It's that time of the semester

~Warning~ Whiny complaining ahead.
also - victory note - at this point, I have eaten my pride and written 6 pages of terribly organized semi-drivel that I will turn in along with at least 4 more this afternoon at 5PM. This is probably the worst I have ever behaved (or written) when trying to write a paper for college. Yikes!

Every semester there is at least one. One paper that causes me to feel the following:
I HATE THIS STUPID F*ING PAPER!!!!!!!!
I just want to WRITE. SOMETHING. Something that is semi-intelligible and turn-in-able!!

This one in particular is only 20% of my grade, and the prof is lenient, so if I just turn in SOMEthing that proves that I have been working on this for weeks at a time (which I have) then I will pass the class with a fairly decent grade. Heck, I could turn NOTHING in and get a B. But I am not the kind of student who can turn in nothing, or even who can turn in something that she knows the prof will read and think "Really? You thought an intelligent person could read this without their brains hurting?"

I have been staring at the information I've collected for this particular paper for... let me think... well, I've been staring REALLY hard for about a week and a half now. And by staring really hard I mean looking at the information, trying to make sense of it, running up against a wall, going to check facebook, going back to looking at my info, trying to make sense of it, running up against a wall, walking away to clear my head *repeat*. For hours. Occasionally I'll get some kind of little breakthrough, and do some discourse analysis. But mostly I'll finish 4-5h of work having analyzed one measly little thing that might not even cohere with the rest of the project, utterly discouraged and exhausted. I am TRYING, honest to goodness. But my brain just will. not. synthesize this stuff into something coherent. I have dedicated four of my days, and countless half-days in the past week and a half to trying to get this going SOMEwhere, including today. And you see what I'm doing? I'm writing a blog post about my frustration. Argh!!!!
I HATE THIS STUPID F*ING PAPER!!
Could I be any clearer? No, I thought not.
It's two thirty, I haven't eaten since breakfast, and I'm hungry, but honestly I don't care (which if you know me will tell you just how desperate this has become) because I just want to write SOMETHING. Something intelligible, intelligent, and turn-in-able. Just a freaking START.
And it is that precise determination that is going to force my synapses to get it together already.
One-two-three-GO!

Two-and-a-half hours later, I have three and a half pages. I am averaging a writing speed of 1 page/hour y'all! Praise God. Things were getting ugly.

Bread!

Today, I made bread.
Me! Bread! Woah!
The recipe came from a dear dear friend of mine who promised me it was the easiest recipe in the world (if I had all the time in the world) and tasted as close to European bread as she has ever come across in the U.S. of A. - so of course, after the quiche-miracle of last week and with a recommendation like that, I just HAD to try it.
I am about to put the first loaf in the oven you guys.
The proof will be, not in the pudding, but in the loaf.
w00t!

p.s.: I wanted to post about this in my facebook status, but I already posted about the miracle quiche last week, and I really do not want to make myself sound too home-makerish. After all, I'M JUST TRYING TO LEARN HOW TO FEED MYSELF FOR CHEAP, YOU GUYS! Without overstepping my budget. Flour and yeast are cheap. Ready-made bread and pie crusts are not. Capiche?
Anyways;
bread!!! :D Yay!

Up-side-down

So... yeah... I just spoke. In front of people. About me. And nobody cringed. People laughed (I said funny things! !!). People even came up to me after and said what I'd said had impacted them. I met another TCK!
The world feels just a leetle bit up-side-down tonight. In a good way.
Over 'n out.
E.O.

Studying + Twister = Awesome

How I would Like to Study/Write:
Come finals time I always, for some class or another, find somewhere I can spread out aaaaaalllllll my papers for that class so that I can really get a good look at them. I guess having a real-live bird's-eye-view of them makes me feel like I'll get a bird's-eye-view representation of the material in my head.
So if I had things my way, for this particular project, I'd have a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge piece of white paper, as big as my livingroom floor, with all my translations printed out on it, so I could write all over it and crawl around on the floor, comparing, scribbling, pondering, referring back to the version by my feet... as if the whole thing were a gargantuan game of twister. Yeah.
It'd be fantastic.
But I don't have that much paper or that much tape. =*(
Still, a girl can dream.

The Rule of "Good enough"

I realized yesterday that I mostly live by the rule of "good enough".

My clothes are always in piles on the floor or the bed, according to how dirty they are...
it's not a perfect system, but it's good enough.

There are always dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, but I do put away the perishable food...
it's not a perfect system, but it's good enough.

I always do the readings for class, but don't make the writing portions to my own standards (which are quite high), only to the point where the prof will think I have...
they're never perfect, but they're good enough.

...and so on, and so forth. In Spanish it's called "la ley del mínimo esfuerzo," and teachers and elders used to throw it in our faces all the time: you do just what you need to get by, not an ounce more. It's taken me three years away from that to find a good translation for it, but I finally have (though I didn't realize it 'til I started thinking about what I meant by it):

The rule of "good enough"

It's ok, I think, to live by this rule in some areas of our lives. But there must be areas for which we find it unacceptable, for which "good enough" just is not enough.
What is it for you?

over 'n out.
E.O.


The above is merely one example of the results of me being really, really good at paper-avoidance strategies. xD

You found me a what??

Thanksgiving. My parent's car pulls up at my aunt's house with all four of us in it. We gather our things, step out, get the stuff from the trunk. My sister and I transfer Christmas presents from our trunk to my Grandmother's, who has come out onto the front porch to give directions. We finish, she smiles, gives me a hug, we exchange greetings... and then she drops the bomb.
"Honey, I have something to tell you."
"Oh? What's that, Jojo?"
"I've found you a boyfriend!" She smiles again, friendly, innocent, almost solicitous, as my brain reels with what-did-you-just-say-to-me????? clamoring. "Do I need a boyfriend?" I say, raising my eyebrows. "I don't know." She rejoins, and then proceeds to tell me a long rigmarole about how she met a woman at my great-grandmother's nursing home (as usual) and they were making small talk about their grandchildren ("because you know, we were signing in at the front desk and just started chatting, and..."), and they discovered that this woman's husband and my grandfather used to have lunch together at the hospital where my grandfather worked (how they determined who sat with whom in the hospital cafeteria is still a mystery, but they did) and her husband just died of gobbledygook, and it's terribly sad, and now she has to watch her mother die in a nursinghomebutANYWAY, what she was trying to say, honey, is that this woman has a grandson who just graduated from Blah-blah university and he is into XYZ, and he's outdoorsy, and she told her, you know, that she had a granddaughter who wasn't frilly, wasn't very girly (I must have looked slightly defensive at this point because she started to say that she had never been that way either, and she'd never even had a manicure, she just hated people messing with her) and anyway, I should just meet the young man... and on and on it went.
I just laughed at her, and took her arm and told her she was cute. She continued to try and convince me, and I laughed (I am still laughing, in fact) But I also couldn't help but cringe inside, because my GRANDMOTHER tried to SET ME UP with the grandson of SOMEONE SHE MET IN THE NURSING HOME while taking care of my DYING GREAT-GRANDMOTHER. Does anyone else see the flaw in this reasoning?!
It's kind of scary, because, knowing my grandmother, this is only the beginning. The first inkling of the fact that she now considers me an "adult" who ought to be looking to find "a nice man from a godly family, sweet pea." It's the first indication that I'm moving up in the world, to places that have new and different kinds of small talk that requires new defenses. Hopefully I will be able to acquire them fast enough, and hopefully I will keep laughing throughout.

over 'n out.
E.O.

Prolific

I have looked it up. Every year so far I have written more posts in November than any other month. Go figure. I guess the stress of finals + life-readjustment + being cooped up inside again makes me want the creative outlet? Or maybe it's just the change of the seasons. I love autumn. I also love the word autumn and do not understand why it has gone out of fashion. Bring it back! It's so much prettier than "fall," if a bit less literal.
Anyway, in keeping with this observation of mine, I have decided to write a post to officially note it - and thereby make this the month with most posts EVER on this blog. w00t.

Autumn. Autumn. Autumn. Are there any other words with "mn" in them? Mnemonics. That's all I can think of. Mn?

clearly this is degenerating. I will stop before something truly unfortunate happens.
over 'n out.
E.O.