Runner up

Have you ever won second prize out of two? How did that make you feel?

I walked into a door today. It got caught on my cheesy green styrofoam slipper and bounced back just as I was exiting, face first. The result is a slightly swollen right cheekbone. I imagined explaining it to people: "Oh, this? I walked into a door." Right. Were I a duplicitous person, like say Cathy Ames or Tracy Barlow, this kind of false-sounding truth could come in handy. Instead, I mentally run through how I might say it to ensure that when I do, it will in fact sound like the truth and not some cover-up. This is exactly how I feel when I call in to work sick. How can I make the truth sound true? Maybe I just have an inbred guilty conscience. I blame mass.

It doesn't matter anyway because nobody noticed. I had no opportunity to put my truth-telling practising to the test.

I met with my thesis committee tonight. I noticed on the walk there that I wasn't apprehensive at all, but maybe I should have been. It's not that the meeting went badly or that they are unhappy with the proposal, it's that the discussion brought up the same issues I'd struggled with in the process of coming up with this topic, which was part of the reason it took me so long to write the damned thing (well, that and you tube). I thought that I had got past that with a revised version, but as a tiny piece of me had anticipated but not wanted to acknowledge, what I had on the page was more anthropology than planning. It now looks like I'm going to have to do more work than I'd planned, and I'd already planned to do plenty. The word "cumbersome" came up a couple of times. I really don't want to go down that path!

Still, it felt great to have that discussion. Come to think of it, I remember now that I'd wanted it back in March, but I wasn't sure with whom. I guess I have the right committee.

On most nights over the past three weeks or so, this crazy exhaustion has started to seep into my body sometime after dinner, making my muscles ache. I have noticed a correlation between this sensation and running earlier in the day. Oh, the fatigue! I am not trying to say this in a complaining-pants way because I really don't mind feeling exhausted at all - as long as I can go to bed. It's when I can't go to bed, like at an event which required payment and I'm wishing more than anything that I was in bed but I'm not, I'm standing, which is just hell. (In such cases, it seems I've recently taken to sleeping anyway.) I feel this way tonight, but I didn't go running today. What did I do, walk? I did have an out-of-character glass of whiskey, which normally I hate because the smell of it reminds me of getting my ears cleaned as a child, but is quite nice hot with lemon, cloves and a spoonful of sugar. It's the booze. It has knocked me out.

Today feels like a Second out of Two day.