Thanksgiving

This is my favorite time of year. Thanksgiving is almost better than Christmas. Food and family without all the  stress inherent in Christmas. Why is stress an inherent part of Christmas? I hereby swear not to allow stress to overwhelm my holidays.

Should be easy. My oral defense is later this week. Everything else will be far more manageable once I've gotten that taken care of.

I did some schooling over the long weekend, but mostly it was all food and family and movies and popcorn and late night pizza. I made myself a bracelet just for fun and visited a quilting shop where they give a free fat quarter to first time visitors.

We've already eaten our way through most of our leftovers and we've got plans underway for using up the rest of the turkey. Tonight it's baked pasta with turkey. Tomorrow night we're having wild rice turkey soup.

I've discovered something rather embarrassing about myself.

I'm delicate. Really delicate. I work hard to maintain a physical and mental equilibrium and just about anything can tip me over the edge.

If I'm physically uncomfortable for any amount of time I'm liable to throw up. I'm pretty sure that's why running 5ks makes me feel so ill. My body isn't used to it and doesn't like it. As a side note, this is also the reaction I had the first few times my optometrist put contacts in my eyes when I was just a young thing. He had to numb my eyes before I could have contacts in them without needing to hold the barf bucket. Needles, bad smells, icky sights (e.g., mold, broken bones, blood) all set me to dry heaving.

I think I may be even more emotionally delicate than I am physically delicate.

I'm pretty sure everybody knew but me. It's embarrassing enough to be delicate. It's even more embarrassing to not know you're delicate. All this time I've been wandering around pretending to be a strong sort of person

I've been finding my life particularly overwhelming of late, with no apparent reason. Easy things have become hard and hard things are impossible. I had a brief verbal scuffle with the Ma earlier today over the issue of not having quite enough soup and it resulted in some bad feelings on both sides. Over soup. Later, I nearly started crying in the middle of thigh work during my workout. It was so hard and awful and I didn't want to do it anymore.

I've known for several months that I'm a delicate sort of person. Knowing isn't helping me handle my delicate nature any more effectively than I did before. It's frustrating.

Struggle.

I recently received a very small package from the Little Brother--the best thing that's happened to me in the past few weeks. I'm not allowed to open the package for about another month. I don't mind. It makes me smile just to see it sitting on my desk, waiting. My tiny package is a small piece of the Little Brother. I love having even that small bit of him around.

Some Reasons Why

This is what I did this morning. Can you spot me? Apparently they occasionally sneak pictures and post them on social networking sites for all the world to see. Fabulous Anna and I have been rather faithful as of late. Don't be too impressed. At the end of class with our bodies sinking into the carpet (why do they want us to sink into the carpet when we finish? because our exhausted bodies aren't worth anything else?), Anna told me she was definitely getting less flexible and I told her it was consistent because I was sure I was less fit. With my right cheek and half my nose squished by the floor and my achy muscles crying all over, I briefly considered spending the next few weeks (or the next few forevers) being as committed to not going as I have been to going. Bleh.

I've spent somewhere between 8 and 10 hours today working on my master's thesis. I've been breaking only for essential things. Like lunch. And dinner. I'm *this close* to being done. Less time than I've put in today ought to finish it up, but I have no desire to work on it anymore. Ever.

These are some reasons why saddling up and getting 'er done is worth it:

• After I finish I won't have to work on it again. Ever. Just like I want.
• No more tuition payments.
• It will be the end of time wasted because of my thesis. So often of late I haven't allowed myself to do things because I ought to have been working on my thesis, but I had no desire to work on my thesis, so instead I would do nothing at all.
• After I finish, I can refer to myself as Master Meg. I'm thinking of having a nametag made up. Maybe with a Marvelous thrown in for good measure?
• I won't have to spend my days on the computer working and my evenings and weekends on the computer schooling. I sort of detest my computer.
• It's November and November is Nanowrimo. I've told myself that as long as I have thesis work to do I can't do any Nanowrimo-ing, which means I am currently about 7,000 words behind.
• I've given myself permission to buy a new pair of boots in celebration after I've finished this thing up. Anything under $200 is fair game. A slightly ridiculous amount since my shoes are more often clearance $10 buys than anything else. Or maybe I'll buy two pairs of boots. And a scarf. And maybe some gloves.

All good reasons. Off I go to do some more thesis-ing. I promise I'm not kind of crying about it.