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.

Getting out of bed

Getting out of bed in the morning has taken to posing something of a problem for me (er, moreso than usual). I can't decide how much of this is January/February-standard SAD and how much of it is the general "where is my life going"-type angst that I've been feeling for the past year. Admittedly, part of the problem this morning is that it's gray and raining (boo, January, it's supposed to be snowing now, not raining!), and rain is guaranteed to keep me in bed as long as possible.

So by this point it's 1pm. This morning I have managed the following:
- finally pull my butt out of bed around 10:45-11
- eat a bowl of oatmeal (breakfast is a new thing I'm trying as of this morning, so we'll see how that goes)
- drink my coffee
- check my email, facebook and forum
- sit and contemplate blogging for a while before deciding to attempt to get a post out

I was going to blog last night because I was in sort of the right mood (i.e., contemplative or whatever), but then it occurred to me that I had pot de creme in the fridge (leftover from Brownie's birthday on Thursday) and an unwatched Vampire Diaries on the DVR. I went for the easier option. I didn't even feel guilty about it, which I figure is a good step for me. But then, Saturday night at midnight shouldn't be a time to feel guilty about wanting to relax.

At this point I'm trying to convince myself to go to the gym. I really should: the running is good for me mentally and emotionally (well, and physically, but I never seem to think about that as much this time of year - it's all about trying to keep my mood at a supportable level).

It's idiotic the things I contemplate when I'm sitting here at 1 o'clock on a Sunday and trying desperately to get myself to do something about which I might actually feel good. I've spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what BPAL I have that is appropriate for a miserably cold and rainy winter day. I have a few that work for miserably cold and rainy autumn and spring days, but for some reason none of those seem right for winter, as though winter were to need something with that extra level of "well, it really should be snowing but it's not." In the grand scheme of things, this entire line of thinking is insane, and I know this, and I also know that chances are extremely high that I'll throw on something woodsy and be done with it. And none of this matters.

What I probably should do is get my ass off the futon, go to the gym so I can run and lift weights for a while, come home, shower, and work on the novel for a while. I had a lengthy conversation on Friday night which ended at 3 and kept me up until after 5 thinking about how guilt can be used as a subtle, awful weapon in a relationship. Nothing about the conversation itself need be said, as it's not my current issues that were being explored, meaning that this isn't a space for any of that to be discussed, but it did occur to me at some point as I was lying in bed reeling from some nasty memories which I wish would just die already that a problem with the novel in current form is that I was nowhere near hitting exactly how guilt can be used as a mechanism of control, but that this is something I can fix in revisions. Therefore I think I ought to be revising while all of this is fresh in my head (or, really, sort of fresh - I've been turning this over and over and over for about a day and a half now so that everything's shifted a few times by now).

I think I am going to go to the gym. It's probably the best thing I can do for the blahs at the moment.