a little thing i wrote about how the teenagers of the 1920s were the first media generation and that they and radio grew up together. it was a nice marriage of my two master's degrees, and i'm very excited that they liked it. i'm even more excited that i now get a trip to seattle in early october. should be fun!

first you reel me out, and then you cut the string

i've been sorting and sifting through my stuff all weekend in preparation for packing up my life again. in the process, i've set up a new email account and been cleaning out my old email's inbox. while doing that yesterday, i came across a bunch of old email exchanges between andre and me. it's always awkward to run across reminders of people who are no longer in your life, and correspondence really chronicles the personal history of a relationship. it was painful to read the exchanges from a time when things were good between you and someone you loved when things have ended so badly. i read through some of them -- for a while there we emailed each other several times a day -- but then quickly deleted them all. there were lots of them, too.

i'm angry to be reminded of him. angry that i wasted so much time and effort on someone who didn't really give a shit about me when it counted. i'm glad to be free of him now, but i'd be lying if i said that i don't think of showing up on his doorstep sometimes just to punch him straight in the nose. the only thing that keeps me from doing it is the knowledge that he could break me in half and probably would.

i've been in the dumps all weekend. part of it is from being rundown by my virus, but part of it is the emails. i had a good cry about it sitting on the couch earlier. the minute the tears started to fall, possum roused from a sound sleep across the room in his chair and came running up to my lap to love and comfort me. he cuddled me for a long time until i calmed down and felt better. i think i'm starting to see why some women become old cat ladies. devotion like the kind i have already living with me is stiff competition indeed.

sick as a dog

how do you get the ebola virus in florida in june? i don't know, but it seems i have. i've been feeling punk all week, but it's really been full-blown since wednesday. usually the first 24-48 hours are the worst, and then you turn the corner, but that doesn't seem to be the case this time. i'm more congested than ever, ache all over like it's the first day, and running a fever on day three. i can't sleep either, because i can't get comfortable. it doesn't help that all the water i'm drinking to flush myself out has me pissing like a racehorse, so my body keeps waking me up. lots on my mind, too. i hope that a day in bed with no obligations tomorrow will do the trick and turn me around, because all the advil and nyquil in the world ain't touching this. ugh.

mission accomplished

for reals, though. not george w. bush style.

i turned in my last paper early this morning. that bitch was 36 pages when i was done, and i was up all night finishing it, despite the weeks of work i'd put into it. then i laid down and thought about all the ways i could have done it better. i woke up a few hours later just glad it's DONE!!

and so, my friends, that should do it. my second (and FINAL) master's degree should be complete. i'll know for sure when grades are posted in a few days, but i think it's pretty safe to say that it's over. i still have some mop up to do on my final project before i turn the final copy into the library, but nothing more needs to happen for the degree to be a reality. it's out of my hands now, and i couldn't be happier. now i just need to decompress and let it set in. i feel like there's still something i need to be doing.

i celebrated today by helping my mom clean her house -- it feels so good to do something other than sit on my fat ass and write nonstop. it is my plan to spend as little time on the computer in a bent position over the next few weeks, but i will keep this blog updated. more importantly, everyone will be getting a phone call from me soon now that i'm free -- so answer when you see me blowin' up your cell! i miss you all and thank you so much for all your support -- it's what got me across the finish line!

and now, if you'll excuse me, i'm gonna go stuff myself with sushi and get very drunk on sake, so my mother can carry my sorry parts home and put them to bed early. oh, and i'll be sleeping late. believe it.

in my defense

i had my defense for my final master's project today, and it went very well. my committee members were very supportive, and they all had wonderful ideas for improving my project. they really got it, and i'm excited about the future of this venture. this also means that i'll be graduating here in about a week -- even though i'm not walking. i'll be celebrating by hanging out with my mom instead. much, much better. speaking of celebrating, i had a lovely dinner with my girls, sanam, emel, and juliana tonight, and it was the perfect way to mark a milestone. good times with good friends.

sorry i don't have anything more interesting to add right now -- i'm busy still trying to finish my last two research papers, so i don't really feel accomplished or relaxed quite yet. check back with me this time next week, as i'll be turning in the last of it all next friday. in the meantime, i've gotta get this apartment cleaned up and packed to hit the road home. can't wait!

project: done

as an update to my update, my big, final, capstone project is done. i finished it late wednesday night and submitted it to my committee before dawn thursday morning. all 88 freakin' pages of it. it was supposed to be 30-40 pages, but it just grew and grew and grew. kind of like a beanstalk, only the giant at the end of it was the project itself. fittingly, i used a green graphics theme. i'm pretty proud of it. at times it felt like giving birth -- especially when i had to reformat it twice on wednesday night (long story, but that was a total of 6 hours of work right there) and the appenidices didn't want to print (a battle which i won) -- but i'm very pleased with my baby. i defend next thursday, and then i'm done. except for the two research papers, but we'll pretend anyway. i'm looking forward to the defense, because it will give me much-needed feedback to help make it all it can be. cross your fingers for me. i celebrated today with a massage this afternoon and a long, four-mile sunset walk around campus with sanam.

in other news, i'm sitting out on my patio enjoying the weather and writing this by the glow of the christmas lights on my railing, and a tiny little bug just crawled up under the frame around my screen. that can't be good. so, with that, i'm gonna take my laptop and my sam adams and go inside. i need to take a shower and get over to sanam's for the post-walk dinner she's cooking anyway. that persian knows her way around a kitchen, so whoo hoo!