Jon made eggnog from scratch this morning; I finally fell asleep at around 8:30 am, and now the boys are downstairs cleaning out the fridges and vacuuming the living room to Beyonce. I've been tied to this goddamn machine for this past week, but small victories were had last night when I returned the 20-or-so books I had used for my second paper and indulged in a midnight shake-and-fry run with Dave and Evan, and early this afternoon when I ascended the stairs to the fourth floor E&ES department office to hand in my 17 pages of sassy policy analysis.

The war has not been won, yet: I am five pages away from a glorious, glorious break. The fiction is already piling up in my backpack for the trip home - Yaron will laugh here, but I'm dying for a good narrative. I've learned a hell of a lot this semester, and my writing style has become more assertive, my voice more powerful. With luck, I'll forget it all tonight in a haze of eggnog and martinis.

Haha, Yaron and Michael are singing along to "Baby Boy" right now. Good times. But I've got to get back to work. Adios.  ¶ 15:02

  And today, before Alex and I parted ways - she to the studio, I to my paper - I cranked up 'Mama Mia,' and we acted out our familiar skit in the stairwell, pirouettes and pouts abound. We tossed our rockstair hair and posed dramatically in all the right places.  ¶ 17:13

  I swear that I can smell kettle corn popping downstairs. It makes me recall late-night laundry parties with Ian and Molly, drinking matte and reading for our classes, passing a bag of the greasy sweet popcorny-goodness while the dryers spun and clanked away. That air smelled like fabric softener, and it was always a little humid from the hot piles of wet clothes that were inevitably tossed onto the counters by more impatient residents in the queue. The laundry room had a bulletin board that rotated commercial flyers on some sort of regular basis; I always wondered who was in charge of putting up those ads about hair color and college loans, and why they were so dilligent about doing so. Balls of lint accumulated in concrete corners. The washbasin sink always dripped a rust trail down its neck. You could watch sunsets over Eagle Rock from that table, and smell the heat reflecting off the pavement at dusk.

I'm listening to Jenny Toomey. Her voice takes me back to 202 Wash, with its whimsical nooks and crannies, and my room in the attic, with its slanted ceilings and uneven floors. Alex and I spent our afternoons crawling from my window to the top of the annex, where she drew pictures of our plants and glass jars filled with water, and I read about economics and watched the neighbor pull in the laundry line from her second-floor window. I would climb up on that house's gable late at night and smoke cigarettes while watching the traffic snake down route 66. Rainstorms would pool on my sill in the spring, and we danced to ABBA and straightened our hair. The staircases in that house were the kind I always wanted to run down as a child. Afternoons spent lying in the hallway, watching Jon pick the locks to mysterious doors in the house, were some of my favorites.

I wish Molly could meet Alex. They'd get along famously.  ¶ 03:24

  Turn up your headphones and sing!

God, I knew something was missing this week.  ¶ 23:16

  extra, extra, read all about it! The inagural issue of the B-6 Revue was circulated among the masses today. "The Glory Hole Speaks."

Don't you wish your house published its own paper?

I will now taunt you with one of my many poetic contributions, a tribute to the lyrical stylings of one President George W. Bush, to our seven pages of linguistic ecstacy:

A B6 Love Poem

Roses are red, violets are blue
Oh my dear old B6
I wish it just wasn't true
Roses are redder, bluer am I
That you refuse to clean up this goddamned pigsty!
You may feel proud of the kitchen, surely some do,
But I can't handle the mess, I feel life is through.
Between our hands and the dishes, there seems a barrier -
Next semester we're cleaning, or I will get scarier!

--a e crawford  ¶ 21:20

  Saddam was captured today, I heard on the radio. I celebrated by turning off my alarm and sleeping soundly until four o'clock.

Before dinner, I turned on CNN and watched a graphic of Saddam Hussein emerge from a deck of playing cards, tugged by an invisible hand so that we could gawk at the bewildered, bearded man open his mouth for a medical examiner. Snippets of pithy analysis from prominent "insiders" were sandwiched between commercials for infinity cars, investment groups, and microsoft e-business software.

Now, I stare at a small portion of my take-home final for Price's class, which asks,

"What are your political rules of resistance? Where do you stand, and for what? What materials in this course have affirmed, reinforced, discounted, changed, adjusted, clarified or in any way shaped your views of what resistance is and how one can resist? What is your political daily bread?"

I just want to reply, "apathy," and email my completed essay back to her right away.

Can you tell that I'm burned out?
  ¶ 20:28