bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with homework

I have a blue belt! I probably should be happier about this than I am, but frankly, I don't feel like it's a huge accomplishment... especially since last year they bumped us up two kyu per test, and this year only one. If I'd been good enough to get blue with stripe this test, I'd be pleased with myself (one girl did, from WPI). I'd have to be pretty goddamn lame not to go up one kyu in four months when I had the best attendance record in the class, especially since according to the useless handouts Shihan hands out to intimidate you, blue belt is still on the "one kyu per two months" track. And the thing I am really still abysmally bad at is kumite. And since kumite is pretty much the measure of how good you actually are in karate (as Shihan likes to remind us constantly), it's not much consolation to be able to do everything else. Like... if I had issues memorizing kata, but could actually fight, I think I'd feel somewhat better about my overall abilities than I do having it be the other way around. And between WPI chick going up two levels today, and the fact that Tony got green at the end of last year, I really, really want to improve enough to go for green at the end of spring semester. But since I have absolutely *no* natural ability for fighting (being by nature both slow and highly timid), and not being able to wear my glasses makes everything out of focus and messes with my depth perception, as well as just psychologically slowing me down further (not being able to see makes me REALLY, really disoriented. I am an extremely visual person; I can't even "close your eyes and take a deep breath" to calm down when I'm nervous. Deep breaths help but the moment I close my eyes I feel unmoored and start getting really uncomfortable... it's weird). But frankly I'm not sure it'd be worth it to invest in contacts unless I had some other sort of indication that if I could see, I wouldn't still just be hopelessly bad. So yeah... I'm feeling like I made the minimum requirements today, big freakin' deal, and I have a SHIT TON of work to do if I even have a hope of progressing beyond the minimal level. And even then, I don't really know if I'll be able to pull it off.

For the moment, though, I need to stop feeling inadequate and do homework. I have two papers to write in exactly one week. AAAAAHHHHHHHHH. This probably means I also need to stop spending so much time poking around the AVEN boards, even though they are lovely and interesting and I feel like so much less of a freak there and they just make the world make SENSE. (AVEN is the Asexual Visibility and Awareness Network, btw. This be my official coming out of the closet statement, for any of you that were unaware of my asexyness (or have been misled by any of my lovesick ramblings, but you know what they say about exceptions and rules).)

I also got accepted to Heartless Bitches International but those forums (fora?) tend to have fewer discussions that are long long long and therefore any attempt to hang out there as a newbie is backreading like whoa forever. So no real time for that yet.

...I think I need a drink.

Current Mood: bleh
Current Location: the ocho
Current Music: none, but something smells like burning.

Happy Repeal Day!

Only problem with Repeal Day is that's it's smack in the middle of finals crunch time. Friday night and I'm (guess what I'm about to say! No really, guess!) doing French homework. I'm indulging in one Jack & diet but other than that, the party is just me an a bowl of pomegranate seeds. Lame. (And if these back-asswards African Francophone countries don't develop some women's rights soon, so I don't have to keep writing paper after paper on their abject stupidity that I'm not supposed to criticize because it's not my culture, I'm going to fly to Algeria and pick off their entire male population, I swear.)

In keeping with this semester's theme of "The more homework I have to do in the shorter a space of time, the more crap happens to set me back," my computer got like twelve viruses yesterday. >.< I think we fixed them, though. But still. Brilliant timing, Oscar. I had homework due at 5 o'clock today that I didn't even get to *start* until 11 am.

Assorted well-meaning people keep worrying at me about the emotional effects of the crash. I had trouble sleeping for a couple of days. Now I'm stressed about homework, angry, depressed, and tired a lot, which seems to be my response to just about everything. Possibly because I am already starting to view the accident not as an isolated event but as part of the stream of things that happen to me and how I deal with them. It fits into patterns--patterns of my psychological responses to outside events, patterns of the Universal Laws of Irony, patterns of family dynamics. At that point, my life was this accident waiting to happen, and it did--the moment I stopped seeing it coming, as always.

It might be more comforting to see it as an isolated incident, but nothing is isolated. Everything that happens, happens as a result of hundreds of things leading up to it. When you can pick out those things, it starts to look inevitable. The future, on the other hand, is always entirely uncertain, because the more certain you are of something happening or not happening, the more likely you are to be wrong. (Maybe not you. But certainly me.)

...Thing is, miraculous escaping unscathed aside, most of the patterns this event falls into are depressing as hell. My brain tends to deal with depressing thoughts about the external world by shutting it out and inducing excessive napping. I do not feel this to be post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ly enough to request homework extensions over it, it just means I'm even less enthusiastic about my papers than usual. Which is pretty unenthusiastic. Combine this with (a) I've been so stressed for so long I think that's just what being alive feels like, and (b) the academic pressure has reached critical mass, where I can't fathom that I really have to do all of this in such a short time, and I have almost no ability to actually focus.

I really want to go take another nap.

HALP

So, if I can make it work, I really would like to do the five-week two-credit study abroad internship sumthing or other in Quebec. And I would like those two credits to go towards finishing my French minor so I can just worry about my major and maybe taking something fun senior year, because, as flattering as it is that Ferly thinks I can major in French too, she also probably thinks I'm getting through this semester okay, considering she still made me do my presentation today, and I still have to have the first five pages of my paper in on Wednesday, and is otherwise not being a fraction as nice about the whole almost-dying-and-not-having-my-school-stuff-on-me-all-vacation thing as Tapply. And I do NOT want my next semester to be as busy as this one (which I'd have to do to take National Imagination, which is required for the major--it'd be a fifth course), and I do NOT want to be taking TWO capstone courses fall semester next year (even if I only took three classes that semester instead of four), and I do not want to deal with all the other fussy little major requirements that are on the website but Ferly is not telling me about. And mostly I just don't want to go through this semester again. I just want to go to Quebec. And have a life. I think I'm going to take the suggestion to major as a compliment and apply my recently hard-earned lesson of Slow Down And Chill The Fuck Out.

And at some point I will have to deal with dealing with this whole car/driving situation over again from scratch, and seeing if maybe this time when I say "OH HAI WILL SOME GROWNUP SORT OF PERSON DRIVE WITH ME FROM JERSEY TO WORCESTER? I THINK THAT WOULD MAKE ME FEEL BETTER CONSIDERING MY TOTAL LACK OF LONG-DISTANCE HIGH-SPEED INTERSTATE EXPERIENCE, AND MY KIND OF LIMITED DRIVING EXPERIENCE IN GENERAL" maybe someone will. Because apparently leaving me to fuck around and figure it out on my own is, like, rilly dangerous. (Which *I*, actually, knew already, which is why I *asked.* Several times. But I will only sit around begging to be babied for so long.) So... yeah. I should save some time and effort for dealing with that.

Belt test in a week. Not half so nervous as I am for regular class tomorrow, because judo with half my skull bruised under my hair will not be fun. My legs are, at the moment, green, but they are legs, they can take it.

I will be so glad when this semester is over.

Hm, title prompt. Having a bit of trouble coming up with something at the moment, since my brain's been working in French all day. I have a half-hour Powerpoint/oral presentation on Monday, on immigration from the French Antilles to France since the sixties. Started it this morning. Had to cancel my plans for the evening but somehow managed to bang out the entire first draft tonight. Tomorrow, will see if I can actually present it so it fits all the requirements. You know you're busy when your "study break" is to try and do the homework for a different class.

Frankly, I don't feel all that stressed or upset, for once. Partly because I'm not feeling so sick anymore. Partly because I seem to have emotionally let go of my friends a little, and it no longer upsets me that I'm not seeing them. I wouldn't be good company these days, anyway. I just feel bad for my hausmates; they still have to see me and listen to me bitch when things are loud and dirty.

I do not like being stuck for writing. At all. I know something will come if I let things bounce off each other in my brain enough, but the time before I actually hit on something is always frustrating. There's an impatient part of my brain that goes "You say you're a writer, WRITE SOMETHING already!" and a paranoid part that's afraid I won't come up with something this time.

I may have to allow myself an episode of Battlestar Galactica or something and then sleep on it. Most of my better story ideas have come to me while I'm trying to sleep and can't.

Yes, that's a Will & Grace quote from like a million years ago, when I watched Will & Grace.

At any rate, today was a good day. The story I wrote for Tapply's class, which I had generally been feeling Not Very Happy with, got workshopped and went over quite well. There are definitely issues in the story, which definitely got noticed, but I also got a lot of shiny compliments (and Tapply seemed to really like it), and since I am an insecure little attention whore, this quite made my afternoon.

In other news, I have a car, as of two days ago (I just have to go back to Jersey and get it). I was expecting to have to shell out quite a chunk of money to cover at part of the cost, but this afternoon my mother told me that the deal on the car was actually cheap enough that she's covering the whole thing. So that's an extra several hundred dollars I actually don't have to spend. That's the sort of good new you don't get every day.

It also leaves me with a more flexible budget for buying GIRL SCOUT COOKIES. Apparently it is that time of year again. I fucking love Girl Scout Cookies.

Fellow Clarkies, this is your cue to laugh at me: I had my first Moe's burrito today. Yes, I am a junior... yes, that means I have lived in Worcester for slightly upward of two years without ever going to Moe's... okay, that's enough, you can stop laughing now.

Oh, and karate club finally freaking started. Yay karate! Also, yay not being the least experienced person in the class by several years! It was nice to labor under the delusion that I actually know karate, if only for an hour and a half. (From now on, though: If I leave class and I am not sweaty and in pain, something is wrong.) I do seem to have lost my paperwork for the next belt level, though, but this is easy enough to fix.

"Girl, Interrupted" makes me happy. It makes me feel all normal an' stuff. On the other hand, being flat-out flailing-and-raving psycho just looks so liberating sometimes.