my mom has been staying with me for the last three days. i can honestly say that i had a really good time. i felt like a grown-up daughter relating to her mother. little things didn't bother me as much. i didn't always think of myself first. i made an effort to really communicate, and it paid off. we had fun. yay! i hope it did her good--she has a job interview coming up and we were sort of preparing for that, too.

classes start again tomorrow.

what to do this afternoon/tonight? still trying to decide.

not only is finals week over, spring break is almost over....my mom is sleeping in my bed and i'm in the living room.

last night i went out to dinner with a....gentleman. and i do not use that term lightly. ;) i had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. i was nervous because i didn't know if it was a date or not, but i don't think it really matters. he's a wonderful dinner/conversation companion. and i would very much like to see him again, but it's okay either way.

earlier yesterday i had lunch with an old old friend from high school. well, obviously not from my school. from summer camp, actually. so i talked to two great conversationalists yesterday and ended up feeling so energized and positive. fantastic.

tonight mom and i had chinese and exchanged gifts and news clippings and stuff. we watched "love actually" and now i am watching late-night TV and....i don't know. getting ready to go to bed.

i am having the most incredible email exchange with an 84-year-old man. he's a student of hebrew and egyptian and he's pretty damn funny, too. seriously, i just laughed out loud, really hard, when i read his latest email. "who is this irishman o rigen?" ha!

i have a neighborhood bar again. i think this is a good thing for me socially and probably a bad thing financially and physically...but it's so great to meet people who aren't affiliated with the university.

finals week, i guess that's why i'm wasting time blogging.......

dear diary,

today i saw a woman with a rat-tail. kind of like new kids on the block, but a little more...feminine. okay, maybe it was a femullet. yeah. it was what it was. the "business" was all spiked up and in front of her face, and the "party" was this long, flowing...curly...tail.

tonight i am listening to some mp3s one of my TAs put up relating to his dissertation. he's giving the lecture tomorrow and we're supposed to listen to the songs he's going to talk about. i absolutely love to hear this man talk.

things are blowing up over here. i can't explain what i mean. it's not a bad thing, though.

how am i STILL sick? or, more accurately, how am i sick again? this is different. last week i had a cold. garden-variety cold. this is more like an enormous aching fuzzy head coupled with a swollen aching throat. no coughing or sneezing. but my neck is stiff, so i hope i don't have meningitis. :)

i guess before anyone feels too sorry for me i should point out that i went home with blues-club-boy and was even mostly sober when i decided i was going to. so as bad as i feel about breaking up with J, it doesn't mean i'm not a duplicitous person. or that i'm hurting more than he is. i didn't tell him about that but...i did tell him about frank asking me to go on holiday again and that i might go....and that was the point where he hung up. (not without saying goodbye, though, he's not a rude person.)

i had a really nice email discussion with a girl from my program this afternoon about feeling left out. she's incredibly popular, and yet here she is, sharing with me her insecurities, and it made me feel better about last weekend. i have two girls here i really really want to be close to. i need some female friends, you know?