It's ten to midnight on a Sunday. I've been playing MarioKart Wii in hopes of unlocking new characters and eventually getting to the point where I can play the Mirror Mode. I'm starving so I've turned on the oven to heat up some pizza rolls, which I'm not entirely convinced are food, to fuel the rest of my evening.

The gym today was a total bust. You know how people always say that you may not want to go to the gym, but you'll never regret having gone? Today I totally did. I had some sort of nervous pent-up toxic energy that I figured would be awesome for running off on the treadmill (too friggin' cold and rainy to run outside today), but I managed to run the toxic energy off in something like five minutes and was dying for the last ten minutes on the treadmill (that I spent 15 minutes only on the treadmill tells me that I was tired), followed by another 12 or so on the bike, followed by a weak and pathetic attempt to lift weights, all of which ended in me realizing that I was fairly sure my heartrate had been too high for a while and that I was feeling faint and getting dizzy, so I decided to go home rather than risk passing out. On the way home I stopped into the bookstore to get the one book that I didn't receive a desk copy of and stopped again to run into Walgreens to pick up a protein bar. By the end of both trips I was weak and shaky and really ready to sit back down in my car and pant for a moment before driving again. Many hours later I'm not as tired as I was, but I have no idea WTF was going on with me today. I've had bad workouts in the past, but nothing like that.

If I have one working braincell that still has the desire to finish this stupid Ph.D., I will email my advisor this week. Preferably tomorrow. I need to schedule a meeting with her so we can figure this shit out. I'd love to say I've done something about the diss since the last time I talked to her, but mostly I haven't. Okay, really I haven't at all. I suck. Twenty year old me wouldn't have this problem - twenty year old me would be done by now, or very close to done and about ready to start collecting signatures, because twenty year old me was tenacious and worked on school stuff from eyes opening in the morning until eyes closing at night. Twenty year old me would have fought harder for one of the topics she really wanted to work on, rather than letting my advisors decide what they thought I should be doing and then weakly agreeing with them, hoping that my capitulation would help it all end quicker.

Nearly thirty year old me feels much smarter and more experienced than twenty year old me ever was or could have been, but nearly thirty year old me has zero drive to get anything done. I still have some sort of ambition, I think, however unfocused - I'd like, when near death, to be able to look at my life and say "this was important; I am proud to have done this and proud of how it made a difference for others." I wish the goal of this ambition were rather more in focus - I feel like if it were then I'd have some sort of path to follow, some sort of (however vague) script to run my life along again. When I was still planning on the academic path, I had a script. Diverging from that path feels like the right thing for me to do, but it does leave me scriptless, and I wonder how much of my current lack of motivation to do anything is because I don't feel like there's a reason to do it.

All of this, I presume as well, is exactly why I have such a hard time getting out of bed in the morning (to wrap back around to where I was 11 hours ago). I'm going to hit the vitamin D supplements hard for a while and see if that helps with anything - maybe killing some of the SAD will help me feel a bit more able to accomplish something, I hope.