I’ve only had one meal today, and brownies don’t sound good. (They might sound good if they were already made up, there’s just something about looking at chocolate, but I’d have to wash a baking dish, open a box, add eggs and water and oil…hypothetical brownies just don’t seem worth the work.)

Also, it’s definitely a theme, lately, for my colds to move in an upper respiratory direction. Gotta wonder if that means something.

The problem is, they took me sooooooooo long…I’ve been writing just about all afternoon, except for when I was cleaning and poking around on the internet and writing random blog entries.  I’ve gotta get better at BIC.

That’s somewhere between “eww” and “ugh,” if anyone’s wondering.

Lately, to reduce heating expenses, I’ve been spending most of my time upstairs. The cats, on the other hand, have been continuing to disorganize the entire apartment…so, the downstairs looked about how one would imagine.

Upon further inspection, I just about lost my lunch.

From what I can tell, the cats have become confused about the difference between “litterbox” and “living room floor.” So, not only do I have to shovel that out (almost literally) and rent a carpet steamer as soon as I can afford to, I apparently start from scratch on the cats’ training. Which I guess I could’ve figured out from the hole they’ve torn in the carpet too.

Another lightbulb just flickered its last…this time it’s the one in the light fixture above the stairs.  I actually depend on that one, and I’m not at all sure how to even reach it.

I explained my tuition problem to the financial aid office, in little enough words that they understood it, got my budget adjusted, and got the additional private loan.  Now I just have to wait for the financial aid office to get back to Sallie Mae.  Almost $5000, for the year–that’ll make some bills easier to pay.

Finally…

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. –Benjamin Franklin

I have a cousin who meets this definition. In two years at Chemeketa, going full-time, he earned just enough credits to transfer to Portland State University as a sophomore. He had to spend an extra year in high school, and even then didn’t graduate until he took some online classes. He’s gotten Federal and VA financial aid cut off at two different schools because of not passing enough credits. The guy’s smart–he just doesn’t go to class. This last term, he just stopped going to class around week 5 or 6 because he hadn’t been going regularly up to that point and there was “no way he could pass.”

This is the cousin who was two years ahead of me–more like one and a half since I got my GED early (getting my parents to put together a high school transcript would’ve been like pulling teeth)–but is still years from finishing undergrad, while I’m less than a year from finishing grad school. He hasn’t taken time off for medical reasons like my other cousin. There’ve been some money issues, because he hasn’t gotten his act together enough to keep his funding. Basically, he hasn’t had any problems that he didn’t cause, and he causes them all the same way.

He’s done it again.

It’s not that Portland State’s academic status requirements are that high. A person has to screw up three terms in a row, at least. Now he’s talking about going to WOU…I have trouble understanding what difference he thinks that’ll make. The academic standards might not be the same as Portland State’s–I don’t know, I never went to Portland State–but they still require showing up.

So, why does an otherwise-intelligent human being do that? I don’t know. Results 1-100 of about 1,080,000 in a Google search don’t make it make sense, though they do show me that everyone from NASA to skin divers, from Disney to the FBI to the fashion world, is trying to figure out how to avoid repeating mistakes. And lots of other people, too…Amazon.ca and barnesandnoble.com stand ready to get into their wallets.

The closest I could find to an answer was in an article on being organized for business. The author lists some categories, and says to decide what is and isn’t working in each category. AH-HA!!! To stop repeating a mistake, you have to recognize that something is a mistake. Obviously it’s unpleasant to the ego to realize that what one’s been doing for months (or, for at least six years) is a mistake, not good, not working, wrong, bad, etc. I remember realizing that I’d pretty much wasted undergrad by “making sure every credit counted”–taking just the requirements, most of which didn’t challenge my brain. Ouch. The recognition that my underlying assumption (faster=better) was wrong, and that if I had it to do over I’d deliberately go on the five-year or six-year plan in order to have time for all the classes I wanted to take, wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to come to. That’s an understatement, actually.

So, maybe some people aren’t that bad at mistake avoidance, or even at mistake recognition. They’re that good at avoiding mistake recognition. Not a talent that’ll take them far, but there it is.

Don’t leave a glass of apple juice sitting out for hours. (Oops.)

If you do, at least look in it before taking a drink (which I did, whew!). Five flies, at least one of them still swimming around, are not the logical addition to a refreshing beverage. Gack. Eww. Must now clean out brain. Bad mental image.

Edit: Five flies, not five files (as previously typoed). My apple juice was not in my computer’s hard drive, or a filing cabinet.

May your Christmas be merry,
Your New Year be happy,
And all your mice be catnip.

From Avrila, Chilsa, Panther, and Squirrel

For some reason it felt like more…probably because I need to fix the margins on that story, they’re a little too wide.

Oh.  Dear.  Lord.

I just found out, basically by accident, in the course of poking around online, that some of my favorite writers are represented by the same agency.  And it takes newbies.

Gotta step back, take it slow, think it through.  Gotta finish writing the darned thing first.  And editing.  But…I think I just found my first choice.

*deep breath*

It’s gonna be a long time before I can do anything with the information.  I’ve changed as a person and as a writer since I started working on these stories, and I’ve hit levels as far as craft goes…I’ve got to change stuff around so that it all sounds like the same writer.  I might even be a couple years away from being ready to write the big query letter; hard to call, really.

The crazy thing is, I found it just after reading this.  Based on the client list, the agency I’m looking at is definitely at the top of the heap.  To see that, just after reading something that said to shoot for the top…it’s crazy, that’s all there is to it.  Too much crazy in this paragraph, but I’m not sure what other word to use, my head’s half spinning.