in the heat of attack it's the passion that kills--the victory is yours alone

Yes, I just quoted 'Burning Heart' from Survivor. If I'm supposed to feel ashamed of that, there are many other things that I should feel more ashamed of--and you should feel bad for being so uptight and snotty!

When I'm stressed, I apparently revert to all of the classic songs of my youth, and by 'youth' I mean 'college'. So, rather than listening to more recent stuff from the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Death Cab (although they're infrequently interspersed in the current playlist), I'm riding high on Guster, James, Collective Soul, Goo Goo Dolls, Bush, Counting Crows, and 'Solsbury Hill' by Peter Gabriel, which emblazoned itself on my consciousness after being used as the theme song for a particularly moving end-of-day recap video during the 2002 Winter Olympics. I promptly downloaded it and listened to it for ten hours straight while trying to avoid failing my classes by doing a marathon in Meyer Library; I can't recall if that's the time that Peter J. happened upon my sleeping form (those chairs were so comfortable!) and stole my shoes, but it may well have been. Ah, those were the days. I would way prefer to sleep in Meyer Library right now--some of the best naps I've had were in Meyer, and my bed in Dublin is rock-hard and v. uncomfortable.

Anyway, the presentation today went really well (or 'swimmingly', which Kim made fun of me for using in my blog), but for some reason I can't relax. I could have gone home a couple of hours ago, but I was feeling the obsessive-compulsive need to clean up my life. So, I recycled the ten half-full bottles of water that had accumulated on my desk, organised all of my emails, and restructured my file-saving system. All of this was actually stuff I needed to do, since I've lost track of the ten million other things that I need to take care of from my emails over the past couple of days, and I needed to do some file-storing maintenance since I had about 100 documents sitting on my desktop, all named frighteningly-similar things, and my lack of sleep has made me incapable of finding things with the weird efficiency that I normally demonstrate. I guess I just don't want to stop working tonight because I know that I have to keep going tomorrow, and I'm reaching the point where if I shut down, I'll be shut down for days, rather than hours. Also, I want to do all of this crap now so that I can avoid some work over the weekend and pack/go shopping.

Despite all of that, I'm pretty chipper--and I booked a full-day spa package at the Sheraton in Cape Town for the day that I will be in South Africa alone. I'm justifying the expense as research into whether South African masseuses provide the same type of happy ending to facials as the ones in India do. I'll be sure to report back either way so that you can benefit from my worldly knowledge. Now, though, I'm going to go home, possibly catch the end of the Argentina match or the Serbia/Cote d'Ivoire game, and then go to bed. Goodnight!