Wow. My office is clean. And it wasn't just me procrastinating, because I'm feeling pretty motivated to study for my exams these days (fear of failure will do that to you). But it was pretty clear that finishing the penultimate draft of my dissertation prospectus would be easier if I could actually find the article I needed to cite, so I finally filed everything away in its proper place. My number one goal for the summer is to catch my bibliographic software up to my file cabinet, cross-reference everything, but in the meantime, I'm just happy to see the floor of my office again.

If only my mind was so uncluttered.

My wife just bought me a $43 bottle of sherry. If that price tag doesn't say "I love you," I don't know what does. Of course, she's deliberately pushing me down the slippery slope of potential alcoholism, too, but I guess we're not supposed to worry about that right now.

Nice things people have done for me lately:

1) loaned me movies so I have something to do during those interminable hours of insomnia
2) bought me sherry
3) arranged to have meals provided for me the week before my first Ph.D. exam
4) bought me picture books as a reward for all my hard work
5) other stuff I'm too tired to remember but really appreciate

Plus, even though no one is answering the phone, I think I should get some sort of karmic credit for trying to make a phone call in Hindi.

It's kind of like a gambling addiction, isn't it? Even though you know the payout will never, ever cover the investment you put in to game, you keep playing. Why do addicts do this? More importantly, why do *I* do it?

Today I had a quite serious conversation with a colleague who shall rename nameless in order to protect her (although, since I only talk to 3 people in Illinois, your odds of guessing the right name are pretty good) about possibly developing a drinking problem. We're both suffering from insomnia, in slightly different forms, and both of us have been looking for ways to cure this problem. In my case, I've even starting seeing a therapist (NEWSFLASH: Therapy *causes* insomnia). At any rate, I said that I'd been thinking about having a drink in the evenings because it might help me sleep, but then I was afraid that if I had one drink today, then surely by tomorrow I would need two, and by the weekend, I'd need three. Well, we can see where that would lead. And my colleague said in all seriousness that she'd been having the same conversation with herself. A drink would help, but we can't take one, because we're both afraid of what seems like an inevitable drinking problem.

Now, I ask you--if you're sitting around in the evening thinking, "God, I need a drink!" and you DON'T EVEN DRINK, shouldn't this be taken as a sign of some sort? Shouldn't you stop doing whatever it is you've been doing to push you to contemplate the benefits of alcoholism in the first place?