jmoiron.net

I have something in the works about the recent political "debates" on (MS)NBC. It's about Gravel and Kucinich and how both of them kinda get it and kinda don't. It's about how scary it is that seemingly smart people in the so called liberal party have to appear hawkish in order to be popular. It's about the ridiculous worship of Ronald Reagan, and how 9 of 10 Republican nominees outright disapprove of allowing abortions at all and 3 of 10 don't "believe" in evolution. It's about how ridiculous it is that questions about evolution are even posed like that in this country; as if evolution or science in general is something that is to be believed and not understood, this really frightening push (from both directions) to appear to take things more on faith than reason.

But then life got in the way. I started a new job, which has been going quite smoothly but has also been requiring a lot more of my time than my old one. I've been trying to get various technical things in place (like a backup system), and also pass classes with the usual flying colors.

But chinks have started to appear, perhaps related to the gradual siphoning of my free time. I've started to go to the gym nearly every day in another probably vain attempt to get into some kind of shape. This has been quite straining, since it's adding an hour or two onto every workday and forcing my significant other to take dinners with me at 21:00 or later.

My classes seemed to concentrate a good portion of their workload on the end of the semester (which, for those many years removed from college, is now). I also have a Japanese class coming up starting May 29th. It's been 5 months since I took the last one and I am very rusty, so I need to spend a significant amount of time catching up. This would be fine, too, except I'm trying to plan a foray out of the country for early June. My foray is slightly complicated by the fact that I already have a great deal of money towards flight tickets tied up into the system of some airline company (I forgot which one but I think it might be Delta).

Even this would be doable; I could make flight plans and hotel/hostel reservations over the next few weeks in downtimes between homework. But my landlord kinda dropped a bomb on us. They haven't been very good (they didn't paint, they never contact us, they don't fix issues we have, etc), but not contacting us at all to notify that they were not planning to extend our lease was pretty low on the decent human being scale. The truth is that we violated our lease (by allowing one of our roommates girlfriends to stay with us), but in light of the fact that we are quiet, always pay early, and renovated the apartment ourselves when we moved in, I think the company could have at least done right by us and told us ahead of time.

So now I'm juggling 2 finals scheduled for the 7th of May, a final project, a hellish amount of work, a 3 week streak at the gym I'm quite unwilling to let go of, an absolutely necessary amount of studying/cramming for my upcoming Japanese class, vacation planning and apartment hunting.