I haven't written an ordinary entry in so long I decided to do so out of sheer nostalgia.

Statistics is going okay, although I've lost most of my energy for it. I expect to regain it while Earl is here -- and that would be good timing, because I've got a midterm on Monday and I haven't even thought about studying yet. I'm lacking focus right now in a big way.

I haven't been reading very much, although I'm nearly done with Empire Dreams, which is a collection of short stories by Ian MacDonald. They're stylistically amazing, without exception, but plotwise I'm ... not surprised. I'm enjoying them, and they're making me want to read his novels, but I can tell where all of his stories are headed long before they actually get there.

I also finished The Fourth Turning, which was as depressing a piece of pop sociology as I've ever seen. It did give me a few new tools for character/world generation, for which I'm grateful, but overall it wasn't really worth the time.

Music has been pretty amusing. I have a CD/alarm clock now, which wakes me up to whatever track I pre-program the night before. I'm absolutely in love with it. So far I've only used it to wake up to the very first track of Rent, but I have great plans for the future. It's much easier for me to wake up to music I'm familiar with than to anything else -- unfamiliar or nonsensical sounds are easy to block out, but if it's a song I know my brain will start listening, and then next thing I know I'm somewhat languidly awake.

Anyway, most of my listening lately has been Rent, with occasional moments of Hair when I've been in a good enough mood that it won't depress me. Falsettos has been a recent addition to the list, as my casette of it appeared again. I've loaned Jim the CD, as I figure musicals about snide self-destructive gay men are right up his alley. I need to remember to give him the liner notes so that he has some small chance of figuring out what's going on.

Last night was quite strange, not surprisingly. Jim paged me when he got home from work; we ended up getting Taco Bell and watching the first act of Sweeney Todd in his living room. Timing worked in our favour despite our best efforts, so I was on my way home around 2220, and thus in time for Earl's 2230-2300 arrival.

Except, as these things go, Earl had actually gotten to my place around 2145. I was, to put it mildly, flustered. Would he be angry that I wasn't home when he arrived? Would he be deeply hurt that I'd been spending the evening with Jim?

That's the top layer. There's a second one that's much harder to explain. I have a strong streak of chameleon nature, which means that relationship dynamics tend to strongly effect which bits of my personality that I show people. In most cases the shifts are very shallow, but if I'm swapping between highly incongruent situations (sf conventions and my workplace being a classic example) or between people I know well, then there's a significant amount of energy involved as I tune myself to the new situation.

What this means in practical terms is that swapping between Earl and Jim (in either direction) takes a certain amount of work. It's easiest if I have some time alone in-between, so I can reset myself into a more neutral mode. It doesn't matter which way the swap is going -- reset time is a good thing if at all possible.

Anyway, I was being fretful and stressed and trying to swap too fast. Earl noticed, and very patiently waited for me to get more inside myself before asking me what was wrong. We ended up talking for a good five hours, which was a very fine thing indeed. So in the end it all came out well, but I wouldn't mind it too much if my life would just calm down a little and not always be so incredibly significant all the time. Please?