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.
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