once i wanted to be the greatest

i was trying to spend this afternoon before my vegetarian dinner date with a cool new gay british friend named jonathon developing a serious plan for myself for this paper-writing process, because boy oh boy do i need to get me one of those, but for some reason i can't focus. here i am instead.

the time since my last post has been very eventful. today, for example, it became a sudden and apparently immediate concern that my hair had become retardedly long. well perhaps not retardedly but there was some struggle. so i up and went to a barber, an actual barber who just thoughtlessly cut about 3 inches off the end in a straight line despite that not being what i asked for. which is fine, i just came home and did some more barbering of my own. so yeah, there's the result to the right. probably doesn't look too different to you, but at least you can be reminded that i exist in time-space or something. with shorter hair.

today i also met with my literature professor to have a serious discussion about my academic writing for literature and the ways in which i need to grow and harness myself - or as he said, to write in a way that makes my intelligence most evident. i have a lot of work to do and a lot to think about, and it does scare me a little but i also want it really badly, want this challenge to be something that i can really embrace and love the process and outcomes of. i am tired of being "intelligent but diffuse" and i want to really treat this as a discipline. it saddens me that no one has really properly taught it to me directly as such before, but i will take it into my own hands. my professor also told me that he was "enlivened and heartened" to hear that i wanted to pursue an academic life centred more or less around the same subject matter as his own (the specific period of literature and all), and that he would be more than happy to give me any academic support i might need. so dad, maybe i am not being such a slacker after all, for i have it turns out "enormously impressed" this professor. it was good to have this ego-boosting but no-nonsense talk with him about how i need to approach writing harder as i am gearing up for quite a bit of words-spinning this week.
my friend mandy said an interesting thing about some newfound paranoia over life that she is experiencing stemming from vanity, from the desire to be the best and make everything perfect for herself. maybe i need to become less expressive and more paranoid as a writer.

but rivalling all of that in eventfulness was the employee christmas party last night. it took place in a four-star hotel called the roxburghe in a large banquet room hosting a few other hotels as well. i ate too much and drank not a little as well, and i still don't feel hungry after all the time that has passed. but it was all quite pleasant, i got to meet the significant others of my polish co-workers, and i got to watch everyone, especially my boss cameron, get really drunk and say and do silly things. co-workers meeting up outside of a work environment is just the funniest social enterprise. the curmudgeonly cook iain who called me dour and not american asked me to dance - to torrentially bad shania twain pop classic "man, i feel like a woman," so i refused and told to him to wait for a bettter song, but i don't know if he understood. stevie wonder's "superstition" came on, which is pretty much the greatest song ever in this context, so i, doing what cameron called "my good deed for the night," asked him to come out for that one. it was pretty harmless. and i've still not had a conversation with this man! but yeah, dancing is still the greatest way to bring people together, i continue to assert. it was fun to dance with my co-workers even though the music was just awful. drunk cameron promised to take me to the next football game in the city - which will be a very scottish experience, it's a huge part of all of their lives - so we'll see if he will actually remember and go through with it. i certainly intend to go at some point. another very scottish tradition is for everyone, particularly the men who aren't ordinarily gracing the dance floor, to get up and jump up and down with fists in the air to "i would walk 500 miles" by the proclaimers. it is this incredibly universal thing and makes me laugh - cameron showed us all the ropes.
anyway i'm sure this will be talked about for weeks afterwards, because that is just what people do at work. happily there are no smears on my honor (psh, of course not, there never are) so i won't be a subject of controversy.
i posted new pictures of the christmas party and of the graveyard i mentioned yesterday, so have a looky under the "view around town" album to which they were added.

oh my my, this paper is going to be quite an effort. i'd better go.