i spent yesterday and half of today losing focus, vision, and clarity. tonight i spent hours cleaning and rearranging my room, and i’ve regained my sight.
yesterday i went to church, tried to think about god and not all the pretty girls (which was successful, in my opinion), then ate lunch. i lazed around thinking that i should do work for awhile, but didn’t have the heart. so i put on my running shoes and went out for a run around campus drive, to see if i could beat my previous record. at first i thought i wouldn’t be able to, because there was a very strong wind (we’re talking 20-30mph fairly sustained). but, i just ran faster…about 3.5 miles in, i started to flag. at that point i thought to myself, you know, you’re such a wuss, you always stop if it hurts to much. remember that 5k you did last year? you had to walk for a few seconds…and that’s weak. keep running…what’s the worst that could happen? it’s all mental…so i kept saying these things and i finished. not strong, i don’t think, but i finished, and i ended up beating my previous record by exactly a minute. which is 15 seconds per mile for 4 miles faster…not horrible.
then i went to santa cruz with alex polk, ryan moore, and chris haughey. i thought it would be as hot at the beach as at stanford (felt like about 200 degrees while i was running), but boy was i wrong. as soon as we crossed the mountains, there was continuous cloud cover, gale-force winds, and sub-60 degree temperatures. i had to borrow one of ryan’s shirts so i wouldn’t die. i snapped some pretty cool photos of the shoreline cliffs, though, so it was worth it. we also went to this little bakery in an old town and got fresh, hot artichoke french bread. mmmm. then we went to another beach, where there was a supposed ‘secret cove’. we started walking along the cliffs to where there was this supposed ‘rope’ that we could climb down the cliffs with to the cove.
on the way we looked down to the beach, and there was a naked man. he was walking around the beach…now standing by the water, now walking back and forth. he didn’t seemed ashamed of the fact that he was naked, even with other people and families on the beach.
walking along the cliffline in the gusty wind was a little scary but fun, and soon we came to the rope, which we climbed down, and got to a rocky cove where the water came in with crashes and whirlpools. we jumped from rock to rock and stood on ancient ground jutting out…barely part of the continent. still, it was cold, and after exploring around, we made the long trek back to the car. we drove 15 or 20 minutes into santa cruz and got a bite to eat before going to santa cruz bible church for a sunday evening college service. the worship there was excellent, and i found myself singing freely as it’s so hard to do sometimes…but i confess that the talk annoyed me. i don’t even remember what it was now…i think i put it out of my mind.
sadly, it was 10 before we even left the church, and i’d put off all my work since the previous thursday. it hung like an oppressive pall of mirk over my soul…i had so much to do by today there was no way i’d ever get it done, after the hour drive back. i was becoming fragmented and blurred…simultaneously distressed and ambivalent….distressed enough to worry and fret, but ambivalent enough to procrastinate. and that’s what i did. eventually i got a little bit of my greek done–maybe 15% of the work required for today. i didn’t do any of my spanish or philosophy. i was just too pathetically unmotivated. still, i did something until 2am, but it wasn’t work.
today was pretty bad…i was completely unprepared for my greek, had a rotten and unhealthy lunch doing a spanish essay that wasn’t even due (and of course something else was that i hadn’t done), and finally i fell completely asleep in the back row of phil 102. then i went home and slept some more, until 5, when i was supposed to have section for modal logic. i got on my bike and went to west campus, and realized i didn’t even know where the building was that i was trying to find. who has section at CSLI anyway…so i rode around, remembering that i’d seen it on my run yesterday. i ended up passing it without knowing it, riding for about 15 minutes, then actually finding it half an hour after section started. i was so fed up with the whole business (and the strong winds which made it a herculean task to bicycle around), i went home.
bible study was at 6:45 and i wasn’t excited about it at all. i felt like i’d had a pathetic day and gotten nothing done, and the last thing i needed to do was spend more time being ‘unproductive’. of course, i knew that going to bible study was, especially considering my feelings, the most productive thing i could do…i just didn’t want to admit it. but i went and decided that i really hadn’t been letting the spirit into my life at all recently…and i needed to give up my plans and my control (which i could see, based on today, were ultra-sucky). i came back at 9pm encouraged.
i spent the rest of the night cleaning and reorganizing my room. it was really a mess–the floor was horribly covered with popcorn kernels, jelly beans, crushed chex mix, bottles, weights, guitars, overflowing trash cans, backpacks, climbing gear, sound equipment, and whatever else…i felt suffocated. but the suffocation was worse than that–the insides of my desk were also dirty…each drawer sloppy and disarrayed.
i think that i am closely tied to the state of my room, because, after spending a few hours cleaning out my desk i felt as if it were my soul that had just received a good scrubbing. and i felt that, when i rigged up a cardboard platform suspended by strips of leather cut from an old belt upon which i placed a set of 4 speakers to make more room on my desk, it was my spirits that were lifted. finally, i carted the full load of dirty clothes off to the laundry, and while they were churning happily i vacuumed the room. immediately afterwards i felt such a sense of peace i knew everything would be ok. the day may have sucked, school may be going down the drain, but at least my room is clean and my soul is in order!
now it’s 2:30 am and dan is asleep. i’m waiting for my clothes to finish their cycle in the dryer so that i can put them away and go to bed. i didn’t actually do any work today either, and i know it will catch up to me soon. but i feel more prepared to deal with it now.
listening to: my long-windedness
