being sarah marie
They love to plant...
Pull, then Push
Savage Minds
The Trick is to...
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander
Bad Dirt, Annie Proulx
Brown, Richard Rodriguez
Namesake
Rewind to the present
Two long but fascinating articles about China and ...
I wish I knew where to start or how to begin. Ther...
I guess it's time to start coming out of hiberatio...
Privacy and the Net
Blogging and Free Speech
Month of Discontent
Sister Issues/My Hunger Strike
December 21, 2005
Deep Slumber
Daily temperatures in the single digits and windchills in the negative teens since I got home have made for perfect hiberation weather. I don't think I've ever felt more like a bear before, and this makes me awfully jealous of their winter lifestyles. Anyway, I've been sleeping anywhere from 9 - 11 hours nightly and passing my waking hours in a semi-conscious state. While it's given me a much needed recharge, it's left me in a state of blur, completely unable to write or articulate anything too meaningful--hence the long silence on this blog.
I reckon this is just another manifestation of the heavy crash-and-burn cycle that's characterized my life for the last few years. I hope to put this to an end sometime in '06 should I indeed graduate from college. Maybe then I will resume my life as a functioning human being.
December 13, 2005
Home
The nightmare is over. I finished my work. I made it home. Things sure came down to the wire. At 11:59 p.m. yesterday night I still had two papers that I had yet to write and had yet to begin my packing. I typed and revised and copy-edited my way into the night, and by 6 a.m. I had e-mailed my two last papers to the respective professors. I have to say, I wouldn't call any of those essays a masterpiece, and I'm definitely not banking on As. One paper was absolutely due today, and although I could have taken the other one home with me, I decided that sometimes you just gotta put your foot down and make things come to an END.
I guess it kind of goes without saying that I didn't get much sleep last night (2 hours), nor did I sleep much at all in the last two weeks. Good to be home, but I'll be a recovering zombie for the next few days.
December 10, 2005
Slowly but Surely...
When I get home it will feel like the whole semester went by in the blink of an eye. But can somebody tell me why it feels like the most agonizing days with the most work seem incredibely long? Finals week is ticking away at snails' pace, and it's just painful.
Here's a quick update though. I offically completed one paper and handed it in. I finished another paper tonight, but I won't be able to hand it in until Monday. I'm teaching my 7th graders for the last time in '05 on Sunday morning, and I wrote up lesson plans for the month I'll be gone.
To do? I still have to write two more papers and an analyzed bibliography, which is apparently some fancy version of an annotated bibliography(?)... I also have to make it through a final on Monday morning. I'm a little worried I won't manage to cram in everything by Monday night. But the worst scenario is that I finish up one paper or the analyzed bibliography when I get home. :-\... We'll see...
Take off? Tuesday morning!
December 07, 2005
Feeling Like Shit
My attempt to go to bed around 8 p.m. tonight (because I feel like crap) has been effectively thwarted. Around 10 p.m. I woke up to the sound of my neighbors chatting and laughing obnoxiously outside of my door. Thanks a lot friends.
After lingering awake in my bed for 10 minutes, I decided not to fight it anymore and to get up. I go to the bathroom to take care of some business and as I head back to my room I notice that my loud neighbors had vanished from sight. Good, I tell myself, at least some peace and quiet. Before I manage to open my door all the way, my two neighbors jump at me from inside my room and scream Boooo Bawahhh!!! I recoil and then realize, oh hell no, I wasn't having it.
As they break out into an uncontrollable hysterical laughter, apparently proud at their accomplishment of scaring me, I roll my eyes and snap. No, no. I feel like SHIT. You guys woke me up, and I don't need this. No. As I walked into my room and they walked out of my room, it dawned on at least one of them that maybe they were messing with the wrong person at the wrong time.
Moving on. I've been feeling kind of lightheaded and woozy since the weekend, but when I woke up today it hit me with a vengeance. Aching throat, hurting ear, weak body, a prime way to feel when I need to be ultra-productive. Great.
I've been work-study working for the last three days straight, so I haven't been able to get much done. At the same time, I managed to completely finish one paper. Three to go and one more final. Five days.
I e-mailed a paper draft that I spent the last two days on to a professor who was encouraging us to e-mail them to him. What an awful idea. He responded in a jiffy, apparently wasting no time tearing my paper to shreds. The organization sucks, and he doesn't see an argument. How can I make someone see when he refuses? Well, I don't have the luxury to spend the next five days revising my paper to "perfection" according to his taste. Anyone want to guess what professor this is? He's already made several cameo appearances on this blog.
Onto another professor who pissed me off today: my advisor who doubles as the supervisor for my independent study. He e-mailed me today exhorting me to let him know what my plans are for my final paper. What's that supposed to mean? Can't a boy just do his thing?! I was honest, and told him that I'm crunched for time, juggling 4 papers and a final along with my work schedule at two jobs, and so I haven't had a chance to start his paper. That being said, I took some time to reflect on the paper and e-mailed him an outline.
Like the previous professor, he wasted very little time with his response and this one wasn't so encouraging either. He told me I'd be LOONEY (yes, caps included) to do all that work in this short stretch of time and told me to take an incomplete on my transcript for that class. Excuse me?! I nearly killed myself reading a book PER WEEK for that class and wrote 6 reading responses ranging from 4-8 pages each and he wants to discount all of that work because I'm having some trouble with my final schedule?
What's so ironic is that we spent the last few weeks reading books by all these social scientists who researched the pressures and experiences of this generation of college students and found that we're spread really thin between work, school, and other commitments like clubs, sports, family... As a result the amount of time we students can devote to school today is completely odds with the demands of college professors. So much for that project in empathy.
My God...
December 05, 2005
Interlude: Piano
My paper writing has been going quite awfully. I can't say I've finished any of my four papers. I can't say I've made a serious attempt at starting more than one. Wow, time's ticking: got a week left. It's not that I'm lazy or whatever, I'm just not feeling too well and I'm so overwhelmed at the scope of this work load. Fast forward my life by 10 days, please!!!
In other news, I took a break to go downstairs and practice some piano. Let me note that I've never had one piano lesson in my life. For years, though, playing piano is something I've always wanted to do. I remember back to middle school huddling around the piano and watching in complete awe as several of my classmates played away so elegantly it made my heart want to melt.
My dorm has a piano, and a little booklet for beginners, so a month or two ago I decided to give it a try. Learning the position of the keys and their names was completely counterintuitive for me, and learning how to play with two hands still is quite impossible, though I'm making improvements.
Lately, I've been looking for sheet music from popular songs and trying to play those. I spent about an hour downstairs today attempting to sound out Coldplay's "Clocks" and "The Scientist" along with Evanescence's "My Immortal." It wasn't easy, but so rewarding when it began to sound right.
Walking down the corridor as I left the piano, two girls were standing against facing walls. As I walked by, one of the girls blurted, "Good job!"
I stopped and stood still for a second. Who me? I thought to myself. I told her that I thought I'm pretty awful and that I never had a piano lesson in my life. She was impressed and insisted that it sounded pretty nice.
I couldn't ask for a better compliment. Now if only I could practice my piano instead of working on these wretchedly dense final papers....
December 01, 2005
Can I Shut Eye?
Leaving home from Thanksgiving was dreadful knowing what lies ahead. My last stretch of the semester is especially short and loaded with deadlines. I have less than two weeks now until I'll be flying home again for winter break, but in that short period of time I have so much to survive.
I got back here on Sunday, and this week is the last week of classes. Unfortunately, classes and regular assignments along with my regular work schedule prevented me from doing much about my major projects, so as this week comes to an end, I'm going to feel the pressure more and more with every passing second.
In my next week and a half here I have four final papers (10-15 pages each) and one final exam to reckon with. That means I'll have written close to 60 pages within the next 10 days. Wow, I wonder if even most writers ever write that much. I'm particularly worried since they're all these heavy-duty research papers, and beyond the tedium of dry, academic writing I still have a large chunk of research to wrestle down.
Needless to say I haven't been sleeping too well since I got back, and I don't expect to sleep much in my remaining days here... Not that that's so different than business-as-usual. Yesterday I had a bit of an ordeal with sleep. I got about six hours the night before, and after being out and about in class and work (where I had to deal with my 7th graders and then some of their parents for conferences afterwards), I got back to my dorm and was exhausted. I couldn't quite afford to feel that way because I had 6-page paper and a 10 minute presentation to give today, both of which I still needed to prepare.
I got back from dinner with my hallmates around 7:45 p.m. and after talking for a few minutes, I told them that I'm going to nap for an hour because I just couldn't be productive feeling this tired. So I got in bed, and was on the edge of sleep, when my neighbors started getting rowdy. We have a tradition of hall-sports on our hall (that I'm not a big fan of), and it's recently escalated from throwing balls to shooting plastic bullets at each other with serious toy guns.
Ten steps back, ready. Draw! And then shoot, shoot, shoot, till someone yells "Ow you got me!" After a few rounds, I shouted out my neighbors' names while still in bed implying that they should be quieter. They made an effort at noise control for maybe one round, and then it was back to the usual rowdiness. It never ceases to amaze me how fickle and short-lived people's memory can be when they're having fun. I put up with a few more rounds, and then seeing as they didn't give a damn about my trying to sleep, I got out of bed and opened my door to find them right beside it. "Can you please go somewhere else? I'm trying to sleep," I reminded them.
They moved, and although I still heard them it was quiet enough for me to doze off for 15 or 20 minutes. I was awoken, though, again by loud shouting as their shooting migrated back towards the vicinity of my room. I shouted for them to be quiet, but I figured that by now it was a lost cause. I lay in bed for the next 20 minutes shifting between trying to zone them out in an effort to fall back asleep, to recalling that interview I heard with Jennifer Aniston where she said Brad Pitt was missing a sensitivity chip.
I know. That's really random, but I couldn't help but thinking: knowing what hell of work I still have ahead of me, and all that I had to do for tonight, and how exhausted I was, were they maybe missing a sensitivity chip of their own when they decided to go ahead and shoot at each other in the hall during the exact time I wanted to take a nap to power myself up for a long night? Hmph.
