I hate that I had to miss this.

We all know what the big hate in my life right now is: the thesis. I have maybe an hour's worth of work today in terms of revisions and then I have to edit my abstact because I was informed last night via email that I have no idea how to write an abstract, so please rewrite immediately.

Anyway, I'm sad because I've spent the last week week editing this damn thing and missed not only the entire ten days of the D.C. film festival but also Jane Seymour's opening reception for her art show in Alexandria, Va.

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, does D.C. and I had to miss it!

I hate wishing I had TV sometimes.

I really don't miss TV very much, mainly because I watch four to six movies a week, work a lot, and have this damn thesis to do (T-minus six days).

But sometimes you just get a Saturday afternoon craving for Golden Girls.


I think it's because I saw Betty White on that damn PetMeds commercial while I was at the gym.

I hate laziness.

Especially my own.

But I can say this: I am halfway through the last set of revisions of my thesis. It's due on May 4, by 5 p.m. Before then I need to edit the second half, write the abstract, give copies to my whole committee, make last minute adjustments, print it twice, gather signatures, and hand it in at the library.

This seems doable. And for the first time ever, I felt a twinge of pride this afternoon as I rewrote the introduction for the 11th time in the past six months. I may despise my topic and resent my department for stifling my two original thesis ideas, but that only makes the final product feel like more of an accomplishment. It takes genuine effort and several hundred dollars' worth of coffee (even instant is expensive if you drink enough of it) to write 70 pages on a topic you couldn't care less about.

I hate being a jerk.

Do you know how hard it is to keep from being passive aggressive in this blog?

I hate heat.

Have I mentioned this before? I don't like to be in a temperature warmer than 72 degrees Fahrenheit if I can help it. Which means that today, which was a balmy 70 degrees, is the last day I will be comfortable outside in D.C. until the first week of October.

I'm already dreading tomorrow.

I hate wakefulness.

I hate waking up 2 hours before I need to and being unable to go back to sleep.

I hate coming home.

I hate coming home from a semi-vacation. I got home from Miami around 2 p.m. today and spent the afternoon catching up on emails and blogs and looking over my thesis adviser's revisions on the first 42 pages of my thesis. As things stand right now, in terms of returned email and thesis revisions, life is a little scary.

The thesis is due in less than two weeks. I'm going to use some leave both this week and next to get this damn thing done. I basically only have the conclusion to edit, ahem, I mean rewrite, and then need to go back and do general edits throughout the whole document.

Keep your fingers crossed!

I hate Amy Winehouse.

OK, I'll admit that I hate / love Amy Winehouse. I hate that she's a big ol' drunk who just don't care, but I also love that she is a HOT MESS. She's replaced Lily Allen as Britain's Sweetheart, at least in my head (I can't speak for the Brits, because I don't get them).

I also love how unpredictable this gal is. She's like a volcano, and we're all waiting for Mt. St. Amy to blow any second now.

But still, I love her voice, and any one who has anything produced by Mark Ronson is at the top of my list right now. Even if she rhymes "addicted" with "a dick did." Sorry, Amy. There's no way I'm letting you get away with that one.

I hate exhaustion.

I hate how exhausted I am by Wednesday every week.

I need to pack for Miami, but all I've done since I got home from work is knit a little and listen to the Essex Green and eat a cookie.

I hate my dinner.

I ate a third of a box of croutons for dinner. Am I lazy or poor? You decide.

I hate my thesis. Part 9,384,509,384,530,985

I'm not the only one. Tyler hates it. Kelly hates it. My parents hate it. My thesis committee hates it. My co-workers at my last several jobs, both full-time and part-time, over the past two years hate it. Anyone who talks to me at least once every six months hates it. The, ahem, third deadline is on the horizon, less than two weeks away, and so I've sitting on my bed for about an hour, doing what I do best and most: Reading blogs that are entirely unrelated to my thesis ... which is about blogs.

So now, in the interest of prolonging my thesis pain, I present a list of things I like to do instead of writing my thesis, and I hope that in two weeks this list can be retitled as things I like to do and never feel guilty about:

1) Dancing alone in my apartment. This is really No. 1. Always and forever. Sorry, neighbors.
2) Furniture window-shopping online -- because I'm way too busy writing my thesis to actually go to the store and purchase furniture. Besides, if I actually purchased any furniture for my apartment, there would be no room left to dance.
3) Reading novels that have nothing to do with blogs or Victorian literature.
4) Cooking, a hobby I adopted several months before a looming thesis deadline (the second of three).
5) Knitting, the hobby I pick up for a week at a time, then abandon for two months. Or two years.
6) Walking home from work, a journey that offers two music stores, six, count them, six bookstores, two bridges, a zoo and Filene's Basement.
7) Buying coffee instead of drinking instant. Paying tuition requires money and since I am too overwhelmed by my thesis efforts to focus properly on my part-time freelance gig, a girl must make sacrifices.
8) Running. I will be fresh out of excuses not to do this six times a week, once May 4th rolls around. I don't really like it, but I like my calf muscles. And I am vain.
9) Searching for jobs in Germany that I will likely never apply for. Because I am still homesick, 11 years later.
10) Seeing friends. I use my thesis as an excuse not to go out all the time, and I always regret it.

This is obviously a list of things I like, rather than a list of things I hate, but I've been prevented from doing almost all of these things as much as I'd like while I've been working on my thesis. So, in effect, I hate the absence of all these things.

....

And if anyone is interested in an unpaid freelance editing job, please comment! I will gladly email you my 75-page document and you can track changes in Word as much as you like!

I hate having to de-friend people on Facebook.

When you find out, through the grapevine, as they say, that the person with whom you spent the last five months in a relationship was planning to break up with you for weeks but avoided it because you were in a horrible emotional state (you know, because your father had CANCER), and instead led you on and perhaps insulted and treated you like shit in order for you to want the relationship to finally end, it's not very hard to delete them from your online network as well as your off-line one. But it seems somewhat appropriate (and deliciously immature) to de-friend them online first before you call them to explain what a sick fuck they are in real life.

And then you write a blog about it, because it's 3:45 in the morning and you're sobering up, livid, and happy that, soon, you'll have them out of your fucking life.

This is all hypothetical, of course.

I hate the blue screen of death.

I hate when I set aside a whole afternoon to edit the last chapter of my thesis, get myself all set up with coffee, food, paper, pens, etc. at the coffee shop, and then get the blue screen of death from my temperamental laptop.

My computer only likes to do this when the circumstances are particularly dire, for instance when I have two weeks until my thesis is due or when I'm working at a conference and am required to submit my work via email.



Anyway, now I'm home and hopped up on coffee and completely unmotivated to work on anything.

I hate bars with a twenty-dollar minimum.

So I got home from work yesterday and immediately got into bed because I was tired. I didn't anticipate falling asleep, even though I've taken a nap every afternoon this week. Granted, I started these naps around five o'clock - not six o'clock, which I KNEW was a bad idea. But I was watching Deadwood on my laptop and something about those cussin' cowboys put me right to sleep.

And then I woke up at 10:30. I slept for four hours. I woke up when a friend called to invite me to meet him at a bar, which is the type of invitation I don't turn down, even though I know it's a really stupid decision to go out after sleeping through dinner.

I got to the bar and started a tab and the bald, tattooed lady bartender told me there was a twenty-dollar minimum to open a tab. Thus, my third poor choice of the night, because after my first two five-dollar gin and tonics, which weren't very good to begin with, I thought, "Fuuuuck, I'm drunk but I have to get two more drinks!" Then I got two whiskey sours that came in tiny little cups that everyone thought were cute. And then I could barely stand up.

But joke's on you, lady bartender! Apparently someone else bought my last whiskey sour and my tab came to sixteen dollars! I don't get it, but I like it! Ha!

I hate smoking neighbors.

Neighbor, if you're going to insist on chainsmoking for every hour you spend awake in your apartment (including the last four), I'm going to have to continue playing the Feist video on Tyler's blog as loud as my laptop will let it.

I hate injury.

Just when my supposed dislocated shoulder pain had faded into nothing, I go to a bar, sit on a barstool for four hours, and leave with shooting pains up and down my right forearm. That was Thursday night. It's Saturday morning and there is a bright blue vein pulsing visibly in my arm where the pain is. What does this mean?!

I think it means I shouldn't go back to Rocket Bar. Once I've been injured physically there, and once I humiliated myself in front of co-workers. No more Rocket Bar for Megan.

I hate tourists.

I hate when it's 80 degrees on April 2 and you're wearing a dress and some fancy under-dress underwear combination that's only got a precarious hold on your body and really uncomfortable shoes, and your heels are bleeding, and you're trying to read a book while standing on the Metro and clutching an enormous bag full of dirty Tupperware that's been piling up in your office drawer for two weeks, and you notice a family of tourists staring at you.

And when you slowly look up from your book, the mom pipes up, "So what's it like to live in the nation's capital?"

And all you really want to do is ask one of her kids if she'd be so kind as to crouch down and reattach the band-aid on your heel that is flapping in the humid subway breeze, but instead you say, "It's expensive."




Seriously, what did they want me to say? "Every day I wake up thinking about President Lincoln, and then I thank God that I live in a city where I can buy a quarter-pound of grapes for $12."

I hate people who blog about television.

And not just because I'm too cheap to get cable and live in a building that can't access even local channels. I hate it because blogging about TV is boring.

I hate people who don't recognize their age.

I hate people in their mid-twenties who insist on going on Spring Break.