Oh, hello, Verbalblogarrhea, most cherished and neglected pet-project. Please do not get your hopes up. This is, in all likelihood, little more than an e-drunk dial. But that "e" denotes a healthy dose of self-indulgence and sorrow-wallowing. Why not save that for your actual diary, you ask? You mean the one with the unicorn on the cover that collects dust under my night-stand, next to my copy of Du cote de chez Swann and the Weight Watchers Complete Food Companion? That one? Well the answer is rather simple. These days just getting out of bed is just one huge travail (not to mention all the time I spend wandering aimlessly around the grocery store and the hour spent staring blankly out the window at the end of the day), picking up a pen and taking the time to write it all out is just a bummer. But the internet? Well, I was in the neighborhood anyway, and I can type 70 wpm. Plus, doesn't everyone have a blog? Isn't it the norm now to piss and moan in a public forum that is still semi-anonymous (even if there is a scanned copy of your senior photo a few pages back)?

What sent me away? Since our last encounter I was laid off, spent 8 weeks watching every single reality program Bravo and VH1 had to offer, worked for a museum exhibit (which has the distinction of being the most Kafkaesque experience of my life), picked up another job making coffee and worked 50-60 hour weeks with no days off, turned into a monster, and tried to balance it all alongside my first Big Girl relationship ever.

The exhibit has since wrapped up and left town. Shrug. It only served to make me realized how very specialized my social circle is and how esoteric my own interests are. What? You want me to get beers with you after work? And we're going to a generic Irish Pub where you'll tell me about your glory days in Alpha Alpha Alpha and that great book that your girlfriend recommended by Virginia Woolf about the pan-sexual time-traveler? Sign me up!

The Big Girl relationship has wrapped up too, though I keep find His things around my apartment and I don't really know what to do with them. He's not dead, so I don't feel totally justified in throwing them away, because maybe he'll want those t-shirts back when he realizes they're missing. Mostly though, finding these relics is like an ant problem that subsides but never goes away, and every time you encounter one you just get angrier that they're still there. Also my heart hurts, obvs.

And, if I may be so bold as to claim that I have a Love Of My Life before even reaching a quarter of a century of life (what?)...I don't like where this is going. Nevermind. He is back in the picture in a never really went away sort of way, and a good bit of traveling done over the summer only served to make me realize that all my dearest kin and fellows are scattered throughout the country and that fewer and fewer of them are here anymore.

All of this has somehow added up to applying to graduate school. This is an everyday exercise in being optimistic. I was finally beginning to get the hang of college right when I graduated, and so I only feel half-accomplished. There is the graduate student that I would like to be, but I feel like there's a lot of catching up to do before that. I'm not sure that I ever really connected with a professor the way I would have liked to. There was no one I could really count on to champion my cause and I feel like I was pretty much just a satisfactory student through and through. I'm afraid that this is going to prevent me from actually moving forward and sooner or later I will just turn into one of those 40 year old women who just stop using their brains and lust after Coach bags.

Oh, but you know what was good this summer? The Wednesday I didn't have to go to work and it was sunny and I went out to brunch by myself and read my favorite French book at my sidewalk table for an hour and a half and didn't feel any pressure to leave, even though my potatoes got really cold.