So it’s been a month. I’m sure you’re all thrilled to finally hear that I didn’t die in a fiery plane crash. In fact, I had a pleasant, if short, trip to Nashville to see my brother graduate and then a lovely week in Vancouver with John to celebrate the last few days before he turned his life over to the Man.

Yes, my fiancé is now working full-time for a huge worldwide (but relatively non-evil, IMO) corporation. It would be tragic if it didn’t pay so damn well. Still, I haven’t seen him much lately. They put him up in a hotel in town for the first week of training and flew him out of state for the second week.

I’ve started my own summer job this past week—an unpaid internship at a place downtown—so that’s kept me busy. The job’s only vaguely related to law, which is fine by me. I’m planning to find a standard summer job clerking at a small firm for the second half of the summer, but I might as well diversify a bit for now, right?

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I just sent in my application for what sounds like the perfect summer internship for me. I don’t want to jinx it, but I will say that I had to look up whether the British prefer “toward” or “towards” (Ans: “towards”). Hi, I’m detail-oriented, it’s nice to meet you.

The job’s still in Houston, though, so nobody flip out. Somebody’s got to stay here to look after the dog.

Which reminds me—did I tell you that John’s going to Abu Dhabi this summer? No? Well, he is. Part of the training for his new job takes place in the UAE, so he’ll be there for six weeks. We’re not sure exactly when he’s leaving, but it’ll probably be near the end of June. And to think I was bummed when he moved to College Station. Oy.

For the last few weeks, John and his friend Roy have been working in their spare time on a neat physics demonstration to show off at the Texas A&M Physics Festival this coming weekend.

If you know what a standing wave is, you’ve probably seen the classic demonstration with a vibrating string. But did you know you can also trace out a standing wave in FIRE? True story.

The apparatus is called a Rubens Tube, after its kind-of inventor. It’s a long metal tube with small holes drilled along its length, filled with a flammable gas and set alight. When you pipe music into one end of the tube, the flames jump into different wave patterns.

Last night I got to stop by campus and videotape their progress. With a little pretending and a little video editing, we almost made it look like they built this contraption in a single evening.

Pretty neat, eh?

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Man, is this week dragging, or what? I don’t think I’ve spent a minute less in front of my computer than I would have otherwise, and if I did, it was because I was either playing taiko or sleeping. I probably did pay a little more attention in class, though, so that’s a plus. Still, I’m ready to be done with this exercise.

Some unconnected bits:

Last night I dreamt that John was being chased by an angry kangaroo. He escaped by running to his dad’s house and tricking the kangaroo into jumping into a frozen lake. Then I stole an airplane and turned it into a robot. I tried to sign my brother up for a locker at his new law school, but the roller skating rink was on lockdown. I did find my own locker, though, and it was full of old swimsuits.

Samson is sleeping with his eyes half-open. All I can see are the whites, and every now and then they’ll roll around a little. It’s creepy as all get-out.

Three showers later, I’m still wearing the same eyeliner I put on for the Galveston show Saturday evening. I’ll probably have to take it off tomorrow because it’s finally starting to get patchy, but it’s had a good run.

Yesterday I was in a crummy situation that was all my own fault, and the idea popped into my head that it would be an ideal time to give blood, since I was already crying. The worst part of crying, after all, is trying not to cry. Once you start, all the tension releases, and there’s relief in knowing that however much your situation sucks, you no longer have to put on a brave face.

John and I haven’t gotten to see each other much lately, and it makes me sad. This weekend we’ll miss each other again because I’ll be in Hidalgo the whole time. Then three weekends later I’ll be in Nashville. I want to spend more time with him before he leaves the country for six weeks at the start of his new job in June, but spring taiko season has other ideas.

A little over halfway through, I’m feeling pretty blah about this exercise. It’s a success in the sense that I haven’t been on any of the sites I used to spend time on for the past four days, but I can’t say I’ve gotten much extra work done in the meantime. The main goal, though, is not to get more done during this week, but to strengthen my self-discipline in the future. A worthwhile goal, that, but hard to measure.

Quitting social media for a week has left me feeling disconnected and out of the loop. I’m completely cut off from my internet friends and people-I-follow, and I miss the casual chit-chat with my real-life friends, even the ones I see regularly in person.

Facebook and Twitter, for me at least, are all about being brief, witty, and shallow, and instead I find myself here on my blog, writing long, boring sentences analyzing the meaning of social media in my life. Gross.

If I do something like this again, I’m going to make it more like “only check Facebook once a day for a week.” It’s not actually interacting with people online that’s a waste of time, it’s keeping the site open and flipping over to check on it every time a new post appears.

Anyway, here are some of the things I considered posting to Facebook or Twitter today:

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For the few of you who haven’t heard through email, text message, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter, but mostly so this momentous occasion doesn’t get left out of my blog, John and I got engaged last week on our trip to Colorado. Squee!

Before we started planning the vacation, we’d talked about how we might be able to move our conjectural wedding date up six months or so from what we’d thought, so I suspected a proposal was coming, but I didn’t know exactly when.

On our first full day in Colorado, John picked out a hike for us up towards Pacific Peak, thanks to this handy website. The weather was perfect, and the views of mountains and blue sky all around were breathtaking.

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I apologize in advance for the trite yearly-family-newsletter tone of this post. The videos are short, I promise.

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John, when he’s not grokking universe-defining equations, powering up a new radioactive cyclotron beam, or reminding young zoology majors of the difference between speed and velocity for the umpteenth time, has taken to brewing beer in his apartment.

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