Prepoceros

As much as I moan and complain about the piddly aggravations in my relatively cushy life, I have to say that 2005 has been pretty damn good to me. Compared to the mess that was 2004, 2005 kicked serious annual ass.

In my last “Year in Review,” I christened 2005 “A Year of Transition and Transformation,” which turned out to be more or less spot-on. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that in the space of twelve months I’ve become “a whole new person” or some crap like that, but it has certainly been the most changing-est year of my short life**.

Since I spent most of the time “on leave” from Mudd and/or half-ass enrolled at HBU, there hasn’t been much book-learning. Life-lessons, on the other hand, have been coming hard and fast, the most important such revelation being that *there is a world outside of Harvey Mudd College*. There’s even a world outside of math and physics, believe it or not—a world in which people work and eat and shop and travel and do things besides homework. A world in which stress and sleep dep are not badges of honor, but rather reasons to seek medical help. A world in which I want to shove hot pokers through my eyes fewer days than not.

I want to make very clear that I’m not dissing Mudd, or math, or Mudders, or physicists, or sleep-deprived people. You know I love you guys, and I have tons of respect for Mudd and everyone who sticks it out. It’s just not the life for me—a fact which I was at best unsure of and at worst completely oblivious to at the end of 2004. I used to be terrified of the real world, but now…eh, it’s not so bad.

This year has been all about work, friends, teaching, blogging, puppies, living on my own, and frappuccinos. Oh god, the frappuccinos. Every time I start to get sick of all the frozen calories, they come out with a new flavor. Sneaky bastards.

So, for your digestive* pleasure, I will now proceed to recite the major events of the past year (in historical present tense, for added intensity!) in list form.

January: I have recently taken a leave of absence from Mudd and am living with my parents. Before I start looking for a part-time job to supplement my tutoring, I call the tutoring folks to see if they have any work for me. Lo and behold, there’s an open part-time position in the office. Huzzah! I begin work on MLK Day (one year ago today). I attend my first wedding as a grown-up. I discover the yumminess that is Project Runway. I sign a lease on an apartment in town, five minutes from the office (instead of over an hour with traffic). I begin teaching my first SAT class, though I was never trained as a teacher.

February: I move into my apartment. TVMax doesn’t hook up my internet connection for five. long. weeks. I still love my new job to bits. My brother is accepted to Vanderbilt.

March: I meet Wendy—what’s this now? A real-life, honest-to-goodness classicist? Be still my heart. My washing machine floods the kitchen. I try to cook things.

April: I try out for Jeopardy! but don’t make the cut. Sigh. Wait for me, Alex…I’ll make it to Culver City someday. I file a tax return for the first time. I register for fall semester at Mudd. I see Andre Agassi play in person. The “spring test season” makes it hella busy at work. Millie, the Jack Russell Terrier whose perkiness knows no bounds, spends her first weekend at Camp Natalie.

May: Coworkers discover my blog and create their own blog ‘rating’ it. Theirs goes dead after two weeks. Turns out blogging is harder than it looks. *smirk* Also, could I be any busier? Still loving it, though. When my car dies as I’m leaving to teach a class, I borrow Toni’s truck and immediately drive it into a pole. Expensive, but comedy gold. My brother graduates from high school.

June: I lose my cell phone for a couple days, and it is INCONVENIENT. I take my first vacation from work, during which I accompany my brother’s Quiz Bowl team to the national championship in Chicago as a pseudo-adviser, then visit my cousin at his hotel internship in Minneapolis. This is my first ever trip to the Midwest; I cross four more states (IL, WI, MN, and IA) off the to-visit list. I unplug my television. It’s been 200 days since then, and I’ve never once regretted it. I start taking Zoloft***.

July: I purchase my very own domain (yes, this one right here), but don’t do much with it for a while. I turn 21. Half-Blood Prince. Mood swings like whoa, especially as I consider whether or not to return to Mudd in the fall.

August: I make up my mind to stay in Houston, though not without a metric shit-ton of angst. I spend a lot of time lying on the floor, trying to block out the world. I add a little Wellbutrin to the mix. I take on yet another part-time job as a question writer. My brother goes off to college. Katrina sends a good portion of New Orleans our way.

September: Prepoceros is officially up and running. I enroll as a transient student at HBU just for the heck of it. That 8am Modern China class? Kicking my ass. Rita comes roaring in to an anticlimax, with the threat of wind causing more damage (snarled traffic, stranded motorists, gas shortages, looting) than the wind itself. Made for some damn fun blogging, though.

October: The mood swings are still going strong. I still suck at school. I can’t stand the Wellbutrin, so I stop taking it*^. I begin teaching LSAT, again with no real training. As a result, my first class sucks balls^.

November: My first attempt at NaNoWriMo tanks almost immediately. Prop 2: marriage now unquestionably exclusive; Texas 1, homos 0. A bummer, but not unexpected. I realize that the thought of going back to California in the spring upsets me, so I apply to UH. As a Classics major. GRE.

December: Puppy! Samson comes home and does a superb job of being adorable and cuddly. I am accepted to UH and officially transfer out of Mudd—this should be shocking and disconcerting, as it goes against any plan I’ve ever had for my life, but I’m surprisingly ok with it, which leads me to believe I made the right decision. Time will tell. Sam gets sick, then better again. Sam meets Fez: instant BFFs. New Year’s Eve at the beach.

So there you have it: transition, transformation, the whole shebang. I’m happy with where I am right now. I’m glad to be in Houston, I like my job, I love my friends, I can’t get enough of my puppy, and I’m satisfied with the direction my life is heading. Things don’t look nearly as dismal as they did twelve months ago.

It’s a little odd, though, that both last year and the year before I’ve made Major Life Changes™ near the end of the year. It’s probably just coincidence, but who knows where I’ll find myself in November 2006? A convent? Jail? Canada?

As for the coming year, I haven’t made any specific resolutions yet, but I feel the theme should be something along the lines of 2006: Settling In and Taking Control. This is a different life than I’ve been accustomed to: living in Houston as a full-time student with a part-time job, majoring in humanities, for chrissakes. I’ve had a while to play around and experiment with things in 2005 when most of my life was in flux, but now that I’m heading in a solid direction, it’s time for me to grab this new life of mine by the horns and make it truly my own. Focus. Commitment. Courage.

Okay, maybe ‘courage’ is a bit over-the-top, but you get the idea. My life. Mine mine mine. Time to start getting things done around here.

Bring it, ‘06.

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* As in Reader’s Digest, silly. Don’t eat Prepoceros.

** This does not include 1984 (or 1983, depending on how you count it), in which I went from not-existing to existing. Hard to beat that.

*** Did I mention that I’d been mopey, disconnected, anxious, and unmotivated for the better part of the year, and that I’d been in therapy for several weeks at this point? I don’t remember exactly when I started going, and I’m too lazy to look it up. I’ve quit now—both the therapy and the medication—but I don’t remember when that happened, either. October, I guess.

*^ I neglected to inform my psychiatrist of this fact, however, so now I have lots of extra pills. It would be so wasteful to throw them all away…. Kidding. Sort of.

^ I’m teaching my second LSAT class right now, and it’s actually going rather well. Phew! Still feel bad about the first one, though. [Edit: I should not blame this on my lack of training—it makes it sound like work doesn’t give two shits about me or their students. It was mostly my inexperience and lack of familiarity with the lesson book, and I did agree to teach the class, after all.]

Really, I was. But, instead, I spent the better part of the day fixing up my new laptop* and setting everything up just like I like it. I’ve had my desktop since the summer before I started college (2002), so there’s a whole mess of things on there that isn’t particularly well-organized. I am a digital packrat**. When I opened this one up and saw the shiny new almost-blank desktop, I decided to make a fresh start. The only thing I copied over was My Documents, and even that has been quarantined; I’m selectively moving things into the new My Documents as I use them.

It’s amazing how few programs and files I actually use on a daily basis. There’s AIM, Firefox, Notepad***, occasionally Word or Excel, … and that’s about it*^.

I spend most of my computer-time on the interweb, of course, where I’m also trying to whittle the information and tools I need down to something more manageable. My old list of bookmarks was the biggest problem: long, unwieldy, disorganized, full of crap I’ve never looked at more than once but saved anyway because it might come in handy someday, somewhere. No more! Now ‘Bookmarks’ is only for sites I pull up several times a day (cnn.com, m-w.com, bloglines.com). I remember the URLs, but I have them bookmarked because Ctrl+click is faster and easier than opening a new tab and typing in the address. For things I don’t need every day but want to remember, I use del.icio.us tags: tags are a more intuitive way to organize things than folders, I think, and the searchability keeps irrelevant items from getting in the way of whatever it is I’m looking for. Yummy yummy.

Part of the reason this has taken me all day (besides having to go back through and tag every site I can think of) is that I’ve been reminded of just how many ‘productivity‘ sites there are out there, and just how addicted to them I can get. Efficiency, lifehacks, timemaps…*drools*. Funny how reading about “next actions” and “do it now” for hours on end translates into precisely no actual productivity.

Hmmm. This “excuse for not posting” has now become at least half as long as the post I’d originally intended to write and thus probably hasn’t allowed me to get to bed much earlier, which was really the goal in throwing up a cop-out post. Also, I imagine an uber-detailed description of the several hours I’ve spent fiddling with my computer is not the most riveting of topics: if you’ve made it this far, congratulations. I done ate up all the cookies, though—’pologies.

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* Did I tell you I got a new laptop? Because I did. It was a Christmas present, or at least the first thousand dollars of it was.

** I am also a non-digital packrat, but that’s beside the point.

*** I love text files. I also love lists. I have a folder called “Notepad files” full of every sort of list you can imagine: shopping lists (grocery, clothing, household, toys, etc.), to-do lists (GTD-style), wishlists, reading lists, and of course a ‘Lists’ list.

*^ I used to use Eudora to read my email, but it suddenly stopped working back in September, and I never could figure out why. Since then I’ve just been SSH-ing into the server at Mudd and reading it there, which has been a minor annoyance but not too bad. Now that I’ve got a do-over, I’ve installed Thunderbird instead. I’ll only be using that to archive the old mail that’s been piling up, though; as of today, my Gmail address is my primary personal account. Woo mail-that-works!

If, on returning from a nighttime walk, you notice that your apartment is unreasonably warm, especially considering the 50-degree “chill” outside, you should not chalk this up to “residual daytime heat” and spend the next three hours wondering why you can’t sleep. It’s much easier to just turn off the oven.

[Corollary: If you tend toward this sort of absent-mindedness, don’t leave the fresh-baked cookies on top of the stove. They’ll be hard as rocks come morning.]

I am twenty-one-and-one-half years old today. That’s all the news there is. Go me.

Oh, except that earlier tonight one drug dealer shot another at a Texaco down the road a little ways from where I live. I drove past the crime scene on my way to Toni’s to watch Project Runway. Very exciting with the flashy lights and the yellow tape and the news vans. I bet my parents saw that on the ten o’clock news and were less than thrilled.

I stayed* up way too late last night and am now falling asleep sitting up. I can’t believe school starts in six days.

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* Is this really how you spell ’stayed’? It looks so wrong, but I can’t think of a better way to spell it. Good gravy I’m incoherent. Sleeeeeeep.

Sorry for all the angst yesterday. It’s just a phase. You’re thinking I should go write some awful poetry and get over it. You’re probably right.

Anyway, the real tragedy is that my lease expires at the end of February, and I recently got a cheery note from the rental company informing me that they’ll be upping my rate by *more than $100*. What’s more, the minimum lease period is now twelve months instead of six. Grrrr.

It’s all Katrina’s fault. The displacement of so many New Orleanians has caused a huge rental housing shortage here in Houston. I’ve checked a few other complexes in the area, and their rates have all shot up as well. Of course I’m sorry that all those people lost their homes and their families and their everything, but goshdarnit that’s a lot of money.

I’ll probably stay put and suck up the extra $1500 or so for the next year. I can try to rationalize the cost by thinking of all the money I’m saving in move-out fees, move-in fees, pet deposits, cleaning bills…but really I’m just plain lazy.

I hate being lazy. As I look around my mess of an apartment and down my half-ass to-do list, I hate it more and more. Look, now I’m lazy AND whiny. Aren’t I just a barrel of laughs.

Speaking of which, here’s a cute little thingamajig. It selects three random Garfield panels and splices them together. Approximately as funny as ordinary Garfield, which is to say, worth a chuckle if you’re really really bored. (via BoingBoing)

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P.S. It’s National De-Lurking Week. Just like National Coming Out Day, but different. So say hi. Or say whatever you want, really. My comment board is your soapbox.

As an incentive, I’ve even added a ‘Recent Comments’ plugin to the sidebar. This is something I’ve been meaning to do since September, but it took De-Lurking Week to get me off my ass. (Added bonus: if you want to leave a sneaky secret comment on a post from way back when, you can’t! You can leave one, I mean, but it won’t be secret. You’ll just have to email me instead.)

P.P.S. That last post was my hundredth on the new site. Woo! Though there’s still a lot of tweaking to be done (new banner, different font, cleaner sidebar, blogroll, tags instead of categories), I finally feel like I’ve settled in here.

Have you ever been smacked in the face by your own mortality? You know, when the philosophical idea of death and leaving-things-behind and non-existence suddenly becomes SO REAL and you feel like you’re in the worst nightmare you’ve ever had but can’t wake up? When it’s so terrible and unfathomably gut-wrenching that you can’t even cry?

Despair doesn’t even begin to describe it. There is a chasm of difference between knowing that you’re going to die and KNOWING that you’re going to die, that all that stands between you and utter annihiliation is this body, this fragile, aging, disease-prone lump of flesh. And you realize that time is passing, and that there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, and you feel powerless and alone. There is no solution; all you can do is distract yourself somehow with day-to-day trivia. You wish you could forget. You wish there were a God out there you could talk to and be comforted by. You wish you were religious; if it doesn’t matter in the end, why *not* be blissfully ignorant?

Has this ever happened to you every couple weeks or so for several months? Because it’s fucking depressing. Crushing, spirit-shattering, heavy, ugly, horrible, unbearable. There is no worse feeling—how could there be? At least I have a puppy now; although he’ll never understand, he can at least be warm and cuddly and distracting. I only wish he were bigger than me and could hold me when I’m scared.

I’m going to bed now. The sooner I fall asleep, the sooner I can forget and go back to actually living like a normal person. God, sometimes I wish I were shallow. I’d been having a pretty good day, but all of a sudden my whole evening’s been ruined. I hope I didn’t ruin yours as well, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

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P.S. I feel like I should reassure the world that I really am a happy person. Really. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. It’s just every now and then that I remember the tragedy that is life and fall into utter despair. The feeling disappears by the time I wake up, after which I can go about my life again. I promise I’m okay.

What’s up with me and link-driven mini-posts these days? Someday I’ll actually start writing original content again, I swear.

Anyway, The Sneeze has a post up that’s inspired a slew of comments way hilariouser than anything I could come up with in the next two minutes. Enjoy.

I need to be getting myself to bed so I can be at UH at 8:45 tomorrow morning to “field test” the new GRE. I probably seem crazy for *volunteering* to take a 3-hour 4-hour exam early on a Saturday morning, but what can I say? I heart standardized tests. Also, I imagine the $115 will help assuage the pain. That’s like 35 frappuccinos.

What’s this now? Jon Stewart hosting the Academy Awards? Ooooh, count me in.

Like any good little overeducated liberal, I have a smartypants-crush on JonJon. I wish he would follow me around and narrate a commentary track for my life. (NB: My birthday is coming up in a mere six months and six days. People with strings, start pulling.) I’ve heard (read) that the show (the interview part, at least) has gone downhill a wee bit since they switched to the new set, but I haven’t seen it in at least six months and am trying to preserve the happy memories so lalalalalala I can’t hear you.

Anyway, the Oscars. I haven’t watched them in a while, but I might have to make an exception this year and invite myself onto someone-with-a-TV’s couch. The possibility of extreme snarkiness is just too good to pass up.

You know, I used to think the world was pretty awesome. But today I discovered this, which blows ‘awesome’ right out of the water. It’s a newspaper. A newspaper in a dead language. Gaahhhhhh it makes me so happy I want to chew all my fingers off.

On a related note (i.e., linked from the above site), check this shit out. Wunderground was already my favorite weather site, but now they’re my FAVORITE favorite. Click the ‘Select Language’ link in the sidebar to see all the nifty languages they support. Tagalog. Afrikaans. Cherokee. Omg make out with me.

P.S. In other nerdy news, the discovery of the largest known prime number was announced today. Now that they’ve got banks and banks of computers churning away at these numbers for years at a time, prime-hunting has become a little less of a mathematical endeavor than a computer-sciencey, algorithmical* one. Still, I join one of the professors involved in being “super excited.”

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*I have a way with words.

After three phone calls, four or five hours of my time, two visits to UH, and fifteen dollars, I finally got the stop removed from my enrollment. Yeehaw!

It turns out that my college courses *didn’t* exempt me from the requirement, as I hadn’t taken anything that fit their description of “government, history, or politics.” Whatever. I ended up having to take the ACCUPLACER, which wasn’t too bad. It was untimed, and I got through it in a little over an hour, most of which was spent on the essay*. It’s a computer adaptive test, so I got my scores back as soon as I finished. Luckily I managed to eke out a passing score, just barely.

I hurried online to enroll as soon as I got back to the office**. Here are the classes I’m in right now, though this may change if I figure out I need to satisfy particular requirements or if my prereqs don’t transfer.

CLAS3374       Women in the Ancient World
ENGL4300       Intro to the Study of Language
LATN1302       Elementary Latin II
MATH3338       Probability
PHIL1321       Intro to Logic

Five classes, five different departments. Two of the classes actually apply to my major. One open spot magically appeared in the Classics course this morning, so of course I snatched it up. The Latin course is *probably* the level I should be at, but I haven’t heard back about placement testing yet. I’ve already taken an Intro to Language class (at Pitzer), but, though I did read the entire textbook over the first two or three weeks of the semester, I didn’t actually go to class much, and when I did, I didn’t get the feeling that it was all that rigorous. Apparently the 4300 makes this one a “senior level” class, which means…something. Maybe it’s harder? I don’t know; we didn’t have that sort of numbering system at Claremont.

The positive side of knowing very little about the graduation requirements is that I’m looking forward to taking every one of these classes. The negative side is that I might be missing things that I’ll have to make up later. We’ll see whether this schedule holds up. I feel like I should have some sort of advisor, but I’m not sure how to get one. Maybe that’s something they’ll cover at this “orientation” they said they were going to mail me more info about. I think it’s early next week; maybe I should call somebody about that. Sorry, thinking out loud. Well, quietly, except for the tippy-typing noises, which don’t seem to bother Sammy as much as they’d bother me if I were trying to sleep. Ok really. Going to bed now.

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* The student guide I linked above says the essay is scored either from 1–6 or 1–4. I got an 8. I have no idea what that means. Neither did the lady who ran the testing center. Hey, as long as it gets that stop removed, I’m not asking any questions.

** I spent almost 5 hours at the office today, but I had so many non-office things to do that I never actually “clocked in” or did any office-work. I heart flexibility—best job ever.