I'm supposed to be on a yearbook marathon, but the packing thing has been much too tempting. All the cool kids are doing it. Also, I'm irritable because I can't remember my fonts and my Photoshop keyboard shortcuts. Now, to pick a font for something, I've been opening up Word and scrolling through its font selection pulldown menu, wherein each font is shown in itself. Thank goodness for this glitzy new feature in Word 2000— I had to use it to remember the name of Caslon Antique. It's precisely what's used in the Les Misérables logo. This amnesia breeds a real, live, nostalgia-tinged bitterness.

Anyway, the packing's partly out of necessity, because Suzie so kindly volunteered her car and herself to help me move stuff tomorrow. We made an abortive attempt earlier this evening; said abortion was due to my knowing neither the house's whereabouts nor its street address. All I know is the vague directional sense that I got from biking over with my landlord, Rob Levitsky, from a different street than the one closest to Stanford because it had been the last in a series of houses we'd looked at, and that it's on Melville and called "Dire Wolf." Needless to say, this did not reap us very good results. After about 45 minutes, we gave up and returned to campus. Tomorrow, 10am, heralds a second attempt. I ought to call Rob, first, and get an address.

Perhaps one of the reasons why I haven't updated lately, despite the blessed done-ness with academic work, is that there's simply too much going on to note and analyze and dissect and discuss. Every room I walk into now holds an odd dichotomy: in one corner, the desk and bookcase of somebody already gone are stark, clean, and abandoned, while in the opposite corner the entire inventory of his roommate's worldly possessions are strewn across every possible surface. Bare mattresses, I think, are the worst.

Speaking of mattresses, I recently realized that mine has sucked in relation to everyone else's. This is how the revelation occurred: as per the usual procrastinatory nature, I was sitting next room and thinking out loud about acquiring furniture for the summer. Bring one for minimizing possessions and, thus, things to schlep (Yiddish word! A handful of them have been in my vocabulary since the sixth grade, thanks to our wonderful Bel Canto director Mrs. Wions, but perhaps so much so that I've only recently become conscious of it) around, I decided that I'd ask Hiten, Chad, Cho, and Kiel for their cow futon, which they'd gotten for free from the guys in the Penthaus. Ben decided, quite vocally, that it was a terrible idea because [1] it was way too small and [2] it was not "comfortable" in the usual sense of the word. First, his conception of small and the critical point at which something can no longer support a human being is, understandably, much different than mine. Second, I'd crashed on it for an hourlong nap the night before, and it didn't feel one iota worse than the Branner-issued mattress. The latter reason was more difficult for him to stomach, but I was positive of it.

To resolve this once and for all, we walked next door and climbed up onto my bed, whereupon Ben immediately stated, "Wow, Michelle. You've totally been shafted the entire year!" It was then that I tested out Betsy's and Roopa's mattresses, a process which even included lifting up the sides of their sheets and looking at the actual thing... and realized that while mine was, indeed, a sorry piece of plastic-encased foam, theirs actually had springs and stuffing and all of those usual mattressy-type things. Boo and hiss! Then again, I can fall asleep anywhere rather comfortably, so it didn't really matter. I'm still going to try to sleep on that futon this summer; in the unexpected case that it gets really bad, I'll probably just move the foam thing onto the ground.

Currently being ingested: a can of coke from Jon and a bowl of dry granola that had been deserted in the lounge two days ago while we were taping for the CD accompaniment to the book. Back to it now. The book, not the food. Well, maybe the food, too.