Daily Newsie

YAY!!!!!

Confession: I skipped class tonight. I had a nightmarish sort of day, and I simply could not face three hours of endless babbling on about other peoples’ families. I have difficulty getting a word in edgewise in that class, thanks to a particular classmate who talks all the time, and besides, I don’t really want to share my family stories with people who likely wouldn’t appreciate the humor in my younger brother consuming a stick of butter while my older brother and I were supposed to be watching him, then throwing it up on the couch just as everyone was getting ready to leave for church. The class tires me something awful, and I really didn’t think I would be able to stand it tonight. So I sat on the couch with The Fiance’, eating pizza and watching TV instead.  It was nice, but now I suppose I should get cracking on one of the three papers due in the next two weeks.

I’ve been reading Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata” lately. I like how it sounds, but the part about avoiding “loud and aggressive persons” because “they are vexatious to the spirit” makes me think I should probably dial it down a few notches. My father always liked the first line — “Go placidly amid the noise and the haste and remember what peace there may be in silence” — while my favorite line is toward the end — “With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world” — but the whole thing is pretty nice. I especially like the part about the universe unfolding as it should. I don’t know why it’s held such appeal for me in the past few days; it must be because everything is getting a little hectic at work and at school, and it just makes me feel better to think that, even though I’m not behind the wheel (or at least not paying the least bit of attention), the fabric of my life is knitting itself in exactly the right pattern.

Heavy. It may be time to stop thinking and just go to bed.

I used to be a strange sort of proud about the fact that any plants under my care quickly wilted and died. My aunt proffered all sorts of shoots and seedlings, but each withered away, leaving me with an assortment of empty pots that I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with. I don’t know exactly what changed, but I am now the proud owner of two thriving plants, both of which have survived numerous transplants and cross-town moves. It’s the transplants that really get me — I actually removed plants from their pots and moved them to larger living quarters, and they didn’t die. In fact, they grew! Aunt Patti would be so proud.

A few weeks ago, The Fiance’ and I ventured to K-Mart for balcony furniture, and the rows upon rows of flowers lined up outside the store caught my fancy. As I debated among pansies, petunias and gardenias (which I don’t really like because they smell like dirt, but they remind me of my grandmother — not for that reason), I stumbled upon a small plant with little white flowers. It was a strawberry plant, and I immediately decided it would be mine. And now it is mine, and it’s growing little tiny strawberries just like its name suggests it would. I never realized that strawberries are actually the middle part of the flower, which obviously gets bigger and more strawberry-shaped as time goes by.

One berry is particularly large and beginning to take on a reddish tinge, and it’s ridiculous how eagerly I monitor its progress. “Did you see Strawberry?” I practically shout as The Fiance’ comes into the living room, and he laughs and nods because he humors me by keeping an eye on it as well. I’m constantly fussing with it, turning it to ensure even growth and making sure it’s always in the most sun-soaked corner of our little balcony. Once school is out and I have more time for such frivolous pursuits, I would love to turn the balcony into a flower garden full of tiny plants — I have my eye on a broccoli plant and a pepper plant, and possibly a tomato plant for my beloved. I like to watch things grow, it turns out, and each new shoot is cause for celebration.

It really is nice to be so easily amused.

I’m 11 pages into a 25-page paper and my brain has officially shut down. It’s not due for another few weeks, which is nice, but I was really hoping to spend today knocking it out of the ballpark. Instead, I wrote for a few hours this morning, ate too much for lunch, slept for several hours this afternoon, and kicked off the evening by knocking marinara sauce all over the beige carpet. So it hasn’t really been a good day, and now my brain won’t think anymore. Rather than force myself to write something sucky that I’ll only end up revising anyway, I decided to set up camp on the couch and watch some TV … but the catch is that I feel guilty and stressed out because I’m not doing homework or writing this paper.

Graduate school is hard, y’all.

That’s what time I woke up this morning, because that’s what time the university’s online registration program was going to allow my section of the alphabet to sign up for fall classes. There was one in particular that I really wanted — one I’ve been wanting to take since I started the program, actually — and I noticed earlier that there were only 12 seats available, so I really wanted to be sure I snagged mine before anyone else did.

I needn’t have worried (or woken up at this obscene hour), because so far only one person has signed up. Two now, including me. I was the first person to sign up for the other class, which — contrary to what the professor told me earlier this year — does not begin on the weekend of my wedding, but the weekend after.

The thing that bums me out slightly is that this is my last real semester. There’s a class in interpersonal communication that I would love to take, but it’s at the same time as the class that has me salivating because it’s rumored far and wide to be the best class anyone’s ever taken, and this time I can’t say I can just take interpersonal next time around. It’s also a little frightening that, after a year of talking about a thesis, I now actually have to write one.

Now it’s 5:20 a.m. and I don’t want to go back to sleep because I know it’ll make getting up in an hour that much harder. I hope you’ve all been blogging, because I’m off to the internets in search of something interesting to keep me awake.

Things I have learned this week from TruTV (formerly CourtTV), which we have now thanks to a mistake on the part of the cable company:

*If you’re going to go to sleep in a ground-floor apartment with your kitchen window open, leave a tomato on the sill so that forensic scientists can identify your killer by the shoeprint he leaves in the unfortunate fruit.

*If a coworker half your age won’t stop stalking you at work, file a formal complaint or else run the risk of him eventually going crazy and killing you.

*Don’t get married, ever, because if you do your spouse will do one of three things: set the bed on fire with you in it, strangle you in the hot tub, or hire a hitman to kill you.

This is worse than watching “Unsolved Mysteries” when I was little, because at least then I knew my dad had a gun in the house. All I have now is a bear who, although fierce, is somewhat limited by the fact that he is stuffed. Maybe I should start watching Nick at Nite reruns at bedtime. At least on that channel, everybody’s differences are resolved with a hug — and not a suffocating one, either — before the half-hour is up.

It’s a perfectly good Saturday afternoon and I’m sitting in the library. I like to torture myself by taking the computer in front of the window so I can look out over campus and see what people who aren’t stuck in the library are up to. I had a long conversation with a local barista this morning after she handed over my honeysuckle and cinnamon latte (SO delicious) about the fact that I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m going to do with my graduate degree, but that, for some unexplainable reason, I want to get my PhD as well. Why? I can’t rattle off theories like some of my classmates can (one of them mentioned a theory the other day that I’ve never even heard of) and I still don’t know what “heuristic” means, yet I feel like putting myself through another two years of debt and reading — so much reading — for what? Could I be a college professor? Do I have any idea what I’m getting myself into?

In other news, I just killed an entire forest by printing out twenty-some articles for my final paper in Family Communication class. This paper is particularly important because it (or some variation thereof) will eventually become the literature review for my thesis, which I’m due to begin in the fall. My Family Comm professor agreed to lead my thesis (which is good, because I like him despite a not-so-stellar midterm grade that I used as an excuse to go into high-calorie mourning for a week) and my Qualitative Methods professor agreed to sit on the committee, so all I need to do is pick one more professor and get cracking. I can’t believe I’m writing a thesis. I may need a drink. Or several.

Right. It’s time to slink off to one of the study tables and start reading about family communication and illness. I may be missing in action for the next few weeks, but rest assured I will certainly emerge before my 27th birthday on May 16 to make sure you all remember it. I may be approaching 30, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still enjoy a good fuss. (Bring beer!)