I Cut My Own Bangs Again.

Apparently, it's that time of the semester, because about a week ago, I cut my own bangs again.

It's not as disastrous as last time - I might be getting better at this.  But I think it points to deep-seated mental illness that keeps me from going to professional hair-stylists and instead, hacking at my own hair with kitchen scissors somewhere around 5:00AM once a semester.  It's a very specific mental illness.  It's called So Little Sleep and So Much Stress That Home Haircuts Sound Like a Great Idea Once Every Three Months Or So syndrome.  Only really awesome people have it.  It results in bangs that look like Bettie Page bangs, if you tilt your head to the right and squint a bit.  Pure awesomeness.

So, remember the boulder from Spring semester?  That was a teeny-tiny little pebble compared to the summer semester boulder that has flattened me.  The stress over the summer was so enormous, I lost twenty-five pounds in about eleven weeks.  Go ahead and ponder that for a minute; I'll wait.  Twenty-five pounds.  That's one-third of my seven-year-old.  I'm pretty sure it's because I have convinced my body that it can live on Diet Dr. Pepper and maybe a tuna salad sandwich at around 2:00.  I like to call it the "Holy Shit I Can't Do This" diet.  At completion, you can fit your newly skinny body into Bad Idea Jeans.  It's a beautiful thing.  (Not that I am anywhere near skinny now, but this is a good start.)

Speaking of my seven-year-old (as I did in the paragraph above, however fleetingly), I have been at home with my children for the bulk of the summer.  Just me.  And them.  And Phineas and Ferb.  And a lot of homework that they would rather I didn't do.  It's a lot of togetherness, and starting Friday, we'll have two weeks of ultra-togetherness, because I won't even have the option of going to class twice a week to get away from them.  I start my Fall semester the day after they do.  Which means that on August 22nd, I will have from 7:30AM to 3:00PM full of quiet.  I may just sit there, in the quiet, doing nothing all day until I have to go get them and bring them back.  I may weep from the beauty of it.  Just the idea is making me a bit teary.

Other news and notes:

* Thanks to my Environmental Science class, I may start doing my level best to ruin the environment singlehandedly.  It would serve it right for giving me the boringest class of my life.  (Boringest is indeed a word.  I just made it up.  English is a fluid language, people.  Changes everyday.)  I plan to buy a Hummer and drive leaded gas on the highway, chucking fast-food wrappers out of the window every three miles.  I also plan to contribute heavily to the hole in the ozone layer.  Maybe I can hire an airplane and take a run up there to jab it with forks or something, creating more perferation.  I also plan to take a blowtorch to Antarctica and melt the ice caps a little more.  Just doing my bit.

* It is so hot outside right now that my sunglasses, which were on top of my head momentarily when I went outside earlier, burned my face when I put them on my nose where they belong.  Burned my face.  I yelped and everybody stared at me.  It's almost as awesome as that one time, the first time I went to college, when I completely buckled for no apparent while walking to class through a completely crowded commons.  I fell right on my face.  That was awesomeness.  Not because I was self-aware enough to laugh at myself at the time (although whenever I think of it now, I can't stop laughing, because somebody falling down and busting their ass for no apparent reason is funny, even if the falling-down person is eighteen-year-old me), but because it was a complete and total failure of my legs and everybody in the entire school saw it.  It was epic and would have been on YouTube, had YouTube existed at the time.  And digital cameras.

* The excruciating heat is not helping with the kid-and-mom togetherness.  You can't just send your kid outside when it's 107 out there with a heat index of 115.  You can't say "run your energy off" and send them out there, because if you do, that's child abuse.  They will immediately melt into a puddle on the porch, and there is just no amount of hosing that will make that pavement clean again.  Besides the fact that CPS will then show up, load the amorphous blob that used to be your child into an unmarked van, and take it away to live with nice people who would never do that.  This may sound like a good deal, but I'm betting there's a lot of paperwork involved and maybe also police, who I promise you, you do not want to tangle with during a summer as hot as this.  Because it's this kind of heat that will make usually normal people try to jump off the Wilson-Riggins Hardware Store wearing nothing but a Speedo with the British flag on it, black trouser socks, and water shoes.  So they're a little busy right now and do not want to deal with your kid puddle and everything that comes with it.  Trust.

I'm supposed to be doing algebra homework right now, but I can't summon up the energy for it, given that I just took my last Environmental Science test about fifteen minutes ago.  And studying for that test made sure I only had about four hours of sleep last night, so I'm fucking giddy.  I'd also really like to go home, but staying for class and working on my review sheet is probably the better idea.  Fucking adult-level responsibility.  You're always screwing up my sleep

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.