Prepoceros

This morning, about fifteen minutes before my alarm was set to go off, I awoke to the sound of beeping. Not a steady, insistent beeping, but a random string of beeps, as if someone were standing in the kitchen, trying to set my timer.

I didn’t know what it was at first, so I lay in bed and listened, trying to decide if it was worth it to get up and investigate.

Beepbeep . . . beep . . . beep. Beepbeep-beep.

Silence.

Thirty seconds later: Beep . . . beep-beep . . . beep.

Well, it sounds a little like the microwave, I thought, but what would the microwave want to tell me that can’t wait ten minutes? (I was still groggy, you see.)

But the beeping was loud, and it wasn’t going to let me go back to sleep, so I stumbled into the kitchen. Sure enough, the microwave was flashing the message that there were zero seconds remaining, and that my food was ready. There was no food. It hadn’t actually turned itself on. Nevertheless, it was done. Do not ask where the food is. You need only know that it is ready. Watch your fingers—the plate might be hot.

So my microwave is possessed.

I’m not surprised, actually. I’ve had my eye on that rogue appliance since the day I moved in. That day, I noticed the screen was blank, so I pushed some buttons to try to get the time to come up. No go. I followed the cord to see if it was plugged in, and it led me to the outlet . . . inside a cabinet. Ok, we’re saving space. It was plugged in, but not working, so on a whim I unplugged it and tried the other plug-hole (there’s a better word for this, no?) on the outlet. The machine instantly turned itself on and started cooking at like power level 7 with 43 seconds left.

I pushed stop/clear, which did nothing. Start? Nothing. The number buttons? Nope. They didn’t even beep—the microwave was ignoring me completely. I opened the door, which finally stopped the phantom cooking (thank goodness), but when I closed it again the darn thing went right back to microwaving up a storm. Not knowing what else to do I jabbed at the buttons a while longer, and suddenly they all started to work. They beeped when I pressed them, and they performed the functions they were supposed to.

Ok then. I’ve only used the microwave once since then, and it behaved exactly as a non-possessed microwave should. I don’t know what was special about this morning that made it decide to act up. Perhaps it was bored.

In the future, though, I’d rather not be woken up at random hours just so some minor demon can heat up his spaghettios or severed heads or whatever. Anybody know a good exorcist?

Today has been a day of extremes. Some good things happened, some bad things happened, and overall I think it was more or less a wash. At least it wasn’t boring.

GOOD: I found one of my favorite shirts this morning as I was digging through the piles of clothes carpeting the bedroom floor. Bonus: it was clean.

BAD: As I was getting into my car, I realized I’d left my watch on the nightstand. I didn’t go back to get it because Sammy would’ve thought I was coming home, and I hate to disappoint him like that. I felt naked all day.

BAD: The Chick-Fil-A on campus was having problems with their credit card machine. Today was probably the first day all year I haven’t had cash on me. The line at the ATM was long, too—people like them some chick’n.

BAD: Caught up in the drama of lunch-getting, I completely forgot about a meeting I was planning to go to on writing internships for next semester. There’s another one tomorrow, but I’ll have to miss an hour of class for it.

BAD: It rained today. I knew it would, so I smartly wore pants that reached the ground (where the mud and puddles are), chose shoes with no traction, and left my umbrella at home.

GOOD: Lucky for me, it only sprinkled while I was walking to and from class. The minute I got in my car and drove off campus, though, it POURED.

GOOD: At work today, my boss asked me if I’d like this man (not Stephen Colbert (I wish), but the CEO he “shadows” in the first part) to buy me lunch next week. He and another upper-level guy will be in town, and apparently they want to visit with a couple of the little people. She actually asked me and two other tutors more senior than I, but they were both busy, so I’m in. Normally lunch dates with strangers (not that I have many of them) make me nervous, but I’m actually looking forward to this one.

BAD: A construction project that has been snarling traffic for more than a year on a major highway near the office was finally completed last week, and the road has gone from four lanes back to eight or nine. Imagine my surprise, then, when on my way to class I found traffic worse than I’ve ever seen it. I travelled one mile in 16 minutes—it would literally have been faster to walk. The cause? A car with a flat tire in the right lane. Seriously.

GOOD: Despite my getting there ten minutes late (see above) and spending the ten minutes after that sorting out issues with students who had not been shipped books and/or had been given misinformation about which classes they were supposed to attend, the class I taught tonight went wonderfully. If I count correctly, this is the tenth time I’ve taught this class (or some earlier version of it), and it gets better every time. Have I mentioned that I love teaching? Love it. It makes me feel all warm and giggly inside.

GOOD: Halfway home and hungry, I remembered, to my great delight, that I’d stashed a Chocolate Raspberry Explosion* in the fridge last night. This is perhaps the one benefit of being absent-minded—it’s easy to surprise myself.

BAD: It’s nearly 2:30 in the morning, and I’m not in bed. Self, I know it sucks that you get home late every night, but you need to quit doing this. Sleep is good. So is being able to wake up on time.

See? Up and down. My mood, on the other hand, has been surprisingly stable. Aside from a weekly-ish panic attack over the re-realization that I will someday die, I haven’t been feeling very emotional lately. Am I stressed? Of course, very much so. But I don’t feel overwhelmingly happy or overwhelmingly sad as often. I think a large part of this is that I’m so busy that I just don’t have time to sit around and mope. There’s always someplace I have to be, some work I need to be doing, something I should think through.

I hope once I finally finish moving (my move-out date at the old place is tomorrow) and get settled in here, things will calm down and I’ll have time for a few mindless pursuits again. It’s nice that my life is full and exciting, but all this “living in the real world” and “getting shit done” is wearing me out.

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* Chocolate mousse with raspberries in it and raspberry sauce on top. It cost a few cents more than my dinner, but I think I’m okay with that. You would be too if you tasted one of these—they’re phenomenal.

Please excuse the distracted jumping-around. I had lots of work to do tonight and only finished half of it. I think it’s because I was trying to work outside on a restaurant patio, and it was too cold to concentrate.

My apartment is a MESS. If my new furniture were to be delivered tomorrow, there would be no place to put it on account of all the bags of crap lying around.

Sam is apparently strongly pro-chaos. While I’m gone during the day, he’ll go into the open bags, pull out random things, and strew them across the floor in various conditions of chewed-upness. He has a particular fondness for shoes, cardboard, and anything with ink in it.

It seems all I do these days is drive back and forth across town. I usually only teach one lesson or class per day, but it’s usually in some crazy suburb out in BFE. Combine that with the fact that school, the office (I still drop in once or twice a week), and my apartment are all in different parts of town, and it adds up to a lot of time behind the wheel. On Sunday I drove about 150 miles.

The bad thing about driving so much is that it takes forEVER, and I can’t get much done in the meantime. I’ve been meaning to get an iPod so I can listen to podcasts while I drive, but so far I haven’t. I’m an impulsive sort of shopper, though—one of these days I’ll just up and buy it. If I were at all budget-conscious, I would probably notice that I shouldn’t buy an iPod and a roomful of furniture in the same month, but I’m going to spend that money (on the iPod) eventually, right?

The good thing about driving so much is that I can put good chunk of it on my expense report. Speaking of which, I should write one of those up and turn it in. I haven’t submitted an expense report since the beginning of the year, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d accumulated close to a thousand dollars’ worth of expenses (mostly mileage) since then. Work is gonna love me.

My mom brought me back a jar of Harry and David spinach artichoke dip from a trip to Colorado. I’ve eaten the whole thing in about two days. Mmm, I love me some spinach artichoke dip.

I had a dream last night that it was my birthday and someone threw a big surprise party for me in a mansion. All the movie stars in Hollywood were required to come—I think there was a law or something. Or I won a contest. All I remember is that I was just an ordinary person, and they were only there because they had to be. I remember being embarrassed that I didn’t know any of their names.

At the end of the night I looked in a mirror for the first time and saw that I was wearing a beautiful deep red full beaded skirt . . . paired with a black and blue lycra jogging top. Ugh. I wandered around the mansion by myself and found a pretty blue sweater in a heap of clothes on the floor. I couldn’t take it with me because it belonged to someone else, so I just sat and stared at it. I still kinda want that sweater, even though it was that shade of medium-blue that clashes with denim.

Man, I’m sleepy. Sleepy to the point of near-incoherence. Perhaps I’d be less sleepy if I stopped staying up so late.

A week past Spring Break, and I already need a vacation. Work and school and life are all happening at once, and there hasn’t been a moment in the last four or five days when I could sit still, clear my mind, and think. Not be rushing off somewhere, not be teaching, not be worrying about anything, just thinking.

I used to sit around and think all the time, which is how I’ve kept up my *amazing* habit of superproductivity, but now…it’s like I’ve forgotten how to let it all go and just think. To lose myself in something, anything. Television, even, I don’t care. I’ve gotten maybe 15 hours of sleep over the last three nights, and not for lack of trying.

I’m about 80% sure I have an ulcer. I’ve always had a healthy stomach, but for the last day or so it’s hurt like a mofo, in pretty much the exact way I would expect an ulcer to hurt. It feels as though someone has shot a hot arrow right through the center of my rib cage, then slingshot me in the same spot with a pebble. I need to go do some deep breathing or something.

This morning I proctored the first practice test for one of my new classes, starting at the kick-ass hour of 9:00 in the morning*. The superawesome surprise was that whoever called my students to remind them about their class sent half of them to the wrong hotel and told one girl not to bring her calculator. At about 9:15 my boss called to say that my other class (which had a substitute proctor, since my two classes were meeting at the same time) was locked out of their building**. I’m glad I wasn’t there, at least.

In my class there was a bit of chaos as the second half of the students started trickling in around 9:30 or 9:45, well after we’d started the test. I actually handled it pretty well, I think—everyone got to take the test (though for the late students, their sections had to be out of order), I explained to the student without a calculator her options for making up the test, and I talked to a parent in a totally responsible and not-scared way. (I’m usually pretty cowardly and tense when it comes to parent interaction.)

If this had been my first class, I know I would have flipped out. Not in a dramatic way—I would have been timid and nonconfrontational—but I would not have been able to deal with the situation with any confidence. *These* are the skills I’ve learned in my year as a teacher—it’s such a good feeling to know that there’s something practical in life I *can* handle and even do well.

Ok. This is not helping with the whole “I need to breathe” thing. I just got in from moving most of the non-furniture things from my old apartment. I’d meant to sort through it all and only move the stuff I wanted to keep, but shit happened, and I never got around to it. This place is a sea of clothes-and-crap-stuffed trash bags. I need to eat, prep new material for *another* new class I’m teaching, deal with some other things, and maybe go to bed at a reasonable hour so I can get up in time for an 8:00 lesson tomorrow morning. I scheduled that one on purpose—am I retarded or what?

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* You’d think I’d have trouble waking up that early, especially since the class is an hour from my apartment, but I was wide awake at 5:30 this morning for no good reason. Wtf?

** SAT pointer of the day: The pronouns in the sentence don’t agree. Do you see why? I refuse to change it because I think the grammatically correct version sounds silly.

I have precious little space in my head to spare for blogging today, so I think I’ll clean out my ‘toblog’ tag on del.icio.us.

Ever wondered what Geoffrey Chaucer would write about if he had access to the interweb? Wonder no more—he hath a blog. It’s only infrequently updated, but some overeducated person has clearly put a good deal of thought into this. The best part? It includes the line “I WOLDE I KNEWE HOW OF THEE I MIGHT BE QUITTEN!”

From McSweeney’s, An Open Letter to My Ability to Lose Interest in Things Easily. Just plain clever. I’ve often thought of submitting something to McSweeney’s. Probably a list. I’m a fan of lists, and some of the lists they publish are unfunny and/or poorly-realized. (On the other hand, many others are crazy hilarious.) I can so do better.

And this? I have no words, except that I want it. Imagine all the applications it could have (they’ve already done some of the imagining for you).

Is it really 3:20? Christ. Nighttime runs differently than daytime, I swear. I have a Latin midterm in 7.5 hours. Woo.

I didn’t have time* to study for this morning’s midterm last night, so I skimmed my class notes as I walked from the parking lot to the classroom. I was nervous going into the test, certain I’d have to hack and bs my way through it. The format—six excerpts from primary sources we’ve looked at, for four of which we had to name the author, title, genre, date, etc. and answer a specific question or two on the work’s significance—was dodgy; if you didn’t recognize enough of the excerpts (or image, in one case), you were pretty much screwed.

Luckily for me, I recognized exactly four. I’d narrowed the fifth down to two possibilities, and for the sixth I would’ve guessed a play I don’t even remember studying in this course.

Not only that, but I was able to dredge up enough detail about each of them to compose three solid responses and a fourth that was mostly there but disorganized and ineloquent because I was short on time. In short, unless she grades horribly pickily, I kicked this test’s ass.

I’m glad I didn’t study. I remembered enough of the material from class, and the things I would have studied weren’t even on the test, really, so it would have been a monumental waste of time. The only study plan that would’ve helped would have been rereading all the primary sources so that I could better identify the excerpts, but I wasn’t about to do that, especially since I didn’t know the format ahead of time.

I hate studying. I’m not good at it, and it bores me to tears. (I’m pretty sure those two are related.) I’d rather just pay attention in class and learn it all the first time around. I realize that’s not always possible, but it’s worked well so far—though I’ve gotten some terrible grades, I’ve never** done poorly in a course in which I’ve attended most or all of the class sessions. I’ve now started six sentences in a row with ‘I’—narcissist.

The exam was thus a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I got in the zone and powered my way through it, and I came out feeling like I could touch the sky. It’s sick and twisted, I know, but I *love* taking tests. Something about engaging my mind completely in a good challenge excites me. As it should, of course.

Actually, I don’t know why many people *don’t* like tests. I’m guessing it’s because they’re worried they might not get the grade they want, but I think the key to happy test-taking is to just not give a shit about your score. I want to do well on every test I take, of course—I want to show that test that I’m smarter than it, that I can meet its challenge and more—but grades mean very little to me.

And I’m not just saying that because my current GPA wouldn’t get me into any grad school at all, much less a reputable one. I know I’ve fucked up a whole bunch of classes. But when I do well in a class, or on a test, or on a paper, I know it. I can be happy for the success itself, not for the artificial achievement of a certain score.

Do I welcome corrections and comments? Of course; that’s why the prof has a Ph.D. and I don’t. But seeing those grades come up on my transcript? Couldn’t care less. Never have, really, since they stopped being straight A’s in about sixth grade. Or maybe the not-caring preceded the not-perfection, I forget.

Ok. Two more midterms this week: one in Logic on Thursday (which I didn’t know was coming up until I looked at my syllabus yesterday) and one in Latin on Friday. Bring ‘em on!

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* I couldn’t squeeze it in between my fast food binge and The L Word marathon. Yeah, I fell off the resolution wagon, but I’m dealing with a bit of stress right now, k?

** With one exception, but there were extenuating circumstances.

Is Spring Break over already? Geez.

I didn’t go anywhere, electing to laze around all week instead. It was lovely. Taught a few lessons (but no classes), went in to the office when I felt like it (my last day will be this Thursday, I think), moved (mostly), bought some furniture (heart Ikea), and, as you can see, shifted my sleep schedule way too far forward (damn). Had game night tonight as a last hurrah before it becomes time to put on fancy clothes (i.e., neither jeans nor pajama pants) again.

I have one midterm on Tuesday and another on Friday. The second is Latin, so I’m good for that, but the Tuesday exam is in my Classics class, and, though I’ve been to every class but two and done all the assigned readings, I have NO CLUE what to expect.

The course website helpfully informs us that the first test “will cover all that we have discussed so far.” We’ve pressed the prof for more detail in class, but she’s always vague and hand-wavy. She doesn’t believe in handing out exam review sheets, either, because she’s afraid people will ‘abuse’ them.

[There used to be a four or five hundred word rant here, but after writing it all out, I realized that it’s my responsibility to know the course material, and that I should suck it up. So I deleted it all. If the test turns out to be extraordinarily difficult, though, you can bet I’ll be back here yelling about it.]

But I should go to bed. My first class starts in just under nine hours. Boo.

Tonight’s internet access is courtesy of the nice people somewhere nearby who haven’t bothered to secure their wireless network. Thanks, nice people!

Though it’s technically stealing, I’m ok with it. See, I *am* still paying for internet at my old apartment, even though I’m not there to use it, so I think it all balances out in the universe somehow.

My plan for tonight was to eat at Panera and so take advantage of their free internet, but by the time I’d gotten home from work and taken a nap, they were about to close. Plan B was to go to Starbucks and pay for their free internet*, but there were no seats outside for Sammy.

I could have driven to another Starbucks, but the next nearest one is . . . some distance away. It’s unclear, really, as their store locator is less than user-friendly.

All I want is someplace with wireless access that’s nearby, open after 9, and possibly serves food. Is this so much to ask?

This is where the nice people come in. By leaving their network unsecured, they’ve provided me with all of these things except for the food, which, um, came from Sonic.

I know, it hasn’t been thirty days yet, but I’m tired tonight, there’s no way in poo I’m gonna cook, and most of the non-fast food restaurants are closed. The resolution-breaking seemed worth it. It’s the first fast food I’ve had in something like 22 days**, though, which is still an accomplishment.

Well looky there, I’ve put my stolen internet to good use by writing a whole post trying to justify my actions to the world. Jeezy creezy, get me to the porn already.

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* Stupid T-Mobile, making me pay to get to the interweb from somewhere that isn’t the comfort of my own home. Boo.

** Unless you count that other time I had Sonic, or that other other time. But both of those were Wendy’s ideas, so they don’t count. Are you following the rationalization here?

EXT. STARBUCKS — EVENING

A young woman, casually-but-not-sloppily dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt, sits alone. Her laptop is open on the table, accompanied by a caramel macchiato, a book on digital security, and an only-slightly-pretentious NPR laptop bag. A small, friendly, freshly-groomed puppy of indeterminate parentage sits in the chair beside hers, snuggled into a navy blue knit cardigan. A generically hip blend of poppy-jazzy music bops softly from the ceiling.

With her new contact lenses she can see clearly enough, even at night, to read the brand names on the coke machines inside the Wal-Mart across the street. Fucking amazing, she thinks, as she marvels at the beauty of even the smallest details and finds it hard to believe that she’s going to die.

She REALLY wishes she would stop thinking about death all the damn time. She’s getting better at blocking it out, but omg sometimes it just blows her goddamn mind.

Anyway, Starbucks. She’s here because she (with the help of her parents and cousin) just moved most of her things to her new apartment, which won’t have internet access until next Wednesday. On the one hand, she wishes she’d thought about calling the cable company before yesterday so that she could blog from the warmth and comfort of her own home, but then she looks around and realizes that this? This is the life.

Though soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce are nearly the same color, they in fact differ in many nontrivial ways. For instance, soy sauce makes good fried rice.