In an improvement over the traditional Wednesdays that feel like Thursdays (also known as Big Fucking Tease Days), today was a Friday that felt like a Saturday. The pros include getting a Saturdayish amount of work done (a Fridayish amount being essentially equivalent to none at all) and the fun bit about remembering every couple of hours that I have two more days before waking up at six, not one.

Cons include making plans with other Saturday-thinking people as though it were, in fact, Saturday - only to realize that we could go to that club tonight, but only if we’re really interested in a definitive Britpop retrospective.

Which, I mean, yeah.

My apartment seriously smells like popcorn. Possible explanations: popcorn elves visit while I’m in Manhattan all day, making bowls and piles and indeed sacks of Jiffy Pop and Healthy Choice Light (butter flavored) and then eat it all before I get home, the bitches; the man who lives across the hall could be engaged in some activity producing a popcorn-like odor which is then somehow wafting in the direction of my apartment; it’s been a long week and I didn’t have dinner.

I saw Meg Hourihan’s book at the NYU computer store today and it, like, totally blew my mind. (In the sense that I flipped through it for a few minutes and then went to have a beer.)

I need to do something about my back. Options include buying a new, back-friendlier bag in which to lug around my god-awful load of textbooks or being the girl who never, ever has her god-awful load of textbooks in class and has to look on with a surly overachiever who makes her displeasure known with eye rolling and/or long-suffering sighs or keep taking ridiculous quantities of Advil (which is in fact not Advil but generic drugstore-brand ibuprofen) so as to avoid collapsing on the floor of Main Silver, making little whimpery noises like some sort of puppy or whatever.

Apparently, the web design club at NYU would like me to Talk About Web Design at some point in the relatively near future. I’m alarmed, not usually being the Talking sort. I’ll probably do it anyway.

And finally, there is nothing more delectable in this world than going to bed on a tipsy Thursday night knowing I don’t even have to pretend to get up early the following morning.

For all that I bitch and moan about how brutal my schedule is, and how fucked up my back is getting (damn you, Deitel and Deitel), and how tiresome my linguistics lecture is rapidly proving itself to be, it is just as good to be back in school as I had hoped it would be. I suppose the season has something to do with it, but (with one notable exception) I’m in classes ranging from interesting to why-didn’t-I-take-this-sooner, and I suspect next semester will be even better with the core out of the way.

I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s again tonight, for maybe only the second or third time. Being a big Capote fan, I loved the book long before Chrissy and I ever watched the movie and while Audrey is adorable I cringe, predictably, at how mangled the story is. But I suppose it’s rather trite to say the movie is good but the book was better.

Anyhow. 10.2.1 is out which I’m planning to grab tonight, and I’m told CandyBar has been updated as well, although it looks like for my purposes the old one will be just as good. I really only use it for the default folder, Applications, and Documents - and for that it’s just perfect.

One of the not-all-that-many things I miss about working full time as opposed to being a full-time student: generally, when you leave work, you’re done for the day. Even if it’s a particularly tiresome or interminable day, even if you have to stay late, usually that’s that. You can go home and make dinner and fall asleep and not worry about diagramming irregular syntactic forms or the many little quirky differences between gcc and the CS department’s compiler of choice.

As it happens, my schedule on Tuesdays has me leaving the house at 7am, getting home around 8pm, and then doing everything that needs to get done for the next day. But at least I’m getting paid well.

Wait.

“He’s late. Is he late?”

“He’s not late. It’s not even two yet. Anyway, was there reading?”

“Yeah, but it’s not due till Wednesday. And he’s totally late, we’re going by that clock.”

“That clock is fast. I never go by that clock. I’m going by my watch, and it’s like three of.”

“Dude, it’s five after. I’m going by my watch.”

“Oh look at that, he is late.”

“What’s that rule? Five minutes or ten? Is there a ten minute rule in college?”

“I’m pretty sure that there isn’t. Maybe, like, a half-hour rule. Anyway one of the TAs will probably come if he doesn’t.”

“There should be a ten minute rule. There should totally be a ten minute rule.”

“There’s no rule. He doesn’t even take attendance, it’s not like you have to be here anyway. I wonder why he’s late. Wait, is he Jewish?”

“Oh yeah, isn’t today, like, Yom Kippur or something? Or is that next week?”

“I thought it was today. Isn’t it today?”

“Why, is he Jewish?”

“I just said that.”

“Oh. Well is he?”

“Maybe.”

“No, he’s not Jewish, he’s Canadian.”

“Is he?”

“He totally is.”

“Oh.”

I know. I know I’ve gone on and on about how I just don’t do The Club Thing anymore: but heavens to Megatroid, that once-in-a-blue-moon really good night is enough to make anyone whip out the god damned black nail polish. Possible contributing factors, re: having a blast at an event I usually avoid like the plague, are as follows:

Attending in the company of people who’ve never been to Batcave before. It doesn’t matter that I’ve gone more times than I’m willing to admit or that I can recognize a regular by their particular permutation of the Goth Dance regardless of what hair or body modifications have taken place in my absence. When you’re introducing someone else to the entity that is Cave, it’s almost like that first time you walked in and were amazed that there could be this much black clothing in all of New York City, much less packed into one three-floored fog-machined building.

Skyy Blue. Seriously, who knew one of those trendy-ass Premium Malt Beverages would prove itself in one sweaty, eyeliner-smudging evening to be my new lord and savior? I should have known that the makers of Skyy would never let me down, but I mean really.

In a shocking display of casual disregard for my own obsessive compulsive needs and traditions, I did not bring a bag. I know, right? No bag! I was completely free to dance my ass quite literally off with cloves and lip gloss squirreled safely away in the myriad pockets of my Favorite Pants Ever. To which, by the way, I added D-rings and bondage straps yesterday with the help of my Girl Scout sewing technique just so that I could wear them with the particular ensemble I had assembled for last night.

Seriously, I have to say the eyeliner held up rather well despite being subjected to four hours of sweat (my own and that of so many, many others).

At some point during my extended hiatus from Batcave, Ian Fford apparently acquired the Mad DJ Skillz. Don’t get me wrong, he’s always played good stuff - if perhaps rather too frequently the same good stuff - but when did he learn how to beatmatch?

1. Take the best mid-September weather ever. No, seriously, better than that. Hoodie weather in the morning, chilly enough to huddle up out of the wind with your coffee on the stairs to Main with a handful of other intrepid smokers and cell phone users. Then warm enough later to spend your three hour break sprawled reading in the sun in Gould Plaza, but never quite hot, exactly, and cool again later in the afternoon. This is what fall is supposed to be like. This is what the whole year should be like, actually.

2. Stir in one of those completely indeflatable good moods that arises partially from the best mid-September weather ever, as well as other factors including: having finally (finally) declared your major, discovering a used copy of The Stranger for three bucks from the Strand the very same morning you have a hankering to reread it, getting your Harvard transcript issue sorted out at last, discovering the single most perfect slice of pizza in the world (and eating it).

3. Get one last ear piercing on a whim (bringing the number to an even six) and discover that it really is even cuter than you could possibly have anticipated. Try without measurable success to break yourself of the habit of playing with your earrings, as you keep accidentally yanking on the wrong one and, consequently, making some highly unusual sounds.

4. Wander down to the bar as per usual thinking yourself awfully clever - by deliberately not bringing enough money for more than a pint or two, surely there is no way you could end up drinking too much. I mean, right?

5. Drink your two pints as intended, catch up with people you haven’t seen since last semester, and discover when you begin making noise about going home that there really is no way you will be allowed to leave without being bought more drinks. And who are you to complain, anyway? It is Thursday.

6. Manage to get home sometime after two am after something bearing less resemblance to office hours than to some sort of philosophical Bacchanal. Given that the very thought of setting an alarm will make your stomach turn over (more than it already is), it is guaranteed: you will be awfully glad there are no classes on Fridays.

Yesterday ended a little less somberly than it began; I think NYU made exactly the right choice to have the big Remembrance thing in the morning and then hold classes as usual. A few people wandered teary-eyed into my early morning lab, but it’s hard to stay depressed when you’ve got cell slides to prepare and membranes to sketch and whatever. By the time I finished up my logic lecture in early afternoon, it felt more or less like any other Wednesday, which was the whole idea.

I finally declared my major (philosophy) yesterday, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. While this is only my third full semester, I’ve got sixty four credits and am considered a junior, which means I should have already declared. It’s nice to have a department to associate myself with now, and my new advisor seems great. After this term, I’m done with the core curriculum, which is equally a relief. I’m still glad I took that year off; there’s nothing like working full time for a while to make the two years of philosophy and cs I’ve got ahead of me seem like the luxury they are.

Last night, I reread most of the several hundred emails I received a year ago today. I had a vague idea of picking a few and posting them for this morning, but I found I couldn’t choose anything like a representative handful and I don’t think I want to after all. Rereading them was analogous to watching that same news footage we’ve seen so many times already; the local stations have been playing it for the past few days and I’m not sure I’m glad I watched. Both brought back with perhaps a little too much immediacy what, exactly, it was like.

A little easier to handle are the Portraits the New York Times has been running for the past year, which concluded yesterday totalling somewhere between two and three thousand pieces. Placing the focus on the lives rather than deaths of those lost seems to help a little, although I wouldn’t be able to explain exactly why - they are, ultimately, just obituaries. Yesterday morning it was Maurita Tam’s that hit closest to home. NYCbloggers also has a good list of last year’s posts and firsthand accounts.

I don’t have anything terribly profound to say, today. Unlike some of my friends, I was not in lower Manhattan that morning but rather at home in Brooklyn; it was my mail client beeping that woke me up. I remember most the waiting and worrying over people who had not yet been heard from, and watching the sky go dark grey with dust and smoke. I remember not being able to sleep for a long time, and the nightmares that started when I could again - which I still have, once in a while. Perhaps the strangest thing to think about now is that for the first few days, we really had no idea at all why any of it had happened or who was responsible.

Today, like last year, I’m thinking of everyone who was not as phenomenally lucky as I was.

Through some mysterious process at Blockbuster yesterday, I ended up at my house with neither of the two movies I’d actually intended to rent - instead, I’d been given Mean Machine and Rock Star, neither of which I was particularly interested in seeing. Rock Star, if I remember correctly, is that Marky Mark thing (I believe that when I saw the trailer, I died a little inside). Mean Machine turned out to be an unexceptional British prison soccer movie, but it had a couple of amusing moments. Unfortunately, both prison and soccer movies tend to be a little on the predictable side - of course the spunky underdog team will come through at the last second of the tied game to score the winning goal, and of course the prisoners will rise above their situations to gain a newfound self-respect or whatever. A prison soccer movie isn’t any different. But entertaining.