"Thingama Jigsaw Puzzled"

I got to have Indian food last night. I haven't had Indian food since I was in London a few years back, and man did I miss the stuff.

You have to understand, curry is one of my favorite dishes. I've had several types of curry--two different Indian curries (the one I had last night was called Chicken Vindaloo, and damn was it spicy), Thai curry, Chinese curry, and my mom's version of curry. They're all different, and I love them all.

I've never been able to adequately explain my love for the stuff. By all rights, I should hate curry--it's spicy, most recipies have lots of vegetables and the like in them, and it's just...foreign, y'know? A major part of my basic personality is my intrinsic distrust of anything new and different. Curry ought to fit that exactly. Yet I love the stuff. It's weird.

Ah well. Suffice to say, I had some damn spicy curry last night, and loved it. If only the Indian restaurant weren't so expensive, I could eat there more often.

I've been pretty lazy since I finished my paper yesterday morning. I spent most of yesterday afternoon asleep on the couch, waking up occasionally to hear the wind howling outside around my poorly-insulated apartment building. Then I went to class and out to dinner with said class, then back to ye ol' apartment. Nothing particularly exciting, I guess.

I did have an interesting conversation with my professor, though. I was mentioning that I'd noticed most graduate students are very serious, almost somber and dour people. They rarely smile, and they never talk about anything that isn't history-related. Now mind you, I love history, too, and I want to spend the rest of my life doing it, but I also have other interests, and I still smile and laugh a lot. I think some of our grad students have forgotten how to laugh. Dr. Lewis thought it had to do with the fact that they're all studying American history, because she thought that would make her pretty boring, too.

But Dr. Lewis pointed out something that Ev had noticed when he and I first had a similar conversation a few months ago--I'm a goofy son of a bitch (those weren't the words she used, but that was the gist). I grin at the drop of a hat, I laugh at life, and I generally don't let a little thing like reality stand in my way of having a good time. I am, in short, goofy, and have a heart that won't allow me to be consumed by the weight of my major. Thus, there's little danger of me becoming like the other grad students in my field.

Now admittedly, as Ev and I first noticed, this might give them more focus than I have. It might give them some sort of "edge" over me professionally. But I'll have a life to look back on which is full of wonderful moments and laughter. They'll have dust and musty rooms full of forgotten words. Admittedly, I'll have the rooms full of dust and forgotten words, too, but I'll have more.

And I'll still be laughing when they're dead on the inside at 35.

~chaos cricket

Song of the Moment: Bruce Springsteen, "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out"