today i have successfully managed to procrastinate and avoid reading in all ways possible. i cleaned the whole kitchen. i cleaned and reorganized my room. i thoroughly read the new york times online, and then followed that up with a healthy dose of left-leaning political blog. i searched the whole (tiny) kitchen for baking soda (unsuccesfully), contemplated baking something that does not require baking soda, but also does not require leaving my apartment, and am now almost out of things to do that aren't my homework.


things have been rapidly changing at home and it's making me feel really disconnected and far away. at the same time, there are lots of reasons that i am glad that i can be far away from certain things. i've been thinking a lot about being an ex-pat lately, which i think stems from reading and re-reading the sun also rises recently. i kind of envy their easy-going life - no cell phones, just 10 word telegrams and a sort of romantic assuredness that you'd see everyone you wanted to see, and many people you didn't want to see. i guess i also romanticize hemingway's character's narratives, and how you have to envision the situations they are in in order to understand what they are leaving unsaid and the manner in which they are saying it. how the romance between the two main characters is so plagued by things unsaid and deep understandings and a mysterious war-injury. there's something really enjoyable about it all to me. i've been delving into american literature rather than facing up to the fact that i have a few hundred pages of german political and gender theory staring me down.


i have made a pretty long mix of music that reminds me of high school and it's all that i've listened to lately. yesterday i talked to ben on the phone for two hours which also made me homesick, but mostly made me happy. rearranging my room also made me happy, and i plan on painting it a little bit in november. decorating my space has become a grand undertaking for me, and its a good way of taking my mind off of any lingering homesickness. the bouts of homesickness have been lessening, though, which is nice. it used to be that every day at some point i'd get a pang of sadness, but now its much less frequent and less severe. learning how to take care of myself is the most important thing i've been learning this month, and i feel like in the next few months i'll really start to feel at home here, which is kind of dangerous in and of itself, because it'll get hard to leave. just things to think about, i guess.