It needs a name...Carla? La Tigra? I'll work on it.

msrp: $1069.
Actual Cost: 80 Hours of surprisingly therapeutic landscaping

First and foremost, behold!  The Cannondale Caad 8 6 Tiagra, a very decent road bike and now the most valuable thing that I own, having beaten out my MacBook.

Today I was listening to Sufjan Stevens and pondering about weeding as a sort of existential allegory for life.  By any measure, weeding is an utterly futile exercise.  Nearly before you're done weeding, new weeds have already begun to grow.  This can become a bit daunting, but if everybody weeds just a bit every day, then there would be no weeds in the world.  Then of course you have to consider the moral relativity of weeding, since a weed is just a plant you don't happen to want where it's growing.  Some weeds are the offspring of plants from just a dozen yards away, where they were planted and where they are wanted and where other plants were being removed as weeds.  Even if you hate them, you do have to appreciate the resilience and determination.  I found a little plant that was growing through a stick and rather successfully splitting it in two.

Banana Muffins,  a delicious last resort

One of the most interesting things I found as I was sitting out in the parking lot waiting for Dave, the bikeshop owner who i've been doing all this for, that after several hours of weeding today, when I saw a couple weeds growing up through the cement I had this very innate compulsion to pull them out.

So i'm pretty stoked about the new bike and I can't wait to take it out.  I just realized, to my chagrin, that I only have one bike lock, so it looks like my other bike will be living on the balcony for a while.

So life is great.  I finally went grocery shopping.  You know it's been too long when your only option for breakfast food is banana muffins with an egg borrowed from your roommate.

White Collar Worker

I got the job at the MTC! I finally got a hold of them after a couple days of phone tag. So that's pretty exciting. This is going to be the first, legitimate, non-restaurant job i've had in my life.

In other news, i got my adademic plan from the biology department, and it looks like i'll be able to graduate in fall of 2013, which isn't bad at all. My two tests yesterday went well. I think i'll be able to make it through the end of the semester without getting lazy and giving up. I just have a couple little tests and then Finals, and then it's summer. I'm pretty much ecstatic.

So things are still going well, life is good.

Cantabrigian

Recently I've had a shift from doing nothing to being extremely busy. This has resulted in an absolute lack of blog posting, first because i had nothing to write, and then because i didn't have time to write. I'm sure this has passed unnoticed, since i don't think my reader pool is too deep.

These days, I've been spending my time in a small corner of the music library at harvard. That sounds like the beginning of a really good story. In fact, I've just been standing over a scanner mindlessly scanning book after book on assyriology, which is the study of ancient mesopotamia. Duh.

As i've been doing this, i've been listening to a lot of This American Life, around 6 hours a day. All this has put me in the mood for story telling which is unfortunate, because there just aren't many interesting stories to tell about scanning books from 9 to 5.

In contrast to the monotony of scanning, I've been riding my bike to and from harvard with Logan. I haven't fallen yet, although no less than once per day I barely escape what seems like would definitely be certain death. The bike is fixed gear, which aside from all the lightness and simplicity that Logan loves, has the side effect of not really being able to stop. You can't even stop peddling. Both of those are things i would usually do to cope with impending death, and lacking these, i find that my only option is to keep going. Today on the way home, a car pulled in front of logan without warning. Logan was a good 10 feet a head of me, and he's a bit better at this whole thing, so he managed to stop behind the car, which was taking up all of the car lane and most of the bike lane. The car for whatever reason, stopped. I sped through the little gap the car had left and got past it, the whole time squeezing the hand brake, which was super; it didn't stop me of course, but it did add a great squealing noise that made the whole thing that much more dramatic.

This story may be reflecting an unwarranted amount of skill on my part, shooting through this tiny gap while Logan got bogged up in traffic. The truth is, had that tiny space not been there, I would have run into the car, or vice versa, and for that matter, the 'tiny space' was probably less tiny and more spacious than my memory would suggest. Nevertheless, the whole thing was pretty exciting.

Actually, as I think about it, the experience feels surprisingly similar to snowboarding, especially since it is literally freezing cold outside.

You would never guess how physically exhausting scanning books all day long is, but it really is one of the more tiring jobs I've done, but I can't complain, I'm making $10 an hour, which from where I am in life seems like a lot of money for performing menial labor, while listening to This American Life.