shift

Bedtime on Monday. It's been another long day, but much better than the last. I saw the Strangers with Candy movie tonight, which was funny in spurts--it seemed like a collection of skits (or episodic scenes) strung together with a convoluted plot. Some of the scenes worked and some did not. It wasn't very satisfying as a movie, but it wasn't necessarily unsatisfying in terms of humor. Let's face it: they should've just kept on making the show.

After that, I went to the Blind Pig, which is a bar in downtown Champaign, and worked until around 12:30. I had planned to go to a coffeeshop across the street from there, but it was full (as it often is at night), so on a whim I went into the bar. When I walked in, I saw the other world religions TA (there are two of us this semester), and he actually bought me a beer, which I thought was the nicest thing in the world. So then I sat at a table, turned on my laptop and iChat (so I could chat with some friends and check emails--this bar has wifi!), and then graded quizzes as the bar crowd waxed and waned in size, and as the smoke curled around me. The smoke is irritating me now, since it's been two weeks really since I last smoked (I had two cigs the other night but that was it!). The Pig wasn't the best study environment, but I got a lot done, and it was a nice change of pace.

Now I'm in bed and I'm feeling pretty good about everything. I still feel a bit of that stomach pit, and I know it'll come and go tomorrow, but I'm hoping it'll clear up by the weekend, after my philosophy of ed conference. I hope to come back to town Saturday night refreshed and ready to restart in certain ways. I think I know the kinds of things I need to do to feel more fulfilled, or fulfilled enough where small triggers won't send me reeling, but it's going to take some changes, I think. I need to experiment with those changes in order to find out what exactly needs to be different, but some things need to shift, and I need to have the strength to shift them.