What’s my motivation?

After turning in my master’s project a little more than a week ago, I’ve been completely useless. It seems I’ve contracted a disease usually reserved for college-bound high school seniors. I have severe Senioritis with a mild case of spring fever and an inkling of homesickness.

Today, the weather in New York is absolutely perfect, which is not conducive to writing one of my last stories of grad school. I actually dragged myself to the computer lab in the hopes that I could get some work done. In fact, I wrote an outline and typed up some interview notes, but an unforeseen power outage deleted an hour of (half-hearted) work, so I’ve returned home and now I’m procrastinating some more by writing this long overdue blog entry.

Homesickness doesn’t feel much like a sickness. It’s more of a dull and determined ache, and one I haven’t felt for a while. But there’s something about spring that makes me miss D.C. It’s easy to romanticize a city from a couple hundred miles away. After screaming, “it’s a dive” to the Lauriol Plaza patrons sipping margaritas on the patio last summer, I kind of wish I was sitting there right now, indulging in an overly alcoholic Mexican beverage. I hear that the cherry blossoms are starting to bloom, and I know I’m going to miss the Japanese festival where Scooby and I get drunk off Sapporo and feed our mochi addiction under the pretenses of learning about his heritage. I want to hike along the Potomac and ride in my mother’s convertible with the top down; I want to play with my niece and go shopping with my sister (even though I don’t have money to spend).

At the moment, home is where the heart is, which means my heart is not in the feature story I’m feebly attempting to write.

UPDATE: I’ve changed my mind about mochi. After writing about it, I started to crave it, which made me google it (why? Because I’m procrastinating!) and I read this on Wikipedia:

“Mochi is very sticky and somewhat tricky to eat. After each new year, it is reported in the Japanese media how many people die from choking on mochi. The victims are usually elderly. Because it is so sticky, it is difficult to dislodge via the Heimlich maneuver. In the Japanese comedy film Tampopo, a house vacuum is used to suck it out. (Some lifesaving experts say that a vacuum cleaner is actually efficient for stuck mochi.)”

Since I seem to have re-contracted my swallowing difficulties, mochi now seems like a completely unappetizing food. Unfortunately, however, I still miss everything else. Of course, if Lauriol Plaza is shut down for a health code violation or something, please let me know!