There's nothing worse than standing in front of the communal mirror brushing your teeth and having to acknowledge one of your undergraduate residents while you're attempting to smile and simultaneously smooth your hair down on one side with your free hand because in your my-nose-has-been-blown-more-times-today-than-I-can-remember state of mind you forgot to try to look decent in front of other human beings. Well I'm sure there are worse things, but it doesn't feel like it right now.

Right now I feel like I look. Neither is pleasant. I tried doing my laundry last night (was that last night? must have been...) and only managed two loads (one is sitting unfolded in the laundry bag and the other is still sitting downstairs in the laundry room somewhere...). I ordered pizza and had it delivered for the first time in months...maybe years. I sat on my couch and caught the last bits of several movies, and wondered vaguely why I was in love with crazy Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon but totally creeped out by crazy Brad Pitt in Fight Club. I walk around with a tissue box and a bottle of Afrin. And I'm obsessively checking my phone.

These classy Saturday nights have to end soon (it is Saturday night already??).

When I interrupted my reading of Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State by Gramsci for the millionth time to wonder out loud who reads about hegemony on a Saturday night I decided that I needed to blog. This is my life. Sitting, toes freshly painted pink (interruption #25) on my well-worn couch, the brown one I used to sleep on when I just moved to this town to start my PhD in Folklore after I had decided that I didn't want to date and was rather content with sleeping on my couch with my laptop near me, which is, somewhat lamentably, almost the same state I'm in currently, give or take a now ex-boyfriend and a much more comfortable bed. There's a half empty Styrofoam cup of week old white on my floor, one that won't be half empty in a minute because I intend on finishing this bottle this evening. I'm trying to (and failing at) reading for my Cultural Studies class, my minor, because I'm fielding texts from a man I met in an airport who is equally cute and slightly chivalrous but also creepy and a bit forward. I don't know if I should be flattered or call the police. I've opted for trying, politely, to tell him to back off a little. But not too far. He does, after all, write things like "May I call you tomorrow?" Who does that? Who courts people any more? Mind you he thinks "the world of me", and although that's sweet...we've only met once...in a crowded airport in December while I was fleeing sleet and snow by heading to Trinidad for two weeks. I was delirious with joy, and confused because the trip was initially planned for two but I was decidedly alone.

My life is ridiculous.

Not in a bad way mind you, but ridiculous nonetheless. I'm warding off potential stalkers on one hand, and possibly maybe striking up an international romance with an old classmate from Tobago who had a crush on me when I was 12. What? And the crux of it all? I can't finish reading this fricking six paged essay on hegemony to save my life.