sawblade and speak and spell

my advice for you guys today? don't grow up poor. if you already did grow up poor, go back in time and have not done that. especially if the people in your family have bad teeth and you don't have dental insurance. because you will end up 28 years old and missing three molars and about to lose another ! and also, you will have had so many root canals that you actually lost count of them.



i know that's shitty advice, because poor people are the ones least likely to time travel (cost prohibitive, can't miss work, etc.) but it may be my only option at this point.

hey. i'm in a bad mood.

history and german last night. we're getting ready for our finals, and my history final is worrying me. it's a word document we download and write in and upload again- it's open book, and available for 24 hours, but it's 24 hours in the middle of the work week. like... it's available at 6pm on wednesday, then i have my german class from 7-8:45 on wednesday night, then i guess i have to do it before bed? cause i work 8-5 the next day. i'm sort of bummed- between this and my german professor scheduling interviews during the work day friday i'm getting anxious about how school will work with my work schedule. blehhhh.


helpful infographic

i was actually going to take a day off next week to work on my final, but since i have to deal with my tooth today i don't think i'll be able to do that. ugh. at least brooke gets here thursday- brooke is one of my favorite people on planet earth and i cannot believeeeeee she's actually going to be here ! everyone, we have to do a good job of selling philly to her so she moves here. everyone be great ! independence hall, be historic ! ben franklin museum, be charming but janky ! liberty bell, stay cracked ! christina, be weird ! mouse, don't wear short shorts ! we have to make this perfect so brooke (and also julz- julz doesn't know me yet but i'm putting her in my poké ball too) moves here.



what else? no real plans this weekend, which is okay with me. tonight i'm probably going to work on my homework so i don't waste a whole day doing it tomorrow, and then saturday i'm probably going to work on my craft swap project. on sunday mouse and i are going to go do a thing but we don't know what yet !

to-do list for the weekend
- german essay
- misc. german homework
- history essay (i'm actually DONE with the reading for the week already !)
- supplemental history reading
- work on craft swap thing
- read m is for magic
- catch up on sleep

i guess most of that sounds pretty boring, but i promise that next week will be cooler.

p.s. fuck teeth.

or peat moss, what have you

soooo one thing i've been thinking about lately is going back to school. i quit school to move to philadelphia, with about 2.5 years under my belt, and realized when i got here that i'd basically never be able to afford to go back (as a teenager, based on my family income of like.. 14k/year, i got really sweet grants and basically got paid to go to school. i mean, like, an excess of $2k/year, and not enough that i could quit working, but that felt like millions at the time). a few years after moving here (2006 !) i got a job at a university that offers full tuition benefits, and incidentally has a program where certain degrees can be obtained entirely after work hours.



i was disheartened to find that my clown college credits from florida barely transfer- a handful of classes do, and about half only transfer as electives (!!!), so i basically have to start from scratch. i guess that's good though because i have decided to switch from pursuing chemistry to history.



i feel really stupid for not taking advantage of these benefits before- i've started the registration process and sort of trailed off several times before. i was thinking about it the other day and it really struck me that i would've killed for this opportunity when i was 18 and that my mom would've killed for it to while going into extreme student loan debt and probably aging herself a million years while trying to work full time, raise two kids by herself, and go to school in her 40s, and that most people do not get opportunities like this.

i also have no false illusions about the usefulness of a history degree. i'm pretty happy with the field i'm in now, which is one of those fields that bafflingly requires "a degree" (in anything), so i basically will just get to study something i'm interested in and see what i can do with it on a personal, if not professional, level, and possibly make more at my current job because i got the degree.

on another note, here's a video of my little cousin setting himself on fire that appeared on court tv !