More than three days in, and I’m still on track. It helps that I’ve been keeping busy: last night we did a short interactive taiko show before Tao‘s performance in Galveston, and today we had an extra long practice to prepare for our trip to Hidalgo next weekend.

As a result, I hurt. All over really, but mostly in my back, shoulders, and arms. And I’m exhausted. I might skip dinner and go straight to bed. I know, poor me, getting to spend so much time doing something I love.

In the near future I’ll have hours and hours of newly-freed-up time to spend on taiko because at the end of last week I resigned from journal. My paper was so far behind that things were getting ridiculous, and my best option was to make a clean break of it. No hard feelings on either side, I don’t think. After I finish up a few assignments next week, I’ll be done.

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Is it cheating if I use the time I would have spent listening to podcasts and spend it reading my own blog archives instead? Speaking of narcissism . . .

A fun thing I found: In one of my favorite posts from 2006, I managed to work in the phrase “Heaven forfend.” Ironically, of course. I’m not sure whether to be proud or ashamed.

And another fun thing: I’ve thought a couple times of looking through my old blog posts to see when we first got Facebook at the Claremont Colleges (remember when they rolled it out school by school?), and just now I stumbled across the smoking post. It was mid-October 2004. Back then it was called “The Facebook,” and you had to have a .edu email address to join.

In unrelated news, tonight’s taiko practice: two and half hours of awkward turtle.

GAH I CAN’T STOP. These fleeting thoughts belong other places on the internet or NOWHERE AT ALL. And yet. I post and post. You’d think the “Publish” button sent a jolt of heroin straight into my brain.

You know how sometimes you put off a big task for a really long time, but when you’re finally forced to start it, you realize that it’s actually kind of fun, and you wish you’d started it earlier? This is not like that. At all.

ALSO.

Space Law is like listening to five TED talks at once, plus someone’s wacky old grandpa.

Some people run 26 miles; I quit Facebook for a week. Sure, the running thing takes a lot of training and dedication, but you have to keep in mind that these are people who ENJOY running in the first place. I bet that gets you through the first ten miles, at least.

Here’s the thing: I have little to no self-discipline. It’s appalling. Most of the decisions I make on a daily basis are driven by instant gratification. If life were fair, I would weigh 300 pounds.

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Lately I’ve been having long, involved dreams every night. I’ve read that extremely vivid dreams are a potential side effect of quitting Lexapro (which I am currently attempting to do, so far successfully), but these aren’t any more vivid than my usual dreams, they’re just longer. Previously I’d wake up most mornings remembering bits and pieces of several dreams, each feeling like it lasted at most fifteen minutes, but now I’ll have one giant dream that seems to have gone on for an hour or more.

Each bit of storyline morphs into the next in that way that dreams do, where all of a sudden a new idea appears, and your brain invents some way to insert it into the action that’s sort of continuous, but in the light of day makes no sense.* And this goes on and on and on.

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Is it me, or has CNN gotten really weird? It’s on the basement TV at school right now, and I’m struck by how informal it’s become since the last time I watched a 24-hour TV news network who-knows-when.

First there was a guy talking about the blizzard in the Northeast. He mentioned the rain in Southern California for a few sentences, then summed it up with “so the whole country is experiencing this.” Right. Okay, so that part wasn’t particularly informal, it just annoyed me.

Then the same guy and another CNN anchor (do they still call them that?), apparently in another studio, had a gripe session between themselves about how dumb the word “bipartisanship” is. They both leaned on their desks and made faces, and the lady actually rolled her eyes at one point. They agreed that Congress was being childish, and that everything would be okay if all of Congress went out and got drunk together.

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I’ve been lucky this year to be in some (okay, two) of the right classes at the right times. Last semester, when much of the healthcare debate was going on, I was in Health Law Survey. We didn’t have time to do a comprehensive analysis of the issues, but we read a few articles and looked at some of the provisions in the bills, and the process was enlightening.

I learned just enough in that course to know that U.S. health care is insanely complicated and full of problems and money sinks, and that I never ever want to practice health law.

And now I’m in Space Law in time to talk about Obama’s announcement of the cancellation of the Constellation program. To be honest, I haven’t been keeping up with space stuff in the last few years, and I knew very little about Constellation before it got axed. I’m excited about the further development of private space enterprises, personally, but it’s going to be weird for NASA not to have a manned spaceflight program. Will American kids nowadays have to dream of becoming space tourists?

I heard on the radio a couple weeks ago that NASA will be auctioning off the artifacts of the shuttle program that museums don’t want. I don’t know if any of the auction is open to the public, but how cool would that be, to own a little tiny piece of a space shuttle? Or even a lowly space shuttle wrench that spent its whole career in Florida? Surely there are more bolts and unidentifiable thingamajigs than the museums of the world can handle.

Of course, now I can’t find any reference to this auction at all, except a few news articles about the shuttles themselves being offered to museums (for a surprisingly low price, in the hundreds of thousands). I did, however, find this little series called “50 Years of NASA” from KUHF. You’d better not have been lying to me about this auction thing, KUHF. I can see you from the Law Center. Or I could if the building had windows on that side.

So yeah. Maybe I wandered a little off topic in this post. But I want my space stuff.