aamcnamara: (Default)
So I had a birthday. I turned twenty. (Two decades, a fifth of a century, Not A Teenager Any More.) The day before, I made lemon cake with olive oil and rosemary in, and then I made blueberry sauce to put on top.

On the morning of my actual birthday, I sat down before work and wrote a letter to my ten-year-old self. In some ways I'm more like her than, say, my sixteen-year-old self was. And I want to show her this picture of me:
picture )

One of the things I know is that my ten-year-old self could not have imagined my twenty-year-old self. One of the things I hope is that, if my ten-year-old self could have met my twenty-year-old self, she would have gone, "huh. Okay. Awesome."

The picture is from my birthday (observed), which was yesterday. Long descriptions of museums )

Today I have been writing--typing, mostly, again. With everything transferred into the Queen of Spades file, there's about 7.5k done on that. I also have the larger part of an outline. Given that it'll probably be a fairly short novel, that's a good start. If I had a week free, I would probably be able to fill in most of the draft, but... well.

I also am hoping to do some work on the still-untitled short story today, as well as finishing up Ideomancer slush from last week.

...and, of course, work on my presentation for the REU program. We're presenting our research at the end of this week; I'm presenting in front of my research group on Wednesday, as a practice for the other one. So I have to figure out what I'm going to talk about, and what I'm going to do if that one set of measurements doesn't actually work out in the next couple of days, and clip down a couple of videos so I can have some examples in my presentation.

Seems incredible that there are only a couple of weeks left in my program at all. After that, it's back to Minnesota for a couple of weeks, and then I will somehow be a junior in college. I'm already twenty. I can remember, very clearly, a lot of time when twenty was unimaginably old. Not necessarily for a person to be, but for me, specifically, to be.

On the other hand, the day after my birthday I wrote a letter to my thirty-year-old self, who I cannot imagine at all. So I think maybe it just goes on like this, on and on into your life until you look backward and forward and realize that every ten years you are more like your ten-years-past self than you possibly would've imagined then, and that your ten-years-on self is unimaginable, and every day of your life is easing you along in that chain.

I kind of like the thought that my thirty-year-old self will be more like me than I can currently imagine. I hope she's nice. You'll all meet her someday, and then you can let me know what you think.
aamcnamara: (Default)
Walking barefoot on the lake path, asphalt hot against my skin, grit prickling the soles of my feet, and then the cool retreat to grass. Dirt lingering under my toenails days afterward, reminding me that I am here, now, on this planet.

The way that I can smell the city now--a hint of heat and car exhaust and tar that reaches even over lakes.

Writing letters, covering both sides of the page with ink until the paper crinkles against it. Licking envelopes; peeling off a stamp from its sheet. The days the mail takes to get anywhere, and the weight and lightness of that time.

Going to my old high school was fascinating because half my teachers and most of my friends looked exactly like I'd left them (yet my friends slightly different, when I really looked at them--but then, a year is a long time for teens). The rest of my teachers I saw differently, with the veneer of Authority taken away. I wasn't a Student, they didn't have any power over me, so they were just a person and I was just a person. In some cases there's still the memory of authority, but it's quickly fading.

The weirdest part of summer, so far, is the lack of usual daily contact. College people particularly, since I saw them at meals, classes, walking around classes, hanging out, and now I'm half the country away from most of them. Summer brings its own reconnections and interactions; it's a different set, and I do enjoy both, but sometimes I miss the other ones.

And a quick page count update:
88 / 350


Sickness slightly receding: yay!
aamcnamara: (Default)
Accomplished today:

- read part of Tehanu (I never read Earthsea as a kid)
- post about the Tragedy of me not being vegetarian
- ~350 words of a idea for a Bordertown story (because I want to write one every time [livejournal.com profile] ellen_kushner posts about the new anthology)
- 50 minutes or so of going through the highlighted Word document of As Large as Alone, cleaning up and clearing off the easiest things to fix.
- mathy coding: establishing structure of my first math paper for the semester, working on a presentation for Thursday pursuant to tutorial from last semester.
- read The Odyssey, books nine and ten

Left for after dinner/tomorrow:
- check out book from the library as reference for math presentation, above
- keep working on As Large as Alone and math paper; poke at the Bordertown idea some more
- read The Odyssey, books eleven and twelve, and take notes on 9-12
- meet with other group member about the presentation, finish up presentation prep
- water plant, take out garbage and recycling

We could call that a weekend.
aamcnamara: (Default)
So I remembered why I hadn't been writing much at college, to wit, the part where some days I am busy from eight-thirty until five and then have to do a philosophy reading, homework for my tutorial, and a problem set for multivariable calculus before I get a chance to surface gasping.

(And then it's ten, and I'm exhausted, and I start looking suspiciously at the clock, because I have work at eight tomorrow morning.)

Yesterday I didn't have anything in the morning, but I did some stuff for Ideomancer and then I wrote a synopsis for the novel I wrote this past summer, and between those things my morning rather disappeared, and then there was class and work again, and then homework to be done.

I mean, it was a good thing that I wrote a synopsis, because a couple of things are clearer in my head now, but it took time away from thinking about or working on The Urban Fantasy Novel.

These are of course all excellent excuses and don't make me feel any better about not writing, but I'm tired enough at the moment that I don't really care.

Maybe tomorrow.


(On a far more optimistic note, Hume's philosophy makes much more sense to me than Descartes' does. Hurrah!)

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