six a.m., day after christmas, i throw some clothes on in the dark

Phew, I just managed to pull out a song with the number six in it; this is the opening line to 'Brick' by Ben Folds Five, which I used to be obsessed with. I spent far too much time listening to this song, which is extremely depressing--or rather, the song is depressing, and it's also depressing that I listened to it so much during a now-distant period of my life. But, that's all in the past, happily. I've moved on to other ridiculously-depressing songs, but I still listen to this one occasionally and get a twinge of nostalgia.

I had class tonight, which was v. satisfying. I stupidly volunteered to bring in my second story a week earlier than I was supposed to, but I wanted to avoid having it commented upon during the last class period, because six people had signed up to bring stories for the last class, which seemed to be a bit much. Oh, well, now I have something to do over Thanksgiving--I'm having dinner w/some friends on Thanksgiving day, but I have no plans for Thanksgiving weekend, and I'm sure that I'll be through with the second season of 'House' by then, which will leave me with nothing to do but stare at the wall and wonder what will happen with my life [blame my pessimism on the fact that I decided to listen to 'Brick' after thinking of the lyric]. Now I just need to come up with a story! If only that were the easy part...

I'm trying to decide whether to sign up for another class. The Stanford continuing studies catalog is out now, and registration for winter quarter is at the end of this month. However, I don't know if I would get much out of another creative writing class. I'm tempted to take an actual literature class; I'm tossing around the idea again of applying to English grad school, and I'm sure that my application would be improved by a demonstrated and sincere interest in literature. Then again, grad school seems like an exorbitantly-expensive five-to-seven year 'vacation' from the real world that will come to a crashing halt when I have to scramble to find a tenure-track position, or risk teaching basic composition to idiots at a community college in North Dakota. Ugh. So, we'll see. But, I may take a six-month online course on English novels through UC-Berkeley Extension; it would have the advantage of putting me into contact w/a bona fide professor, and I think that I could learn a lot just from critiquing classic works. We shall see, we shall see. Now I should go to bed, though, so that I can go to work tomorrow. The weekend is already here! That means twenty episodes of 'House' and some Easy Mac. Yay.