My fingernails are flaking and peeling. It is extremely annoying. I can't remember how I solved this problem the last time I had it. I can't remember when that was - maybe last spring semester? Maybe it's a winter thing. I am always kind of hoping that somehow my fingernails will just stop chipping and flaking, but every time they grow out, there are those edges again. And then I peel the flakes off, feeling simultaneously fascinated by it and also hugely irritated.

It's an odd feeling.

I just found an old playlist that I made sometime last summer or last semester, perhaps. It's actually a very good playlist. I am listening to it and it is distracting me from my work, which is not a huge life-changing work but merely a little write-up of the seminar that I went to yesterday so that Nomura will give me some more points in case I need them. I am a packrat in terms of points. I do not turn my nose up at extra credit.

My inorganic book came today. It is all loud colors and kind of happy, and I haven't decided whether or not I actually like it. Then again, I have not put it to the test yet, so we shall see whether I end up loving it or not really feeling one way or the other about it. I don't feel one way or the other about my pchem book. It is just kind of there. It is light blue and has bubbles on it. I'm not sure why that's physical chemistry, but I'm also not sure why Jupiter or Mars or whatever it is on my achem book is analytical chemistry, so I'll just not ask questions.

My differential equations book is chillin' in Hong Kong. That's what I get for ordering international editions hahahaha. I just couldn't bring myself to spend MORE than $125 on a math book. It's not that I don't love math, it's just that I tend to love chemistry more.

This morning I picked up some money at the bank so that I could pay this girl for a Microbial Ecology book. I forgot that I was supposed to get a $10 for Laura so she could give me a $20 (she owes me $10 for various things). So now I have a lot of $20s and no $10s. What a pain.

Deep breaths.

Deep breaths and to-do lists may well become the theme of the semester. It's just that I have so much to do in a set amount of time. At least tomorrow is Saturday, which means that I will get sleep. I hesitate to say what else I will accomplish tomorrow, for fear of jinxing myself.

Suffice it to say that I hope that the terror of impending deadlines will kick my butt into action. The dates are just so inconvenient.

I went to a seminar today. Apparently the chemical ecology class was also given credit for going to the seminar (it was on sex pheromones), so it was absolutely packed. I mean standing room only. Dave came - maybe because the topic was so FX-y that he felt he ought - and there was still a seat next to me because I had draped my coat over it, so I indicated the seat and he came and sat next to me.

I didn't see FX come in but I certainly saw him at the end, so I'm not sure how exactly he did that. Nevertheless.

I think I like inorganic chemistry. It does not seem quite so anti-organic... Dr. D makes a big point out of being anti-organic but she's not. Not really. Anyway, it's hard to say NOW because I have only actually had two classes, but it seems sort of general-chemistry-esque (it will stop being that way soon, I'm sure) so far and that recalls Hem and, well, I miss her. I miss her a lot.

I'm cold. It's cold in my house. It's pretty much cold everywhere, which makes me kind of miserable. I'll tell you where it isn't cold, is on the third floor of Carnegie. It's like they're trying to smoke me out, whoever 'they' are. With heat, not smoke. Reminds me of the pchem 1 exam I took when the room felt like a sauna and I had trouble concentrating on the problems because I pretty much had sweat dripping down my back. And also my front. It was terrible.

BLAH. I don't feel like doing anything. I wish I was Schubert. He takes his napping very seriously. He has been napping all night. Mostly he naps, eats, and asks to go out. When he asks to go out, it's very annoying and he does it about three hundred times even if he's just been out so I usually yell at him. Good thing he loves me anyway. What a good dog.

Okay I would write down what I need to do but it is so OVERWHELMING that I will try to do the big thing tomorrow. Then it will no longer be overwhelming.

I feel overwhelmed. Forget it. I'm going to watch an episode of LOST if I can remember which one I'm on.

Don't you hate it when someone tells you something that you really should have heard from someone else? And then you realize that the someone else would not have told you because that someone else is actually holding it back - specifically - from you, and everything's just shot all to pieces.

So I'm all eaten up about this. I shouldn't be, should I? But when you compromise everything you believe in, it's another matter entirely. It kind of hurts sometimes to realize that maybe your MORALS actually keep a good friend from confiding in you - and really, if you can't talk to me about it, what does that mean?

Does that mean you're turning your back on what you used to claim to be? Does it mean that you've allowed yourself to fall away from that? Are you looking down on me now as someone backwards and old-fashioned? Or is it that you're scared of how I'd react? Does it mean that you're ashamed to admit to me what's going on?

I'm just so confused, I guess. It really sucks to be confused like this right when I'm trying to get my feet planted firmly underneath me before the semester goes off in a whirlwind of papers and lab time and timesheets and exams. It sucks even more than this to be confused about what I'm supposed to be feeling about everything. I guess if I hadn't heard that it was specifically being held from me, I probably wouldn't feel the same way.

It's the fact that it's held up like a badge of honor to everyone else, and then, as an afterthought, a quick instruction to not tell me. I mean. What?

Sometimes I think that college has actually contributed an amount of drama quite comparable to my drama load from high school. Generally I try to avoid drama. I hate cattiness -- but I am not the instigator, which is why I'm going to let this eat me up for weeks and weeks and potentially longer than that instead of staging a big confrontation and getting lots of people dragged into a maelstrom of my passive-aggressive nature with the passive bit gone missing.

I suppose I should talk about chemistry a little bit, in keeping with the details of the blog. Or something. I'm pretty tired and I had actually kind of planned to be in bed by now but whatever. That's the way my life goes.

I'm kind of excited for inorganic tomorrow. It's novel. I don't bump into much that feels simultaneously new and exciting and old and familiar.

one of us won't last the night
between you and me it's no surprise
there's two of us, both can't be right
neither will move till it's over
I'm the center of attention
and the wall's inside my head
and no one will ever know it
if I keep my mouth shut tight