First and foremost, I'm territorial.

As far as I know, I'm the only person I know using this intarweb name. Hence, I try locking it up on random blogging sites, becoming this inactive e-squatter, preemptively defending my e-name from... um... yeah.

I really have no business doing this, as I already have an LJ, a Dreamwidth account, and a Wordpress blog, on top of being about a week and a half out from starting grad school (to study English literature, written in English primarily by actual English people, not literatures in English which include American and other postcolonial Anglophone national literatures).

At this point, I'm dithering about my dwindling amount of Slack, wishing there were more time to play WoW, knit, read fluffy SFFH/specfic non-assigned books, cook random stuff (I have a week and a half to do fesenjan, Hawaiian-Korean beef BBQ of some sort, and probably a round of potato tacos, homemade style), and do half the other things I thought I'd do when I left my publishing job two years ago. Then again, applying to graduate school was as rewarding as it was nerve-wracking, and I expect more of the same from the actual experience.

Coming to the end of my long vacation is still jarring; I hadn't planned to be out of work for so long -- when we moved two years ago, it was right at the start of the recession, in one of its first epicenters (SoCal). A year ago, I realized I had no business doing anything other than applying to grad school. The worst that could happen was not getting in, having to reapply, and working somehow in the mean time. Instead, I got accepted at two universities, received solid financial aid packages, and ended up with a finite deadline to unemployment. Technically, I don't know whether it begins on the 21st or the 24th, but it's less than two weeks away by either count.

Now there's reading I should do in preparation for the reading I hope to do -- won't even really know what I'm taking until three days before classes start. I requested three classes, but everyone puts in requests for various seminars, and the department chooses the roster. The lack of control bugs me a little, though I understand the reasoning. But in the mean time, it's the push-pull between last-hurrah slacking and being-serious studying. There's even Latin to review.

Mostly, it's strange to start living an external life again. I've cloistered myself in the apartment for much of the time, playing with string, and escaping into other worlds via books or computer, making random dishes, experimenting with goat, oxtails, amaranth, and millet, as well as a range of New World, Old World, and creole-culture cooking styles, poring through James Beard, the Doubleday Cookbook and The New Basics, then consulting Diana Kennedy, Madhur Jaffrey and The Soul of a New Cuisine. I've got numerous scarves and given handmade gifts to show for my two years of exploring knitting. I even have a sweater for the cats to sleep on. My inner goth has been let out of exile, returning to Convergence, and has since found a nice monthly deathrock night relatively close (and affordable) to feed the soul. I haven't made all the progress with exercise that I would have liked, but being a student on a semi-regular schedule should help with that a little. I hear tell that the undergrads are scarce before noon.

Hopefully, I'll be a little more measured in my graduate studies than my frenetic overscheduling ten years ago. I am a little lazier and older. Still, I'm sure I'll be fine. It's just the waiting that's getting me all antsy.