inhibit

verb to hold in check; to discourage from free or spontaneous activity especially through the operation of inner psychological or external social constraints

oh how these inner phsychological and external social constraints are discouraging me from free and spontaneous activity! my tongue equals the weight of 1,000 squids. it's too easy to say the wrong thing.

What. A. Day.

The most serene of moments. Mark tells me I'm all on my own, that if I can take the boat out 200 yards, capsize it, right it, get the hell back in, and sail it back to a perfect docking then I've passed. It's completely dark now; all the other boats are long put away and everyone else in my class is up in the yard celebrating, exept one, he stays to watch.

Just me and the boat in the blackness. After whooping and hollering and yelling out commands and arguing and laughing for three hours, the calm is surreal. Taking my time, I sheet everything in, I fall off, and sure as Sunday the boat bows to physics and start to tip. I love the feel of the mast finally coming to rest on the water. I jump in, I split my eyes half in and half out of the water for that cool effect, I shore up some strength, and then with two strong kicks I propell myself up into the now-vertical cockpit, over the center grip, and in one relatively smooth motion I'm on the side of the boat, ten feet above the water, and I raise a little victory fist to Mark on the skiff. Completing my circle I hop down on the center board and right the boat easily, but then I manage to clamber into the low side and capsize the damned thing again. I pop up to show Mark I'm alright and repeat. Now the boat is up and I'm in the water, holding onto the high back side, and my energy is gone. I kick and I flail and I try every combination of feet-first-arms-first-head-first-whatever-else-I've-got-first but my sodden carcass will not go in, and now I've lost what little energy I had. Mark pulls up close on the skiff and tells me calmly and quietly that if I can just get myself back into the goddamned boat then the rating is mine to have, but if not, I fail. I'm on the verge of tears. I gather my thoughts. I hoist myself a quarter of the way in, cursing the harness with every inch. I pause, I think about which specific muscles I need to contract next to push on. I contract them. I push on. I'm half way in. I can tell if I just get one more centimeter of torso over the back side then my weight will shift and I'll be home free, but I'm so tired, so tired, and the muscles are not contracting. And even as I realize how cheesily epic I am making this moment, I think about running, and about editing, and about planning symposia, and about hanging shelves, and finding jobs, and being a sister and a daughter, and I think about Doug standing back there on the dock, and I think about Rwanda, and I realize that this beast that I'm fighting in every aspect of my life that I love, this effort, is the key, and that if I don't show myself right this second that I am capable of making an effort, then I will have officially given up, and I will literally and metaphorically sink to a level of mediocrity that will color the rest of my life.

So I say fuckall to my tiredness and to every time I've ever lobbed myself a softball when I should have accepted a challenge and I get back in the boat, and lie on my back and have a little cry.

Then I dock "perfectly" (ha) and get my rating and have a few celebratory beers and a celebratory hamburger and a celebratory deep conversation with Mark and do some celebratory dancing in the yard and take a celebratory hour long stroll to the BART station and get a celebratory walk back to my apartment, complete with celebratory nerves and celebratory excitement.

I've said it tongue in cheek so many times but now I believe it wholeheartedly: Sailing is a metaphor for life. I wasn't sure until last night that I'm going to be ok.

Friday afternoon and this place is wrapping me in a blanket of achy nostalgia. Toczyski lab is playing their typical Friday afternoon melancholy rap music, and all of third floor north is passively subjected to it, there's no complaining when it's not up for discussion. It makes me laugh how casual Fridays are so roguely observed here, how it's never mentioned, there is no beer:30 here, but people tentatively and furtively let their collective hair down on Friday afternoons, their thin veneer of relaxedness covering an extra tension. Friday is the day where when we mess up, it gets to grow for three full days, rather than being nipped in the bud tomorrow morning.

The wine glass from open house three weeks ago is still on my desk. They said please return them to the kitchen but the kitchen is so far .

My stomach is all tied up in knots like it used feel just before a jazz band concert in middle school. What are these nerves for? I'm all keyed up with nowhere to put it. Jesus, clammy hands and everything! How odd, and how crippling.

I have two staplers on my desk, one of which works, and the other of which does not and is plagued with a litany of issues. It has GENOME written on the back in white-out. It kind of sort of staples things, but it does these weird inside-out jobs, and everything ends up in a bungle. I think I've kept it for this long because it reminds me of when Tim drops Garreth's stapler out of the window. It says GARRET on it in Tipp-Ex because GARRETH wouldn't quite fit.

JP is not wearing his glasses today and it reminds me of Urkel turning all suave in that one string of episodes of Family Matters. I swear I have never seen an episode of Family Matters but I somehow know both the general outline and various subthemes of the show in some detail. Like the knowledge just leaked into my brain any time I passed a TV that had recently been showing Family Matters.

While we're on the subject of TV shows, which "we" are apparently, Dexter is a m a z i n g. Why am I paying for cable? Why is a show that is about revenge killing, and only revenge killing, so good? It's that theme song I tell you the theme song. If I could choose a life that felt like any television show theme song in all of television history then I would choose the life that feels most like Dexter's.

Dum, da dum, da duuummmmm.

my desktop is my new religion

it was basically a disaster before, with things scattered everywhere, vitals next to meaninglesses, and a massive, pixellated green monstrosity in the background. now though, ah.

Whoa.

I miss them so much today that it stings. Why today?

so...which movies DO you like?

these ones, to start :)