12:00am: The thought crosses my mind that I should probably go to bed.
12:30am: Yeah, I really ought to.
1:00am: At some point.
1:30am: Bed.

3:30am: Alarm! Mutter something; ignore.
3:45am: Snooze button.
3:50am: Snooze button.
3:55am: Snooze button.
4:01am: Rocket out of bed; arrive at computer several minutes later, hunt for...
4:47am: ...people! Yay, Harish!
5:22am: Emails, emails, emails, shove clothing into backpack, kiss sleeping parents goodbye, fly out the door, and...
5:55am: ...hit the road, deliriously happy to be heading towards more edumacation things! and blasting one of my mom's CDs from the radio as pink threads begin to peek through the pitch black. You're gonna hear electric music / solid walls of sou-owwnd

Flash forward: 10:20am; having crossed back over into EST, I'm driving through South Bend to meet Pascal Calarco in person for the first time, thumb pinning a bluetooth headset to my head; it seems like that particular experiment didn't pan out, as the point of trying a bluetooth headset was to see if I could jam my phone's audio source into my ear canal enough that I could understand speech without mashing the earpiece (or, if it's noisy, speakerphone) against my skull with one hand. Resolve to try another pair; also decide that at some point I actually need to measure the frequency profiles of various types of background noise to mathematically corroborate why certain environments are particularly crap for hearing; car-rumblings obscure the only frequencies of speech that I can hear. It's why I scrunch into strange postures in the backseat of cars so I can lipread people in the front through side and rear view mirrors, and why I suddenly grow quiet in motor vehicles when it is dark.

Sometime around 11am: TOUCHDOWN JESUS!
Shortly thereafter: Hi, Pascal!

A wonderful day follows wherein The Mel completely preaches to the choir on open source stuff, and gets a much better gauge on how TOS might come into Notre Dame; my fingers are crossed for a POSSE here if follow-up goes well. It is topped off by dinner with the Calarco family, where I compare favorite PBS shows (a side effect of living with a kindergartener) with Pascal's  kids. Arthur and Wordgirl are popular, though they like Dora the Explorer way more than I do.

Driving to Michigan City with a giant moon hanging in my rearview mirror and the sky flapping in the wind, dripping Kool-aid into the trees so that they redden for the fall. Trying to transcribe in my mind the piano for the piece "She's Got A Way" by Billy Joel, playing it over and over to hear the thin points where his voice breaks free from its wistful restraint, and how the keyboard comes up to wrap around the rawness. I think I have it now; I wish I wasn't so shy about singing so that I could record myself playing, or that I could play cello properly and have its voice stand in for mine. It's hard for me to even listen to myself speak (let alone sing) sometimes; I keep imagining the nasal deaf accent that I can't hear pervading it, invisible to me but grating to everybody else. Dumb flight of fancy; I should corroborate something before I actually avoid it. But I still flinch and cringe in front of cameras and microphones, regardless. Something I'm training myself out of, like similar reactions to physical contact. Hard. At least I have a lot of energy to spend on it, and people to help push me now (which is still new and wonderful, the notion of somebody catching me before I do).

Music helps; reading helps. Walking down the mental track of someone else who's not perpetually straining at the leash helps me strain less on mine. Writing helps; I can lay out my own mental tracks to follow back into a settling-down. Long journeys help, although I can't tell if I'm running-to or running-from (and in the absence of indications towards either, choose to believe I'm simply running).

Tonight I play travel agent for FUDCon, then travel agent for myself, then sleep a couple hours 'till the morning hits.