Closer

Yesterday was the last day of classes. I'm not calling anything finished yet. It's not over until the end of finals and I've handed in that last blue book. I learned that the hard way last time. One semester lost turned into a year that way.

And today... today I did nothing. All day. I've had do-nothing days in the past, but they've always been full of a nagging sort of anxiety, the knowledge that I'd still some assignment waiting for me after my little day off; that there was something I could be working on now and was just too lazy to focus on. None of that today. I sat in bed, watched a shit ton of "Lie to Me" on Netflix, and went for a drive. I love "Lie to Me" because A) that's the kind of shit we just finished studying in my Political Psychology class, and B) I'm mad good at detecting micro-expressions. I solve the cases and know who's telling the truth and who isn't way before the plot unfolds. Yeah, I'm tooting my own horn here. It's my day off. I do what I want.

I've been sick for the better half of this week. Immediately after the show closed (we're talking Monday morning), I developed a horrid sore throat and cough. No, it wasn't anything I did onstage. It was my body entering the second stage of the stress response. During times of severe physical stress, your body expends all of its energy trying to keep you looking and feeling normal. Once that threat (the stress) is gone, it completely collapses. It's exhausted -- not just from the stress itself, but from the added stress of masking any physical duress. So I lost my voice about 16 hours after curtain, I ran a fever, and I was in agony until I finally decided to bite the bullet and get some NyQuil. I wasn't sleeping, and that was only making me sicker. Even if my liver isn't in the best of shape, a few days of Vick's can't hurt that much. So I DayQuil'd and NyQuil'd that shit until -- well, really, today's the first day I haven't felt the need to take it. My voice returned a bit yesterday, albeit huskily, and today it's almost completely back to normal and my throat doesn't hurt at all. My nose is a little runny. I'm debating as to whether or not I should take more Nyq tonight. I don't need it. But it would feel good. (This has happened ever since grade school: I take ill, develop a mild addiction to OTC sedatives, and quit with some reluctance later when I can afford to re-train my body to fall asleep on its own.)

I need a new laptop. Desperately. This one is falling apart like mad. It's already crashed once (remember that episode last summer?), sometimes it randomly goes to sleep and won't wake up until I unplug the charger, take out the battery, and re-install it, the audio doesn't work unless there are headphones plugged in (and yes, I've tried all the typical are-you-sure-you're-not-just-an-idiot things by dicking around with my system preferences), the little mouse clicker-thingy doesn't know it's being clicked sometimes and at others it thinks it's being clicked when it isn't. Very aggravating. The worst part is that my screen is incredibly moody, as in, if I tilt it past a certain angle it goes dark. And that angle changes every time I re-open the computer. I also have to open it very slowly; it's like boiling a frog. If I swing the screen open it goes dark and stays dark until I close it again and slowly creak it open, tilting and tilting as far as I can go -- do I want to take a gamble and push it to 90 degrees? Let's try this... slowwwwly... FUCK I lost it. Time to shut it and re-open. Come on... more... more... FUCK DAMN IT NOT AGAIN. Okay. Open... slowly... slowwwwwwwwly...

You get the picture.

Anyway, I can't summon up the balls to tell my paternal unit I need a new one. They're so expensive and I feel incredibly guilty after ALLLLLL the money I'm bleeding them for.

Still, here I am, with a continually open tab on the apple page so that I can drool over a 13-inch $1100 Macbook Pro. I'm not unreasonable. It's the second-cheapest Macbook model they have in stock (the first is only a couple hundred dollars less and it's much lower quality; I'd probably only keep it for a few years and have to replace it again like this one. The Pro is top-of-the-line. It's an investment. Do want).