rainclouds in august, and other such nonsense

i feel so distracted lately. and i really wish i knew why. or even just had a hunch, or the tiniest shred of an idea. but alas, i don't.

for the last several weeks, my ability to motivate myself to make progress at work has been pitiful at best. this is not helped by the fact that alcherio was on vacation, which has the dual effect of relieving stress in the short term (when the cat's away...) and increasing it in the long term---he's supposed to be back next week, and i feel like i should really have something spectacular to show him after three weeks of work. of course, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense either, since even had he been checking up on me each week like usual, the combination of three weeks of small advances still probably doesn't add up to anything particularly impressive, but i'm starting to get that uneasy queasy feeling in my stomach nonetheless, as his return draws closer. mostly, i think he'll just be very disappointed that we're not going to be able to make the submission deadlines at the beginning of september. we both knew it was a longshot, and not particularly likely (especially with him being gone), but we were still going to try, and it didn't really happen. maybe if i had worked my ass off, it might have been possible; but for whatever reason, i don't care enough about it to do that.

as if it wasn't obvious already, yes, i can feel myself sliding down into a depressive phase. and no, i haven't dragged my sorry ass to a psychiatrist yet either; i'm still too chicken. i know i need to, but i just can't bring myself to actually do it.

tuesday evening yannick and i tried to go to another yoga studio, and when we showed up, it was locked, and there wasn't anybody there. that was frustrating, but we went for a drink anyway, and talked for a while, which was nice, albeit not at all what we had planned. (hrmmm, replacing exercise with drinking beer; tempting, but not exactly what most people would call productive or healthy...) turns out, despite the fact that there was a class scheduled on the calendar, he doesn't let anyone show up cold for a non-beginner class, and he wasn't expecting any current students, so he didn't come. after talking to him on the phone yesterday, we're going to go back on monday for his beginning class, and then talk about what the appropriate level for us might be. more news after the fact.

learning german is proving to be an interesting experience. somehow, even though i know it can't have been more than a year and a half ago, i can no longer really remember or imagine what it was like to not understand [basically any] french. this is probably mostly to do with the fact that i still think my french sucks splintered telephone poles even now (which it does). but i at least understand the majority of what goes on around me. in german however, whoohboy. i've been writing all my emails to markus in broken german, and he's been cool enough to actually take the time to read, understand, and correct all of them. at the moment, i'm lucky if i get one sentence out of ten correct. it's a little disheartening, but mostly i'm starting to feel a little bad about taking so much of his time for him to bring me up to speed. that, and even if i get the writing down okay, it looks like the speaking will take much longer. since, when writing, i can put all the words out there on the page, and then rearrage them into the proper order. when speaking, you gotta get the order right from the beginning, or you're basically screwed. :) well, i'll still sticking at it, and hopefully it will snap into place sometime soon.

on a similar note, i'm going to geneva on saturday to meet with katja again, which should be fun as well as embarassing. while i'm there, i'm hoping to make it to the music store sean told me about where he got his guitar (a non-descript but nice, and more importantly, nice sounding classical) for cheap (chf150), and maybe i'll even buy one. that would be cool. i really do want to learn to play eventually.

seems i'm turning spendthrift in my old age. yesterday i ordered a gps pedometer/heartmonitor for running, because it was on sale for half price, and looked like a really cool toy. i've actually been wanting to get a heartrate monitor for a while, so it's not really that extreme, but in reality, i probably could have gotten one for around $50, instead of the $200 i spent on this fancy gadget. regardless, i think it's probably a good thing, since mom and dad had wanted to get me something for my birthday, and we didn't manage to find anything that would be reasonable for me to take over here while i was home. so they're going to chip in a little bit for this new toy. it still amazes me that i'm actually staying focused and motivated about my health for this long. i mean, truth be told, i'm actually probably bordering on obsession at this point. but if it works, i'm hardly going to complain. my filtered weight is continuing to fall steadily. if i can keep it up, i actually stand a decent chance of reaching my goal by the beggining of december. such a fascinating idea. i keep wondering if it's too much to hope for, or too good to be true, or something like that. but doing the math, and watching the numbers, it really looks possible... a body that i'm not so ashamed of; that would quite possibly be the best christmas gift i've ever received.

last night we had "movienight." this time antoine and jean-christophe showed photographs from their vacations (antoine went to vietnam with his family, and jcz went sailing the coast of croatia with his girlfriend and a few others). some very cool shots. of course the expensive cameras don't hurt any, but they must be pretty damn good photographers as well. and to try something new, we had a sort of makeshift baked potato bar for dinner. in the end it actually turned out well, and everybody seemed to like it just fine, but i was scared for a while when the potatoes weren't softening even after having been in the oven for nearly an hour and a half. probably they were just the wrong kind of potato, but at about two hours we hit a severe non-linearity, and they suddenly turned done. too bad i had only estimated that they would take around 30-45 minutes to prepare... [rolls eyes] and we made banana muffins and tea for dessert.

and since this journal entry is turning into a completely random free association session, speaking of food, enno is coming over tonight, and we'll try to make risotto. this'll be our first cooking night what seems like a _very_ long time. i hope we start doing it regularly again. i really enjoyed it, and i've kinda missed it. hey, come to think of it, the slowfood thing should be coming up pretty soon, too. i wonder if we'll go again this year. gonna have to check on that.