That last post was a bit hurried because people kept coming in to the Radio and TV classroom wanting to talk to me about life. I did not try to explain that I was already busy talking about life to myself. I just sort of tried to type furtively while keeping up with conversation.
I can't guarantee that the same thing won't happen again while I'm typing this post because I'm at a picnic table right now. Not the picnic table - I don't show up there until 2:15 at the latest. I'm at a different picnic table. And I'm trying to keep my feet clear of like five giant red ants that appear to be building an ant metropolis somewhere, because they are damn busy. So if this post just ends in "AUGH!!" you can be assured that either I have turned into Charlie Brown or my foot just got chomped by a pissed off ant-worker who got tired of having my foot in the way.
A digression of my own: last week at the picnic table, I felt something tickling my foot and when I looked down I saw a huge monarch caterpillar just meandering lazily on top of my foot. I screamed like a little girl and kicked until it flew off and landed in a pile of oak tree thingies. (If you live in Texas, you know what an oak tree thingy is. If you don't, try Googling it or some shit, because I cannot explain it to you. They fall off oak trees in the spring and stack up like freakin' snow-drifts full of allergies.) And then I did a dance, because I could still feel its creepy-crawly little feet on the top of my foot. It was highly amusing for everybody except me. The caterpillar was okay. I checked on it, and it was dazed for a minute (probably very impressed by my dancing skillz) and then it wandered away in a direction not aimed at any of my exposed skin. Which makes me think that maybe monarch caterpillars are smarter than they look. Some people might argue that this is a very good reason for me to wear closed shoes (as in, not my flip-flops, which is all I ever wear), but those people would be idiots. My feet need freedom. You can't trap my feet.
It's gorgeous outside today, which makes it that much harder for me to get my curmudgeon on. But I'm going to try anyway.
Here's one: WTF? Why did those two girls start running just now like their feet were on fire? They were walking along like normal human beings and it was like there was a starter pistol only the two of them could hear. I don't like to run even if my feet are on fire, and theirs clearly aren't. Fucking teenagers.
Anyway. I don't know if this happens to non-old people when they're in college and past the halfway point of the semester, but here's a phenomenon that I have been experiencing, and it makes me want to punch a baby in the face. I've been working on my algebra homework during the week like I'm supposed to do, but then about halfway through it's like I hit an invisible wall of stupidity. Even if I'm on a roll, answering questions on the homework and just killing it, suddenly and without warning, I become really, really stupid. The equations look like a foreign language, and try as I might, I cannot get the brainpower going again. I've tried experimenting with the time of day when I'm doing homework, and no. It doesn't matter. Algebra wants to make me stupid and it. is. winning. (You can make your own Charlie Sheen joke here. I'm sort of over Charlie Sheen at the moment. Wife-beating bastard.) I cannot seem to make algebra understand that I have a limited amount of time to do said homework, otherwise I end up with the demon eyes and the spinning-around head and the Linda Blair voice and my children become afraid of me, so its cooperation would be greatly appreciated. No, instead, algebra just laughs evilly and makes me dumb. It's really unfortunate.
Also plaguing me are topics for papers. Two of my classes have extremely, extremely broad topics for the papers that are due before the semester ends. The parameters are not quite as broad as "write a five-page paper on something," but they're close. In US History, the parameters are "write a five-page paper about something that happened in US History from pre-Columbian days to 1877." Wow. That covers a lot. In Business Computing, the parameters are "write something about computers that interests you." That professor at least tries to be helpful by printing out thousands of pages of articles about how your cell phone is silently giving you brain cancer. This is not helpful for a woman who suffers from extreme anxiety over bizarre and improbable ideas, which manifests itself as feeling the compulsion to build an escape plan from her car in the event of either zombie attack or bridge collapse. (When my kids were small and in car seats, I would torture myself with trying to figure out how to get both kids to safety from a car sinking in Town Lake. Now I have to stop myself from formulating an escape plan using detailed graphics and then explaining to my children how we're going to get this done in event of water landing. I have a nine-year-old daughter who also suffers from extreme anxiety over bizarre and improbable ideas, so this would be parental cruelty at its finest, perhaps resulting in future emotionally-intense therapy sessions. I despise emotionally-intense therapy sessions. So I keep my mouth shut.) In both classes, I have a case of too many possibilities. If I had less of an imagination, I'd be fine. I'd pick the most boring thing in each subject and write a damn five-page paper on it. Instead, I'm coming up with ever-ambitious topics that probably would require an actual dissertation or some shit as opposed to five effing pages.
You know what's going to happen, don't you? I'm going to end up running out of time, picking the most boring thing in each subject and writing a damn five-page paper on it. It's practically inevitable.
The problem is that I think too much. (Holy Cheezit, that was an acorn that just fell out of a tree next to me and smashed on the concrete like it was dropped from the Empire State Building. What the hell is wrong with that tree?) And, clearly, I'm easily distracted, but goddamn. If that acorn had fallen a foot to the left, I'd probably be on the ground unconscious right now.
My friend Xavier the Spaniard has picked his topic for his US History paper. He got dinged for not writing a conclusion on the last test, too, so he's decided that he's going to write one page of content and four pages of conclusion. I sort of like his style.
Speaking of US History and tests, I have one today. I better get cracking on amassing my interwebs information to make up my "notes," since it's an open-note test. My plan is to take all of the study questions from the syllabus, find the Wiki article about each thing and write my essays from that. Not copy them, just write from them. That's the plan, Stan.
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