I Do Not Recommend a Summer Semester

This Summer semester has been hard.  Like, haaaard.  As in, very difficult.

As in, last week I crawled out of my cave for the first time in a month, brushed my greasy hair out of my eyes and blinked into the unrelenting sunlight.

Okay, just kidding, my hair wasn't greasy.  I have been bathing regularly.  Sometimes I would take a shower in the middle of the day just to jolt myself out of the endless loop of Richard Nixon's political career, global warming, quadratic equations and the universal symbolism of the hickory tree in literature.  I'm clean, but I'm definitely not socialized any longer.  I do, however, know exactly what has happened on all the seasons of all the cities of The Real Housewives, because as it turns out, rich women with a complete lack of self-awareness bickering is great background noise for studying.

There were several problems inherent in a Summer semester for me.  I will list them for you now.

1.  I have kids.  Kids who are not in school this summer.  I did get them into a lovely day camp every weekday from 12:00pm to 6:00pm, but that was mostly in order for me to go to algebra class on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Most days, I feel like I haven't seen them much this summer.  (Although, some days I feel like I have seen them entirely too much.)  It has gotten to where every time M2 sees me open up my laptop, he screams "Noooooo!" purely on reflex.

2.  I am stupid.  Somehow, I managed to sign up for two five-and-a-half-week classes and two eleven-week classes.  This resulted in a June filled with exquisite horrors including a history test every Tuesday that necessitated reading and taking notes on at least four chapters of the history textbook every blessed week and an English paper every week also.  Which, as you may recall, involved reading depressing short stories and then writing at least three pages on the symbolism, point-of-view and other things I'd rather not write about.  Oh yeah, and I had to write an eight-page annotated paper for history.  Not to mention, two algebra assignments every week that consisted of at least 20-30 problems and having to read about two chapters of Environmental Science from the world's most boring and pessimistic textbook ever.  It should seriously be called Fuck It, We're All Going To Die and It's America's Fault: A Study in Earth Science.  I'm also required to watch videos laden with the fish with three eyes from The Simpsons and oil-logged birds and otters pulled from waters contaminated by oilspills.  And somehow, through all the tears for the poor chocolate-covered birds and otters, I have to take notes.  The good part in all this is that the five-and-a-half-week classes are over, so we're down to the Algebra and Environmental Science.  And guess what?  I have tests in both this week.  Hooray.

3.  I am still unemployed.  Actually, I think this is less a problem and more a plus at the moment.  If I had to juggle a job with all the rest of this nonsense, I would be in the proverbial padded room right now.  I can't even clean my house on any sort of basis, much less do a good job for somebody else.  However, the lack of employment does mean abject poverty at the moment.  Spike and I decided that we will revisit the employment issue when the kids are back in school in August.  As it stands, a job would be tough after August 5th anyway, as camp ends that day and they would have nowhere to go from then until school starts August 23rd.

The long and the short of it is - this is a lot of work.  By some miracle, I still have a 4.0, but I'm pretty sure that my algebra class is going to be the killer there.  I got an 83 on my first test, and I walked out of there thinking I aced it.  But it turns out that I'm not as awesome as I thought I was, and I made approximately two billion stupid mistakes that turned my aced test into an 83.  And that was on the stuff I already knew from Elementary Algebra.  I am in deep doo-doo.

The good(?) news is that when this semester is over, I have seventeen days until the next one starts.  That's seventeen days off, bitches!  Probably, I will sleep through fourteen of them, because I am tired.  I am parent-of-a-newborn tired, that bone-deep exhaustion that you secretly fear will become a part of you forever.  August 5th is like a finishing line, and I am that runner whose bowels have completely failed them during the marathon, and I am shitting myself all the way to that nebulous tape somewhere off in the distance.

In other good news, I've lost 14 pounds since May 23rd.  Never let them tell you that absolute overuse of your brain doesn't burn calories.

I Have Been Blasted Out of a Cannon.

I have decided that Summer School is like being shot out of a cannon and having to do a shit ton of things in the air before I hit the ground.  That cannon is called "Summer Semester."  It even says it down the side, in big, metaphorical letters.

School started on May 23rd, and since then, I have done three US History II tests, three English papers (well, two, but I'm working on the third and it has to be submitted by midnight tomorrow), an Environmental Science test (which required something like 21 straight hours of studying, and even then I think I must have studied the wrong stuff, because the test confused me) and hours upon hours of algebra.  It's getting so bad that when M2 sees my laptop on and open, he gets pouty.  He doesn't actually want to play with me or anything, he just doesn't want me working on homework so much.  (I've compromised and will turn on Real Housewives of Wherever, which he is addicted to as much as I am, and I work on homework with that running in the background and listening to M2's insightful commentary, which includes things like "That's a little dog.  I wonder what kind of dog that is.  What kind of dog is that, Mom?"  I am an awesome mom.)

The English and History classes are five-and-a-half-week courses.  They are a blessing and a curse wrapped up together in a tasty good-evil burrito.  The blessing part is that in five and a half weeks, they will be over, leaving me the other five and a half weeks in the semester to concentrate on algebra and Environmental Science.  The curse is that there's a paper every week, and a test every week, and all I ever do is study and write papers.

I have one paper left after this one and a departmental exam for English, and two tests and a research paper left for US History.  The end is in sight.  I just have to hold on a little bit longer and try not to go insane, and hope that the rest of my family can stick with me on this.  I also have to hope that the house, with my total lack of housework right now, can hold and maintain just a little bit longer.  I figure a little clutter is okay, but if it rises up and attacks us, it might be time to take a few minutes away from studying and clean that shit up.

I Figured Out What It Is About This Campus

This summer, I'm taking classes at a campus at the north end of the city.  This campus does not feel like home to me, and I figured out why.  There are actually two reasons.

1.  People keep asking me for directions.

I don't know what it is about me up here, but I'm forever getting stopped by folks who want to know where things are.  The thing is, this is only my fourth trip to this campus - I'm as clueless about this crap as they are.  I was really proud today to be able to direct someone to the library, though.  And that was entirely because I had just figured out how to get there. (I was, in fact, just leaving there when they asked me.)  No matter, though - they asked my help and I was able to give it!  Correctly, even!  The next guy, not even ten minutes later, asked where the bookstore is, and that was a big fail.  They're still hiding that particular place from me.  I haven't even seen a hint of it yet.

What is it about me that makes these people think I know where I am or what I'm doing?  I absolutely don't, and one day when I give the wrong directions and someone ends up in Narnia, they're going to figure it out.

2.  There are far too many white people here.

This is not a racist statement, as I myself am white.  I should probably back up at this point and mention that my entire education from the seventh grade on has been conducted in historically underprivileged schools.  In other words, I have never gone to a junior high or high school that was not located in the ghetto/barrio.  As a result, I feel much, much more comfortable on CCC campuses that are similarly located.  The two campuses I went to last semester for classes are only a couple of miles (or even blocks in one case) from my former high school, so I felt completely at home.  The people were generally the same, I was comfortable with the neighborhood... it was much better than this.

Here, I feel like I'm on an alien planet.  Everybody is totally serious, all the time.  I get it that school is serious, and summer semesters are particularly perilous (that's another blog post, but I have a paper due tonight, two tests early next week and another paper due at the end of next week, so you might have to wait a bit), but smile a bit, dammit.  This is probably also because it seems like the majority of people taking classes this summer go to four-year schools and are getting some cheap credit hours in while they're on summer break from the other place.  I gather that from the abundance of tanned, skinny co-ed looking girls I see wearing sorority t-shirts with their short-shorts that advertise their sorority's annual Quilting Bee and Watermelon Seed Spitting Contest For An Obscure Charity, which was held on March 11th of this year.  If the event in question had been held in 2004 or somesuch, that would mean that they were not, in fact, slumming this summer, but if that was the case, they would not look like the fresh young hussies they are, either.

I should also point out that this campus is approximately an hour away from my house.  It was the only Intermediate Algebra lecture class I could get that fits not only with my schedule, but Spikes, M1's and M2's, so I'm not complaining.  I have nine weeks left to go, which isn't too much.

It does make me feel like I'm in a White People Zoo, or invading a Free Range White People Commune or something.  I'm longing for just one car with too-loud bass, or those fighting lovebirds I posted about in the Spring.  It would make me feel less like an extra-terrestrial.