U of I: What are you trying to prove, again?

Starring at the severe weather report in awestruck horror: why the hell haven't they canceled classes? It's looking a LOT like it'll land on the 12'' side of "6 to 12 inches." This on top of the snow from the day before yesterday. I went out at 6:25 am and walked back at 7:35 am (a nice little chunk of War and Peace and some good cocoa later-- sadly no candy bar, damn you 'Hawk Shop,' the one time you're actually closed) and my footprints had already been completely obliterated by the snowfall.

Spent the treacherous walk home muttering Terrible Things re: U of I in Spanish, just to make sure my hatred is still bilingual. Not just curse words as that's too easy, but trying to get as rhetorically inventive as possible/invoke the ghost of that 135 degree Fahrenheit day in Sevilla summer before last using simply the right words, like all good magic.

Incidentally, the German surname Fahrenheit apparently means may be somehow mildly related to 'experience.' So sayeth the Online Etymology Dictionary, at least. With correction from bagheera_san. I feel like if I lived in Vienna or Berlin a bit I could pick up and come to like German better. Conversations and reading were always decent, but my god, the noun cases!

As it is the kibbutz is going to force me to learn Hebrew, and there's the possibility of work in Buenos Aires, to transition to a fuller fluency in Spanish, so there's no real time to weasel a teaching/hostel position in Hamburg or something. I want to though. Maybe after grad school? But then I wanted to spend a bit of time in Prague scraping an income off one of those barely-legit English teaching places as well, so there's always that. Or there's always the magical world where the nonfiction book advance 1) comes in and 2) does so in time to afford me a bit of a living while I scratch out some more work. Here's to dreaming.

Even if the stars align and I get the plumb cash Poe was waxing poetic about, I still kind of want to work a crap job rather than devoting all of my time to writing. You know in Dostoevsky's notebooks, he constantly bitches about not having the time to write, being constantly distracted and harranged by family chaos and interruptions. But as scholars have pointed out, when he had a chunk of time he was unproductive, frittered it away, accomplished none of his goals and didn't know why: he simply didn't know himself very well.

Even as he whimpered for a free day he thrived on the chaos, the interruptions spurred him, he worked best under severe pressure to the point where it became the only sure precondition of his output. I bitch about school preventing me from working on original fic, and yes, my balance of time spent on writing could CERTAINLY be better? But I think I need something besides me, a room, and a blank word document or I'll gnaw my hands off before I type so much as a chapter.

And cancel class already!

U of I: What are you trying to prove, again?

Starring at the severe weather report in awestruck horror: why the hell haven't they canceled classes? It's looking a LOT like it'll land on the 12'' side of "6 to 12 inches." This on top of the snow from the day before yesterday. I went out at 6:25 am and walked back at 7:35 am (a nice little chunk of War and Peace and some good cocoa later-- sadly no candy bar, damn you 'Hawk Shop,' the one time you're actually closed) and my footprints had already been completely obliterated by the snowfall.

Spent the treacherous walk home muttering Terrible Things re: U of I in Spanish, just to make sure my hatred is still bilingual. Not just curse words as that's too easy, but trying to get as rhetorically inventive as possible/invoke the ghost of that 135 degree Fahrenheit day in Sevilla summer before last using simply the right words, like all good magic.

Incidentally, the German surname Fahrenheit apparently means may be somehow mildly related to 'experience.' So sayeth the Online Etymology Dictionary, at least. With correction from bagheera_san. I feel like if I lived in Vienna or Berlin a bit I could pick up and come to like German better. Conversations and reading were always decent, but my god, the noun cases!

As it is the kibbutz is going to force me to learn Hebrew, and there's the possibility of work in Buenos Aires, to transition to a fuller fluency in Spanish, so there's no real time to weasel a teaching/hostel position in Hamburg or something. I want to though. Maybe after grad school? But then I wanted to spend a bit of time in Prague scraping an income off one of those barely-legit English teaching places as well, so there's always that. Or there's always the magical world where the nonfiction book advance 1) comes in and 2) does so in time to afford me a bit of a living while I scratch out some more work. Here's to dreaming.

Even if the stars align and I get the plumb cash Poe was waxing poetic about, I still kind of want to work a crap job rather than devoting all of my time to writing. You know in Dostoevsky's notebooks, he constantly bitches about not having the time to write, being constantly distracted and harranged by family chaos and interruptions. But as scholars have pointed out, when he had a chunk of time he was unproductive, frittered it away, accomplished none of his goals and didn't know why: he simply didn't know himself very well.

Even as he whimpered for a free day he thrived on the chaos, the interruptions spurred him, he worked best under severe pressure to the point where it became the only sure precondition of his output. I bitch about school preventing me from working on original fic, and yes, my balance of time spent on writing could CERTAINLY be better? But I think I need something besides me, a room, and a blank word document or I'll gnaw my hands off before I type so much as a chapter.

And cancel class already!