ascending peculiarity

So basically all I have done from March through June was panic about school.  But that’s okay now, because I graduated.

I’ll repeat that, because it’s worth repeating.  I GRADUATED.   I passed the classes I needed to pass, I did the things I needed to do, I figured out how to fix the paperwork mess-up when they told me I didn’t do it, everything.  All of it is done.  For the first time since August 2001, I am no longer a college student.  For the first time ever I have a diploma (fuck you, high school, I don’t need that GED.)

I’ve already moved on the next goal: getting a job.  I’ve only been sending out resumes for about two weeks, so I have an awful lot of soul-sucking ahead of me.

May, why such a hateful month? It seems so counterintuitive that spring should be the worst time of year for me, but that doesn’t keep it from being true: my mental health is never worse than it gets to be from April through June. There are plenty of people who suffer less when the sun is back out and everything is new and growing. I seem to do best when it’s grey and rainy and cozy.

I have other reasosn to hate May besides the physical, though. May 2007 was when I had my big breakdown, and had to quit school for months and crawl back home to my parents, when things were so bad I couldn’t even make myself leave the house alone. May 2007 also was the month we lost my paternal grandmother; my maternal grandmother died in May 2003, on Mother’s Day. All those associations are stuck with me now.

So I’m definitely slogging through this month. School is frightening me a lot. I need to pass all my classes in order to graduate in June; right now the situation is iffy in my syntax class, and it’s a lot easier to panic about how I’ve screwed things up than it is to actually do the work to fix it. The idea of what will happen if I don’t graduate is pretty much a black hole in my head: I can’t imagine anything whatsoever. “My entire life will be ruined” sounds a little extreme, but I don’t know.

Only a month, though, and then school will be over. I can survive another month!

I spent the weekend up in Cornelius, which really helped my stress levels a lot. One of the more difficult things about the last few months has been my lack of people in Eugene; I have more social skills than I used to, but that’s still a matter of friendly acquaintances, rather than actual friends. I can’t remember how people actually make friends, to be honest. When I think of most of the people I’ve become close to in the last five years, pretty much all of them were cases of already being friends with Person A and getting to know Person B through them. It’s an excellent system! But it doesn’t help when you realize you’re in a situation where you have to start a whole new chain.

But, yeah. I spent the weekend at home with my sister and mom and it was a lovely break from everything.

This weekend, I:

+ had more hugs than in the past month and a half combined
+ slept a lot
+ watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and the new Doctor Who with Kelly
+ got a really cute haircut
+ convinced my mom to buy me new clothes
+ saw my brother for the first time in ages
+ played Mario Kart on the wii for the first time and found it unexpecteldy awesome
+ spent the round trip to Eugene belting out every song on Kelly’s ipod ridiculously loudly

And Susie is coming down the weekend of the 24th, and then I’m probably going back up again the weekend after that for my family’s big barbeque.

I can do this.

Sometimes crappy supermarket sushi is the yummiest thing in the world.  Sometimes it is the grossest.  I really wish there was a way to tell which one it was going to be before I buy it.

I’ve been in a really weird mood all this week, which I blame mostly on my sleep schedule.  It’s getting worse as time goes on, and I’m not sure what to do to fix it.  I’m working on giving up both naps and caffeine, which has to help a little, but not enough.  According to everything I’ve read about insomnia, the most helpful thing is to actually have your bed be a place devoted just to sleep, but that’s really not possible for me.  When you live in one small room, the bed works overtime as place where I do homework, place where I read, place where I watch movies, etc, along with place where I sleep.

Yesterday I attempted to register for my classes for spring term; this was not completely successful.  In order to graduate in June, I have two more linguistics classes I need to take.  One of these is a phonology class.  One is a syntax class.

I can say with some confidence that all of the following are true:

a) Both of these courses are required for all linguistics majors.
b) Both of these courses are ONLY offered spring term
c) Very very few people who are not ling majors will be taking either of these classes.

Given all these facts — who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to make the required discussion session for the syntax class take place AT THE SAME TIME as the lecture for the phonology class?

HATE HATE HATE ARGGGGGGGH.

There’s another discussion section listed that supposedly doesn’t have the conflict, but it was already listed as full when I registered yesterday (and, dude, I’m a senior with too many credits, I have a pretty good registration time!) and it’s still full now.

Ugh.  I guess I’ll have to go see the linguistics undergrad advisor next week, because seriously.  Ridiculous.