what a bizarre week.

my sweetie got acute food poisoning on monday night. rancid shrimp in a salad roll, he speculates. he called from work at about midnight that night explaining that he was spewing from both ends and asked if i could go get him some ginger ale while he gingerly made his way home.

on my way out to the gas station -- the only place around that might be open at that hour -- and as i was walking down the sidewalk, i see a skunk dart out from the bushes and come barreling straight for me. i skirted around me at the very last possible moment; i think it might have been about 40 cm away or less. i don't think i've ever been quite so close to a skunk before.

just what i need, i thought, to be sprayed on my way out to get ginger ale for the ailing husband.

anyway, monday night was sleepless; certainly, it was much worse for my sweetie than it was for me, but horrible sounds of vomiting every twenty minutes made for a sleepy nori on tuesday.

i had tuesday off, actually -- our tech project wasn't to start until wednesday, when i had to give my presentation on content management systems. i joked that it was just like a reading break, only a fifth as long. i spent most of it nursing my sweetie back to health, which was interrupted by a meeting with BCAMP, in which i was pretty much told that there was no place for me there and that i really should consider other internship options.

well, poo.

i tried working on my CMS presentation, which ended up quite the piece of garbage, especially when compared to LC's awesome presentation on wikis. however, i did manage to get an entire research article laid out and sent out for proof.

wednesday, i finally got to find out whom i'd be working with in tech. turns out i'm shafted with the smelly guy again -- who was utterly ineffectual in our last project and was, as you may deduce, smelly -- but the rest of my group seems pretty solid. our goal is to find a way to automate the process of catalogue production by flowing ONIX-compatible XML data into a commonly used layout program like quark or indesign. last year's group got pretty far with the project but couldn't quite make a fully functional package. i got stuck being project manager, which is fine, i guess, but i'm just afraid that i'm not really going to end up giving it my all because i feel so burnt out.

this week, i also decided on my history paper topic: the history of ink. i'm not entirely sure what angle i'll be taking on it -- and i have about six books that i asked my sweetie to get me from the ubc library to read yet, but i ran the topic by my instructor, and she was entirely too enthusiastic about it. unfortunately, on thursday, i found out that smelly guy apparently wanted to take on that topic as well, and wanted to coordinate presentations on the same day.

so unimpressed i was. i don't want to have to coordinate anything with him.

anyway, the week ended fairly well, with a few of us heading out to drink on friday night and plan a kitshy 'yearbook' for our class, complete with an elementary-school-type class photo with our prof standing by us and one of those white-lettering-on-black signs reading 'mpub class of 2005,' individual photos with incoherent call-outs to our peeps, favourite quotes and inside jokes, an autograph page, and tally of our upcoming 'most likely to...' survey.

tonight is oscar night. in keeping with three years of tradition, at least one of S&A is coming over for dinner and to watch the program; however, none of us have really seen any of the nominated movies, so the whole affair is really just an excuse for me to take sunday night off. i guess i kind of need it. within the next week, i have a tech paper due and i have to get started on this history presentation worth a rather substantial chunk of my mark.

~sigh~. okay, here i go.

i have a laundry room!

huzzah!

magazine project over!

we had our presentations yesterday, and all three groups did pretty awesome. fuck, am i ever glad that's over.

my designs got the least criticism -- surprising, considering i was really the only art director of the three groups that wasn't a 'designer.' one of the panel members said that our magazine proposals were 'among the best he had ever seen,' which i thought was lip service, but apparently last year, the groups put out dave, a magazine for the regular and not terribly good-looking 'dave' who just liked to drink beer and hang out with his friends; boys only, a magazine for the 'reluctant reader' in the 9 to 12 male demographic; and goal, a magazine for parents of children who played sports -- essentially for soccer moms.

yeah.

so our magazines don't seem like that much of a stretch. they could actually be real titles.

after the presentation, we hung out and had brie in the lounge. KS and i played guitar and people drank a lot of free liquor. a bunch of us went out, intending on going to subeez, but it was packed. we ended up at honey, a pub i'd never been to before, but it was great: booths with large plush velvet cushions, music from the 60s, a wall onto which they projected some russ meyer-esque film with russian subtitles...food was consumed, drinks were imbibed and dancing was done.

good times.

i'm tempted to take a pause, but i have some severe catching up to do...a mountain of editing work, physics journal crap, my technology presentation i have to give this wednesday, my technology paper, my history paper...

and although i did the laundry last weekend, it's been sitting in a massive (but clean) heap on my bedroom floor, remaining unfolded and getting permanently wrinkled.

oh yeah: my internship plans with MOMENTUM fell through last night. i don't really know what i'm doing this summer.

excellent, as they say.

where others hyperventilate, i appear to clench my jaw retardedly hard. at this point,i think my molars are going to fall out; i am *so* stressed out. there is so much shit to do and not enough time/energy/brain cells to do it. K&T called today and said surprise! they're in vancouver for the weekend! let's hang out!

aaugh! worst timing ever!

i'd invite them over for tea but the apartment is currently a filth-encrusted hovel, the laundry room still isn't done, there is refuse all over the bottom floor of my place, i have a big presentation that i have to design all snazzy this upcoming week (what the fuck made me think i could be art director of a magazine, anyway!?), there's a completely unintelligible article i was supposed to edit three weeks ago, both my prof and MOMENTUM are putting pressure on me to do my internship with them, i have a management assignment to do and i'm running on an average of five hours of sleep per night this week.

*whimper*

why won't sfu give me a week off?

why!?

instead of prosecuting michael jackson for child molestation, we should prosecute janet jackson for giving the FCC the reason it was looking for to send freedom of speech back to the mccarthy era.

discuss.

ugggghh...

that's how i feel right now.

i've been in this perpetual state of exhaustion since monday and i'm not sure why. i'd thought it was the whacked out fumes from the tiling adhesive my sweetie's been using, but now i'm not so sure. i just constantly, constantly feel like i should be sleeping, and i'm constantly, constantly cursing my backward university for not having a reading break.

suicide rates are highest at sfu, too. correlation?

anyway, my internship prospects look like they may be taking some concrete shape...i am either (a) working for MOMENTUM (i find out sunday whether and how i fit into the whole magazine-publishing scheme), (b) working part time as a research assistant to my prof gathering data in support of BCAMP's application to get magazine publishers a provincial tax credit and part time for BCAMP putting together a position paper including lobbying strategy and contacts, or (c) working (who knows how?) for douglas & mcintyre.

until then, i've got more pressing issues on my mind, like 'how the fuck am i going to get that 700-page book read by next friday,' and having to buckle down and write this silly paper on eben moglen i've been putting off for four days now.

*yawn*!