i'm writing my second nanowrimo novel, which means that i have few words to spare. so i guess it isn't the best time to try to start blogging again but i guess i owe my devoted readership an update. (i assume if you are reading this, given the lack of updates, you are devoted indeed!)

so i moved to minneapolis a couple of months ago. the past two months have been an exercise in degeneracy. i am typically a binge-obsessive person, but even by those standards this is ridiculous. i have been here for two months and i have met essentially no one outside of the math department (where by "essentially," i mean "".) so the vast majority of my time is spent doing a few things: math, which i think i have worked on more this semester than any (which isn't very much, really), bridge, and talking to eva on the phone.

for those of you who are pretty casual followers, eva is my girlfriend of now 13 months. she's fricking awesome and i'm not just saying that because she's reading this. (and i'm not just saying that because she's reading this.) maybe we will get married and have kids some day. maybe i shouldn't jinx things.

long-distance relationships are hard, of course. i don't think i'm at my best over the phone; i'm best in lengthy emotional epistles with word choice you can't help but smile at. the weird thing is that even though she's more of a phone person than i am i think the constant phone contact makes things easier for me more than it does for her. because it is hard to talk to her on the phone without being reminded of who she is, which makes the whole thing a lot more tangible for me.

the lack of actual social interaction with people probably also helps my end of the LDR. because i have no actual comparisons regarding what it would be like to actually talk to people, the phone doesn't seem flimsy in comparison to anything. so i'm actually sailing through pretty conflict-free. which is nice.

with the social aspects of my being sort of subducted, i'm turning into a pure quantitative fiend. bridge is a fantastic game and i can see myself getting better even though i occasionally make awful plays when tired or careless. it's really a game of concentration and i have the concentration to spare. i've always been good at concentrating when i have no other option. i think that's why i test so well: when i'm taking a test, there are by design generally no distractions, nothing which could conceivably be multitasked. so i have little choice but to turn my entire brain to the task at hand, and once you do that with a multiple choice question the wrong answers fade away.

really i have little to complain about except that my mother might be going crazy.

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