these eyes will stay wide

basically i don't want to talk about anything except how nervous i am about school. i'm really scared ! what if everyone hates me ! what if i'm not smart enough ! or rather, not... academic-y enough ! i have to write a ten page paper for the genocide class which is making me really fucking nervous- not just the paper writing stuff, which is huge because i don't really remember how to write a research paper, but because of my procrastination issues. i somehow managed to get this done when i was 18, though, so maybe i can pull it off now?



this is the part of the syllabus that makes me most nervous, though:

Each student will be asked to choose a date to guide the classroom discussion for the first 30 minutes of class.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh what the fuck ! why would you do that to me ! why ! i'm pretty good in front of audiences and i'm not shy or anything, but i'm.. not a college person and don't know how to do this junk !

in other sad nerd news, i actually dressed up for my first day of school? my mom sent me an email this morning that said, "i wish i was there to braid your hair on the first day!" me too, mom. me too. i'm wearing:


with a wide black belt



and two of my coworkers have said i looked cute, which of course i found annoying because i hate coworkers talking about my body or appearance. because i'm the dourest feminist !

bleh. i don't know. i'm too nervous and rushed to write anything good- i have meetings from 11-3 today, both redundant in one way or another. one specifies that a boxed lunch will be provided, but it's most assuredly a red bell pepper stuffed with a green bell pepper for the vegetarians (aka me). i actually told the guy running these meetings that i'm allergic to bell peppers (not a lie. well, a lie. but i would rather eat any of the stuff i'm allergic to !) but i am willing to bet $9,000,000,000000,00,00000,000,000.47 that he forgot.

sorry this entry is so grumpy and negative. i'm really, really, really, really scared.

p.s. clark park is closed for renovation ! boooo.
p.p.s. jeanne's show is tomorrow !

this is dedicated to the one i love

mannn. okay, so to distract myself from academic reading yesterday, i read the first of those young adult novels, daphne's book.



i tried not to read the descriptions too closely for any of the books i bought, so based on the title and cover i thought it would be a story about someone getting their diary stolen. it turns out that it's a pretty realistic portrayal of a girl being forced to work on a project (writing a children's book) with daphne, the most unpopular weirdest person in school. of course they become friends, and the main character (cannot remember her name !) has to deal with being embarrassed about daphne in front of her popular friends, and keeping daphne's big secret, which is that she lives in abject poverty with an increasingly senile grandmother. it's a huge bummer- daphne basically has to take care of her little sister and stops going to school so she won't have to leave her sister alone with her grandmother, whose senility is pretty scary and depressing. it gets to a point where they have no electricity, heat, or food in the winter and the protagonist finally has to tell her mom, which gets daphne and her sister sent to a group home, which is also described pretty accurately and therefore depressingly.

it ends with a ray of hope (second cousins of their mother taking them in in maine) but not a really happy ending, which is also the way daphne suggests the book they're writing for class ends. daphne's desperation and loneliness and distrustfulness are super realistic, as is the protagonist's (what the fuck was her name !) mixed feelings about genuinely liking daphne and wanting to be liked by the popular kids. overall it was a total bummer and i cried a little at the end !



i've been so busy reading books from when i was a kid over again that i don't really keep up with new YA fiction- do people still write books that deal with poverty, foster care, unfit or mentally ill parents, etc.? or is it all vampires and werewolves and harry potters?

after i was done reading, i went to german class, where we learned how to ask people about their families. this will come in handy in case i'm ever in germany and am ordering food and suddenly have to know my waiter's grandparents' names, i guess. i had an opportunity to give feedback on the format of the class, and i tried to be gentle, but i think it's going too fast. he just blasts through powerpoints full of stuff and then has us look at them later, but there's a new powerpoint for every class and we have class 4 days a week. i'm doing okay- my blog essay only had one correction and everyone else's had like 10-15.



my big worry is my history class. we aren't getting much personal feedback or any graded material, and the whole thing makes me feel stupid. i know i'm not stupid, and expressing this is kind of frustrating because everyone is like DON'T WORRY YOU'RE REALLY SMART #)(@)*#)(*)(# but smartness and doing well in school don't have that much to do with each other. going to school seems to be like 10% intelligence and 90% knowing how to go to school. it's frustrating because some of the reading she's giving us is like the world's most jargony jargon (one article i read yesterday was like a cartoon of a stuffy history professor?). i feel like there's so much information for me to try to read and synthesize, more than i've ever had for a class before, and i keep missing stuff. 99% of it is that it's a short summer class so we have to cram a whole semester into 6 weeks, but it's super super super stressful for me so far and i'm really worried about it.



blehhh. i have a meeting now, and then i have to try really hard to do all the work i have to do and then go home and have more excruciating classes and feel stupid and want to go to sleep forever.

wish in one hand

blehhh. so at the end of our fiscal year, we have a staff appreciation day. usually it's a really low-key morning with breakfast and mimosas, then we play board games if we want (last year it was at the circa centre and we had a playstation !), then we have a really good catered bbq for lunch, and then we get "surprise" dismissed early at 12 or 1. i'm totally cool with this format ! i feel appreciated ! however.



this year some people on the committee opted to make it a field day type thing so now instead of actually relaxing after a stressful end of the fiscal year, there is a rigid schedule of "fun" including tug-o-war and something called like pass the grape, which sounds like a weird sex thing. i will not be playing pass the grape with my coworkers. i do not need to have elementary school activities assigned to me to have fun. i'm not 8, or from south philly.

i had both of my classes last night. history class was kind of a bummer because i have a lot of academic insecurity and i feel like everyone is so far ahead of me- not in knowledge of the subject, but as far as having the tools and language to discuss it. and i shouldn't compare myself to them, because they're mostly very young and have been going to school for 17 years straight at this point. i also got something wrong in one of my essay questions and i'm wayyyy too embarrassed about it. the added bonus of posting our homework online for everyone to see instead of just handing it in is a bummer, though i understand why it's useful !



german class is fine, but it's weird that the class is being taught in german by the third lesson? like i took german for years but i can't imagine how the people who have never taken it are doing. like, he just keeps saying things loud in german instead of saying it once in english? i mean, it's working, but it's weird.

after class, i did some homework (including writing a german essay and making notes for a history project) and then did the argent dailies with paul. i'm sort of bummed that everyone (including me !) quit wow, but i decided to do those dailies every day to get the three mounts i don't have.



then i had a rousing conversation about merkins and celebrity nudes with mouse (not arousing, rousing), and a little about possible poisoning at jamestown. i tried to talk a little bit about stuff i'm learning to help me remember it, because mouse is the only person on earth who wouldn't be bored by it ! did you guys know that the colonists named "virginia" after their virgin queen and because it was "virgin land", but the name the indians had for it, which i totally forgot (tsenecomaka?), means "densely populated land"?

what else? something less grumpy. there was a thread on my all ladies feminist messageboard about books we read when we were kids, and i ended up picking up used copies of all the books i hadn't read. because i was a nerdy, library-frequenting child, that was only five books. i got:


the ghost next door by wylly folk st. john


wonder by rachel vail


the girl with the silver eyes by willo davis roberts


stranger with my face by lois duncan


daphne's book by mary downing hahn

the majority of those are supernatural thrillers, and i'm really surprised i hadn't read them- especially that i've never heard of wylly folk st. john. honestly i'm surprised i haven't read the other ones either because i also liked books about girls doing stuff (any stuff). haha. have you guys read any of those?

i guess i'm going to get ready to go- the work party starts at 10, and the closing ceremony (aka we get to go home?) is at 1, so i'm going to go home and work on my history homework and maybe eat a big sandwich? then mouse and i are going to the phillies game and tomorrow we're possibly tubing if it isn't raining???

weekend to-do list
- clean ! there's so much grossness that is my fault that i'm oblivious to !
- DROP MY LAUNDRY OFF (this is important, all my cool clothes are dirty)
- finish my history homework (hopefully i'll do that this afternoon)
- do my reading for history next week
- post the german essay i wrote on our class site
- do the other german assignments i have (which is just using this interactive website)
- go grocery shopping

all of that is a pretty tall order but i want to try to be responsible !!!! wish me luck.