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.

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.

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.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about that this week.  Careerwise, well.  I’m not qualified to go on into academia and graduate school.  Publishing, whether books or comics, is really cutthroat, and I don’t have any internships or editing experience coming out of college.  Library science is still a definite possibility, though: the program I’ve been looking at in New York offers a specialization in Rare Books and Special Collections, which is exactly where I’m most interested.

The thing is, though, before I do any of that, what I really want to do is go to Europe.  If I don’t do it now, I probably never will, and it is something I want, almost desperately, and have for a long time.

Of course, I’m far from alone on this.  There’s a long and storied history of poor desperate American kids with nothing to their names but a BA heading off to the continent.  From what I can gather from research, there seem to be two main ways most of them achieve it: the first is teaching English, and the second is as an au pair.

I’m pretty sure teaching English is not the solution for me, though.  There’s any number of problematic elements:

a) There’s not that many jobs in Europe, compared to other markets, like east Asia
b) Employers in Europe are way more likely to hire applicants who are already from the EU
c) TEFL is one of those things that’s gotten so huge it’s really incredibly hard to tell what is legit and what is a scam or just crappy
d) Most decent jobs require some sort of training, and courses are well over a thousand bucks
e) I’m not actually interested in teaching.

Being an au pair, on the other hand, sounds really appealling.  You live with a foreign family, and in exchange for about 30 hours a week of helping with childcare and light housework, you get free room and board and some decent pocket money.  (In the some of the programs I’ve looked up, they might even help pay towards your language classes, which, hey.)

The only real problem I see with this scenario is I don’t think I have enough childcare experience.  I have some, at least.  The entire fall of 2003, in between leaving Simon’s Rock and starting Evergreen, I spent at home babysitting for the 2-year-old and 4-year-old foster children while my parents were at work.  Still, I don’t have any actual references.  I guess that leaves the problem on what I can do within the next six months or so to make myself that much more qualified.

(Puck suggested that, since I still have a hole in my schedule for next term, I should consider taking a child development course, or something along those lines.  This is a brilliant idea and I would totally take their suggestion, if it were not for the fact that I cannot find UO offering anything even vaguely similar.)

So, yes.  So far my plans are to try and get more experience with babies and preschoolers, and to continue researching any other likely ways to get myself overseas.  Advice is always welcome.

So far I’ve figured out a number of things a number of strategies that seem to work pretty well.  The three things that consistently work to motivate me to get out are a) classes b) meeting up with people and c) running errands.  Something that <I>doesn’t</I> work at all, apparently, is just telling myself that I should go out and take a walk.  I need to have a goal in mind, and a clearly defined plan, all set up in my mind.  (CONTROL ISSUES AHOY.)  And for whatever reason, just going out doesn’t fit into that structure in my head.

So the next problem is, of course, what can I use as a motivator on days when I don’t have class, or a friend to meet up with, or important errands?  Because right now my instinct is to make up new errands, which … ends up with me spending money when I shouldn’t, which is unacceptable.

Today I went out to buy mechanical pencils and to check if the comic book store had the issues I wanted in.  I got the pencils, and they were sold out of the comics I wanted, so I was halfway successful on those fronts.  But I also ended up buying a book, a frappucino and a sandwich, not one of which I needed.  Why do I fail so hard at financial responsibility?

The weird pseudo-spring continues outside.  It’s a little too warm to be wearing my hoodie around, but not so warm that I don’t feel weirdly awkward without it.  Surely this is unacceptable to all reasonable people.

Yesterday I was feeling seriously anxious for the first time in a while, and since I had neither work or school, I went ahead and took some of my anxiety medication. It wiped me out completely, which was actually pretty nice. Sometimes a weekend of sleep is exactly what you need.

I have delivery food coming right now. That’s not responsible money management by any means, but it’s the last time for the forseeable future. Tomorrow starts new twin goals for me: a) don’t spend money on food unless you have no food whatsoever and b) stop drinking soft drinks. I’ve tried the giving-up-soda thing many times before, but who knows; many the umpteenth time is the charm!

My favorite song of the moment is definitely “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You” by Black Kids. They had their EP up for download for free for a long time, but it seems to be gone now. Still, you can probably find the song somewhere on the hype machine.

I’m missing people a lot right now. Not anybody specifically, but just … people. I like Eugene a lot, but it’s not home. Knowing there are dozens of people I can cling to on instant messenger or email doesn’t make up for the fact that I don’t know anyone in this city I can just go to for a hug when I need one, or call up to go out to lunch and play Uno with afterwards.

Today I slept in rather late, and then I got dressed and walked down to Safeway. It’s that weird part of February where it doesn’t feel like winter anymore, more like spring. It’s sunny and bright and the air tastes fresh and I walk through town squinting and wondering what happened to my Oregon rain. Which is silly, since it will be back within a few weeks, either way. It’s too warm to really wear my hoodie for the walk, but after all these weeks of cool weather I feel rather naked without it.

I really like the walk to Safeway, anyway. Between my various mental illnesses, getting out of the house is in and of itself a pretty big goal for me. Even though I know from experience that going out and taking a walk and doing something improves my mental state everytime, I can never quite make myself believe it. I have to prove it over again every time. I dragged myself outside today and went “Oh, yeah! I like this!”

(one of the things I really like about this room is its location; it’s pretty much equidistant from campus and the grocery store, which is all sorts of convenient.)

So I picked up my crazy pills (and also a few odds and ends: a slotted spoon, some mayonnaise, a Coke) and came back and got to feel like I had made something productive of the day. Most of the evening, on the other hand, has been devoted to watching British television on my laptop.

My sister Kelly and I had watched the first few episodes of Torchwood last year, when it began playing on the Sci-Fi Channel, but I gave it up pretty early because of how badly it sucked. Kelly stuck with it, though, and apparently it actually developed into a decent show by the end of the season, which she showed me last weekend. Today I caught up with it all the way to the last shows broadcast, and: yes. It is very enjoyable! John Barrowman is pretty, and there is goofy ridiculous science fiction; as long as it’s not mind-numbingly horrible, I think that’s all you can ask for.

I also have been watching QI, which is made of charm, cleverness, and cute. (Triple threat of alliteration!) Quiz shows, you are always the way to my heart. If you can be snarky and British while doing so, all the better.

If nothing else, it introduced me to The Moonwalking Bird, which is a thing of joy forever. You honestly do not want to know how many times in a row I have watched that clip.