It's thirteen days now, till the trip to the Southwest. I'm excited. It also means i have so much stuff to finish before then, especially my research paper and greg's anniversary present. I've been working on it almost every day, and it's about half-way done, but i have to make out a schedule so i'll have everything i need for it in time. A friend of mine observed that whatever greg does is going to have to be pretty damned special to merit all the effort that i've put into this thing--which is a lot. But it's like I'm trying not to put my hopes too high. I know he'll try, of course, but in the unfortunate event that it turns out to be, shall we say, less than stellar, I don't want to have had a thousand romantic notions and then find myself utterly disappointed. Those aren't fun times. And it's not like i expect him to do something along the lines of what I am, because I just love doing things like this, and I'm perfectly willing to spend a long time with it, and he's, well, a guy. At the same time, someone tried to tell me that this is just the way things are, that men aren't any good at this whole romantic thing, and that's such crap. This person's basic message was: you better just deal with it, because it doesn't get any better. Hm, then how is it that I see a lot of the guys around me doing really cool things? Example: on scott and marianne's anniversary, scott decorated her locker with balloons and ribbons and this gigantic heartshaped collage he had made of the two of them. Now, this is scott, the big class clown who delights in making dumb jokes and laughing like a monkey with his little chimp friend, and it was seriously the sweetest thing i had ever seen him do. So i don't believe that this is a general fault of the gender. I can't help it if i want something that required imagination or inspiration or just something beyond what can be purchased in a store! See, now I'm getting all worked up. And i really need to go start my homework, so this rant is officially over.