For the benefit of the universe: I am dense.

I cannot read minds, and I am extremely bad at picking up signals. If you have something you’d like to tell me, do me a favor and just fucking tell me.

Everyone loves leaving subtextual clues for everyone else (and it’s not like I’m not guilty of this), but nobody ever just comes out and says something, for fear of looking like a fucking idiot. Which you will temporarily, but it’ll save you a lot of pain in the neck, ass, and/or heart in the long run.

So give me a red light or a green light. Because I may be smart, but I’m not too good at picking up clues. I’m not a goddamn detective. And I haven’t slept right in a month, so picking up subtlety is not currently my strong suit.

Then again, when you’re as tired, overworked, and overheated (current temp: 81 degrees with moderate humidity) as I am, it basically takes a whack in the head to get your point across.

And even that may not be too effective, as I may already be asleep.

I love Chicago. Butt cold in the winter, sauna-like in the summer. Yay for fuckin’ that.

It’s actually not that hot yet, it just kinda feels like it because it’s been cold for so long, and because there’s no air conditioning in my apartment. A barbaric way to live, i know, but included a/c will bump your apartment up to at least 600/person/month where I live.

I don’t particularly have that to spend, especially after I graduate in December and have to start making up creative variations on “Will Work For Food” to put on my resume.

Buy a window unit, you say? First off, they’re hard to find used, and bloody expensive new. Secondly, you need one per room, and that adds up, both in terms of the cost of the actual units and electric bills, when you have 3 bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen.

We could probably get away with 1 each for the bedrooms and 1 for the living room. The bathroom is kind of out of the question since the window’s not wide enough to shove an AC unit into, but the cost would be ridiculous. The electric bill would at least double.

And at this point in my life, it’s better to be hot than broke.

Besides, sweating it off is a much easier way to lose weight than, you know, eating less.

Studying for my Gender and Society final (which is largely about sex and sex-related topics) got me thinking: there is a natural cycle of sex vs. relationships that everyone seems to go through.

At first, you want something. Anything will do, though having the stable, long-term relationship before the sex is generally considered a good idea.

When you’re in a stable, long term relationship, novelty can wear off and sometimes you get left just wanting sex. Then you get dumped and all you want is the comfort of the relationship, you don’t even care about the sex.

For a while after that, you just say “fuck this whole relationship thing, I’m fine!” but you’re so depressed about the breakup that you don’t want either sex or another relationship. And then, slowly but surely, you start to want sex again. Not a relationship, because dear god, you just saw what that can do.

Maybe you have a couple of unfulfilling flings, or more likely you just kind of sit around like a blob, doing your homework and having Liz Phair on a continuous loop in your head singing “I can feel it in my bones, I’m gonna spend another year alone.”

And after a couple of months of that, you are prepared to heartily lust after anyone that even gives the most minor indication that they might possibly like you. This generally leads to falling flat on your face, which in turn leads to swearing off both lust and relationships “forever.”

And then, just when you’ve finally moved on with your life, you meet somebody fantastic, and the whole ridiculous cycle starts all over again.

I think I’ve found a way to combine two of the most popular internet scams (Diets and College Diplomas) into one undefeatable scam: The Soul-Crushing Stress Of College Diet.

Yes, in this scam, er..program, you get sent to a top-flight school for a year. You live on your own, so you don’t feel bad if you waste meals. In fact, you actually save money.

You’re doing so much work that you don’t have time to sleep, let alone eat. And when you do eat, anything you eat gets burned off much easier because you’re constantly awake and burning a great deal more energy than you otherwise would. Hence, you lose weight.

You also, after all of this work, earn a college diploma! Don’t expect it to get you far, though, since employers will want you to have some sort of useable skills, and all you’re going to remember is a pile of statistics about how badly women are getting screwed, paywise.

If you act now, we’ll throw in the extra-special bonus Soul-Crushing Stress, which you can mix and match among the following types:

I love that in order to better prepare for finals, we participate in an activity that is guaranteed to kill brain cells by the millions.

It’s Dillo Time, kiddies.

Ah yes, the time of year when the Rainbow Party (big gay party held at the end of Rainbow Week with massive amounts of Sketchy Punch–also known as Everclear and Kool-Aid) coincides with the other festival of drunkennes on campus, Dillo Day.

Dillo Day is a day when moderately famous bands are brought into Northwestern by a student group in order to entertain chemically altered students (usually drunk, but high if they can find any weed). It’s highly entertaining.

Last year’s Dillo sucked for me for I was on medicine incompatible with alcohol consumption, but I intend to fully make up for that this year.

So far so good, what with six cups of Sketchy Punch and a Bud Light leading me to offer to walk the insanely hot Italian girl home from the Rainbow party, even though I have less than one tenth of one percent of a chance with her whatsoever. She accepted, so I am in fact, the goddess of Everclear.

But you can just as easily call me “Hey, you, drunk girl!”

Tomorrow: Kegs and Eggs, BBQ and Beer.

Oh, and I apologize for any spelling, grammatical, or HTML errors you may encounter with this post, since I’m rather fucking wasted as I write it. Woooooooooooooooo!

It’s 3 in the morning and I feel downright chipper.

It’s not because I had some sort of fantastic day. I had an up and down day.

Up because I finally decided to fully skip the Class From Hell (News Media and American Society) instead of subjecting myself to half of the pointlessness then saying fuck it and leaving. Down because I ran into The Ex and her new flame.

And that wasn’t really as bad as I thought it would be, to be honest. I had no idea there even was a new flame, so I think a big part of what hurt was the fact that I had no idea, so I hadn’t realistically prepared myself for this eventuality. But it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.

Which, in an odd way, brings us back to up, becuase it’s a sign that I’m at least somewhat over her. And getting over exes is always a good thing. Plus, I sold for $30 in a charity date auction, and having people bid over you never hurts your self-esteem.

But returning to my original point, it’s now about three AM and I feel…great. I think I’ve finally gotten through the transition phase of being nocturnal and evolved into a fully nocturnal creature. I had such horrific difficulty getting up this morning for my 10am class that I thought it might be happening, and lo and behold, it has happened.

I still drag during the day, but it’s oddly freeing to at least have one time of day when you feel like you’re firing on all cylinders, even if that time is the middle of the night and everybody else is dead to the world.

It’ll be interesting to see how I do at Kegs and Eggs for Dillo Day (Non-Wildcats: Massive communal public drunkenness and music festival. The school sponsors the bands, the students sponsor the drunkenness).

I’ll have incentive to get up because it’s free beer and breakfast, but it’s going to be pointless to get drunk if i’m already so disoriented from lack of sleep that I’m seeing little green men anyway.

But for now, I need to take advantage of the chipperness whilst it lasts and try and spit out part of a paper, because lord knows I’m not going to be able to by the end of next week, when everything is actually due.

I was parking my car when I got back from four hours of logging footage for a project, and I saw there was a guy in the car I was parking behind. And he was listening to the same radio station I was.

How did I know that, you ask?

I look over and he’s lip-synching the words I’m hearing.

He had no idea I was listening to the same station, so he probably felt only mildly embarassed at getting caught singing along with the radio.

Had he only known….

This has been a long, odd day. Not in any specific way, it just was kind of off and unusual all day. But I should have known what was coming.

The first sign of oddness was this morning, when I momentarily found myself trapped in a commercial for the Honda Civic.

I was returning equipment from shooting into the wee hours of the morning for my video production class when the first one came up, bearing an unlikely Celebrity Endorser: Garry Marshall, famous writer and director of entertaining things like Laverne and Shirley and Pretty Woman.

He was there to give a speech, since he graduated from Northwestern quite some time ago, it was just really odd to see someone of his level of fame pulling up in a Civic.

Then, as I pulled away to go park my car in a slightly more legal spot, I saw two more Civics, parked and waiting along South Campus Drive going out to Sheridan Road. They were both sort of pastel in color, and so was the one that deposited Marshall, so then I thought I had been pulled into some sort of weird easter-themed Civic ad.

It was all very disconcerting, and should have been a sign that my day was going to be as random as it was. But alas, I was too tired to care, let alone form coherent thoughts about the potential for weirdness in my forthcoming day, so whatever.

Those of you who have been reading this weblog lately have probably noticed that my postings have become increadingly sporadic and incomprehensible.

That’s not stopping until finals week (begins June 10), when I can finally lift up my middle finger to all of my classes with pride, for I shall be finished with the Year From Hell, and shall be ready for my Quarter Of Total Bullshit Classes before graduation.

Just so you know, and don’t wonder if I’ve fallen off a cliff or something.