i keep sitting down to write... then i keep getting overwhelmed. too many stories, too much to talk about. so i end up writing nothing.

life's good. i should be sleeping right now. i should've been sleeping several hours ago.

i successfully slept in until noon today!

since my feet are still feeling a bit too battered from dancing to cajole them into running, i took the bike out for a spin this afternoon... i look like a super-dork in my helmet, and there's not that far to go in any direction before i run into scary traffic, but whizzing around the neighborhood and little greenway in walker springs park made me feel like a little kid again. well, a real chicken of a little kid, since i kept hitting the brakes every time a downhill and a curve happened together... (puts me in real awe of mjeanette and mbarronj. i mean, geesh, trails... i can barely manage a paved greenway! and the conventional wisdom about never forgetting how to ride a bike? total baloney.) anyway, it's fun, and after all these years gear-shifting finally makes sense, but i think i'm gonna have to get a rack for the car if i'm ever to get a decent workout biking. although, since it's it's a 30ish-lb cruiser, carrying the bike up and down two flights of stairs almost qualifies. (unless... if i could get away with using the big shoulder/turn-lane on the left side of the one-way road going the opposite direction to get up to walker springs and then ride the sidewalks along there and middlebrook, like i do when i jog... is that against the rules? seems like i was told never to ride on the left side of the road as a kid... not to mention the whole one-way bit... but could i get an exception?)

kinda cool thing... after lugging it upstairs, i decided to find out just how retro the bike really is. according to this page and my serial number, my bike was made in june 1985 by giant for schwinn. which makes it 20 years old, just about the same vintage as my very first bicycle!

INTERNET! i have internet! no desk yet (although i'm considering seeing if i can take it apart into small enough chunks to fit in my car this evening), but internet! my apartment's no longer isolated from the rest of the universe!

saw this quote on a card while browsing bookworks yesterday, it grabbed me. i want to make sure i'll remember it.

"The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences." --Eleanor Roosevelt

i didn't realize roommates.com makes you pay even to access messages people send you. that sucks. (also posted on rent.com's roommate service; hopefully that one's more sensible.) so i'll go about this the old-fashioned way: anybody know anybody in knoxville who needs a roommate? i think i can afford at least a studio apartment on my own and probably don't have enough furniture to fill even that (1 very big desk, a few bookshelves, plan to buy a futon again), but a roommate equals less pinchy finances. i'm sloppy but easygoing and willing to participate in keeping common areas clean; reasonably quiet but i tolerate noise; i watch too many foreign movies, but i'm cool with keeping them on the dvd player on the computer in my room if they bother anybody; and i don't like to stay home very much anyway, so living with me would probably be almost like living alone! my only big requirement is being fastidious about getting the rent and bills money in on time. brendon park apartments, over near cedar bluff, are my current favorite probable place based on location, price, and recommendation of karate instructor and his fiance. anywhere between walker springs (where karate is) and lenoir city (where work is) will keep my daily path about the same length it is now, though.

but i don't want to be 25 yet.

from nytimes.com: "Voters in Shiite and Kurdish areas turned out in especially large numbers, and at the day's end election officials here estimated that the nationwide turnout could exceed 60 percent."

if the estimates here are good, iraq's voter turnout quite possibly exceeds ours from a couple months ago. boycotts and threats and everything. that's just... completely amazing.

the other day, it struck me that the one i'm dragging around with me, roman jakobson's essais de linguistique générale, is especially pointless to be reading in french: it's by a russian guy who emigrated to the US and primarily wrote in english. but all the linguistics i've ever taken was taught in french, so it's actually prob'ly a little easier for me to read this way. plus, convenient: i had the book for one of those courses in france, but i was (and still am) a little slow at reading french and a bit fond of hanging around bars, so i never got through all my texts. oh well, the translation it is...

and i really hate the trend towards the bigger-sized trade paperbacks instead of pocket-sized ones... really, my recent spate of reading in french on my lunch break is less about the will to retain language skills, more about the fact that those are the editions that fit in my purse.