return to the paper

lisa is gone and now i can get back to my paper and stop feeling like a tourist in the country i've lived in for the last almost year. and i have not done anything on the paper while she was here. which is what i feared. so it's back to the salt mines for me. or the coal mines. what sorta mines to english majors descend into anyway?

i have a long 4 days in front of me. carrie shows up on thursday and she will be here for 14 days. so i need to get stuff done before she shows. and then after she leaves jesse's dad will be here. all considered despite the fact that i will be here until september i only have about a month left to work on my thesis which has not been started. or a month of time when people will not be sleeping on the sofa and (despite the fact that i like them) making me feel like i'm the guest and they are the ones that really belong here.

to be honest i love house guests. i love draining a bottle of wine and eating chips with friends. long into the morning. solving the world's problems around 3 AM and then promptly forgetting the solutions the next mouring when rolling late out of bed. (i have a great program in mind for improving the american health system by the way). i love rediscovering the city i live in afresh as i point it out to people i really care about. and i really like knowing that when i call them on the phone they know where the phone is located in the house and where i am sitting.

but when there are more guests than not and i am currently desperately trying to pull together the most important paper of my thus-far academic career... well, i don't feel smart enough to write this paper at all let alone with an obstacle course constructed around it.

the worst part about having people here was that i couldn't fall apart. which i do about once a week when working on a paper. just on the floor crying and thinking that i will never finish it in time. and jesse comes and picks me up and makes me a sandwich or gives me a glass of port or just tells me he knows i'll do this and that he'll help edit (which he's actually gotten pretty good at despite some of his early undergrad papers) and i'm fine a little later. but i couldn't do that. and i need that. gets all the stress out and i can leave it there, balled up on the floor, and not come back to it for another week. i can't break down like that in front of the people that are coming. like lisa either asked me what was wrong all the time or worse told me to smile and that i should be happy. this did not go over well. that just makes me feel worse. because i need to break into bits for a half hour so i can get back to outlining a couple of hours later.

so. anyway. that's that. carrie is low-key. and self-entertained. and jesse's friend anyway. so this all should be less of a problem. i should have time to write and read and read.

i always feel like such a bitch for posting things like this.

god, now you all are never going to want to come visit me. no...really i like you. and i am very rarely writing a masters thesis. so there. yes, come visit. just not till this is over.