Do you ever think about what if, like, Sylvia Plath had a blog? Would it be cool or would it be like, ugh, I have such bad PMS today?

Lately I guess I don't know what I want to do, in the immediate. Or it's that I am incapable of juggling projects. I don't want things to TOUCH, just like I always wanted my food divided into separate experiences: corn first, mashed potatoes with butter next, salty ham last. Not together. One, then the next.

Summer is a time for exercise, though suddenly the exercise has to be done first thing because these are sauna days. It is a time for fruit and vegetables, though I'm skipping the Farmer's Market to go running in a minute. It is a time for translating German, something true to form I have to do right before class in the morning.

Hypothetically, those side dishes still leave plenty of time, but once afternoon hits I just sit on the porch, eat wasabi peanuts, and listen to books on my iPod. The trouble being, of course, that Audible.com and other books-on-tape companies don't exactly cater to the studying-for-phD exams crowd. The Queen of America goes to Washington City? No. So I am listening, again, to Drop City.

The Exercising, Translating German, Resisting the Heat portion and the Writing A Book portion and the Doing Exams portion of my life are all supposed to be happening simultaneously, yet like the food on my plate I don't want them to touch. I want to do one of them at a time. Slowly.

I have gotten out of the habit of trusting myself to be able to get things done. My self-confidence is an itsy-witsy little julienned slip of a translucent thing.

It's a good chance to practice stoicism, dealing with discomfort, patience.