Sunday, Restless Sunday

Sunday evaporated just now. I woke up at six in the evening for the second straight day after staying up until nine in the morning. Sigh, some schedule to be on. I was planning on getting stuff done, too. But that sure didn't happen. At least I managed to do some of my laundry, so I won't be wearing filthy clothes this week.

This is what a gamelan looks like, except it's not normally played by white people from Olympia, Washington.

I really am supposed to be doing work. Music of Asia. Reading, busy work, bibliography for a paper... But no desire to do that. None whatsoever. I already bombed the first test because I couldn't memorize all the various names of gongs in the Gamelan orchestras of Indonesia. Yea, that's useful knowledge, I know. But I usually wouldn't mind having to learn meaningless crap. It's just that this is so hard for me to learn that it amplifies its meaningless to me.

So I think I'll end up dropping it. I don't need it to graduate on time. It's fulfilling my Core IV "Non-Western" requirement, but I have some flexibility with my scheduling, so I should be able to get something to cover it in Spring of 2004 that's not so impossibly hard for me, both to learn and to be interested in.

So that frees up some of my time. In fact that frees up alot of time. It's good to have an easy quarter in the winter because it's a nightmarishly cold and depressing quarter as it is. I don't need school's help to be miserable and stressed out this quarter. I'll have all the more time to do the things that I enjoy and are actually helping me learn how to do what I really want to do, like the Times New Roman.

Oh, look - a defunct web ring that hates me. How cute.

Oh, the Times New Roman. For those who don't know, it's a "humor publication," as I like to call it due to indecision about the type of humor (satirical? sarcastic?) and the format of publication (newspaper? magazine?). I'm determined to get it started up and running smoothly and of its own volition by the time I graduate in June 2004 (well, assuming I don't drop anymore classes and stay for another year), despite a lack of motivated writers and the stubborn red tape I have to go through to get approved as an official media group. Gak.

Oh boy, do I like to pretend I'm busy with all this stuff. Really, I'm just lazy so that I do nothing for long periods of time and all this stuff gets jammed together before deadlines and my life goes from 100% sleep and video games to LIVING HELL. And if it's not interesting, like, say, Indonesian gong music, it just never gets done and I say screw this and either do a minimal, half-assed job or give up entirely.

Hey, at least I'm not like my friend's little brother who really did do nothing but play video games and sleep all day when he went to college and he ended up failing out and having to go back home and go to community college. There are worse examples than me. But sometimes I don't feel that way. I'm always thinking I should be doing more, but I never am. There really needs to be better ways of self-motivation in the world. I can hardly motivate myself to go out to get something to eat sometimes, much less to do all the work it takes to start up a newspaper or to get a job or whatever. Yet at the same time that I feel so unenergetic, I feel so restless.