i'm really feelin' frustrated

dear students that supply the material i grade for my paycheck,

i would like to thank you for opening my eyes to the reason that so many of my professors have dropped writing assignments from the syllabus only after we all submitted them. to be honest, i've been harboring a little petty grudge against quite a few of my professors who had us write reports with promises of comments that would show us the exact way to change our own personal styles of writing into forensic report style only to say two weeks later that the assignment would be dropped from the syllabus and the class would now be graded out of 90 instead of 100. i thought them lazy and irresponsible and a slew of other adjectives that made them unfit to teach. but now i understand that they were just trying to save themselves. like a person escaping an abusive relationship, they were finally willing to say that they had had enough and that they deserve so much better. and i applaud their strength and self-preservation. i'm a little jealous that i cannot do the same.

students, i would like to thank you for cementing in my mind forever the importance of writing. you have shown me that the ability to write well is a gift not to be taken for granted. you taught me that knowledge of basic grammar can not only save my academic and professional careers, but also my life. because i know i, for one, would love nothing more than to strangle both you and myself after getting halfway through some of your papers. i understand that for a lot of you, english is not your first language, so i am willing to overlook the your/you're confusion and the use of the wrong "its" that grates on my nerves like nails on a chalkboard. but there are some things that i just cannot and will not overlook. to the student that thought not using the first person in a paper meant to take out all sentence subjects completely, i hope your favorite brand of cereal gets discontinued. to the student that put together a list of random nouns that lasted for two lines and ended it with a period, as if it was some sort of new-age sentence, i hope every time you think you find a parking spot on campus, it turns out that the space is occupied by a car pulled in a little too far. and to the student that refuses to believe in any form of agreement - subject-verb, tense, etc - and puts quotes around half of the paper without actually quoting anything, i hope a monkey claws out your eyes.

but above all, i would like to thank you for teaching me that, no matter how old you get, grad student or not, you are never too old to be completely lazy and moronic and underestimate the intelligence of everyone around you. i confess, i never read the slides of the professor i work with. but that didn't stop me from noticing that nine out seventeen students copied his slides word for word. i'm not sure if it was the fact that every single one of you had the same bullet pointed list, in the same order, with the same typos, and the same extra spaces added in that tipped me off or the fact that you all decided to ignore what the assignment wanted and give me the exact same answers to questions nobody asked, but somehow, i figured it out. and by the way, i don't know how many times the professor and i have to repeat it, but bullet points are not allowed.

and to the students that write papers that flow, that know the difference between their, there, and they're, that answer the questions asked and fill their papers with insightful findings and helpful conclusions, i would like to thank you for being the light in an otherwise dreary existence. you are the voice of reason that keeps me from jumping out of my windows. you are the ones that help me make it through.

sincerely,
your much abused TA

P.S. a lot of you start every sentence with "this examiner," and it took me forever to pinpoint exactly which memory that was tugging at. i finally figured out that it was somehow causing memories of cadet kelly (the disney channel movie) to resurface. this TA now wishes that she could send half of you to some form of literary boot camp where someone will call you a maggot to humiliate you into writing better.

*Don't Be Stupid (You Know I Love You) - Shania Twain

i just don't understand

i love snow. i do. i think that there is no point to winter without a good covering of white. i like how snow looks, i like the crunch of it being compressed under my shoes, i like throwing snowballs and sledding and the bite in the air when it snows. i love the smell of snow. the rare times that we get crazy amounts of snow and are snowed in make me ecstatic.

but today, i do not want snow. i wish this snow had come on saturday. or any time next week. or last week. or the week before or after. but not today.

today i have a midterm, and it is a test that you can't really study for because there is really not much to study besides everything ever written online about macs ever, and that is impossible. but the professor said it wouldn't be hard so i was trying my best not to stress about it. and doing a very fine job at that, too. but now we have snow and school is cancelled so my midterm is cancelled and it is pushed to after spring break which means the week of me sitting around doing nothing is now the week of me sitting around doing nothing and trying not to worry about my midterm. and i just wanted to finish all of my midterms before spring break so that i would only have my independent study to think about. and now that is ruined. thanks a lot, snow.

speaking of snow, why is it that whenever a major storm is threatening to hit, people run out and buy milk? i mean, i get the rest of the groceries, but milk? you know what happens when there's a really bad storm? electricity tends to move on to somewhere less stormy. and milk goes bad without electricity. fast. and very disgustingly. i mean, i can barely tolerate keeping milk on the counter for the three seconds it takes to make chocolate milk. in fact, sometimes i pour the milk in the fridge and then gulp down my chocolate milk as fast as possible because ew unrefrigerated milk turns sour. and i know i am beyond extreme, but i do not understand why you would buy something that gets so gross without electricity the minute people tell you something is going to happen that may leave you electricityless. i mean, can you not go a few days without milk? really?

*I Just Don't Understand - The Beatles

i read this article on procrastination today, and it is seriously the most perfect thing ever. like, really. go read it now. especially if you procrastinate or know people who procrastinate or have ever judged someone as lazy because they procrastinate. it's kinda long for an online article, but totally worth it. i mean it.

if you don't want to read all of it then at least read what he says is the reason for procrastination:

It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth. 

You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything. 

But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures. 

Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers. 

This was the part that made my heart sink when I read it. Not that anybody was trying to make things difficult for me, but I grew up feeling high expectations from the adults in my life and myself. For most of my schooling, I was always in advanced programs, always aced everything, and when I got anything less than an A, people asked me what was wrong. 

I also noticed other kids didn't get this treatment. They were congratulated for getting B’s and even C’s. So from the feedback I got, I learned that a report card (of mine) with five A’s and a B was indicative of a shortcoming somewhere, not success. I've written about this before so I won’t get into it here, but suffice it to say that I learned that the downsides of being imperfect are far greater than the upsides of being perfect.

i think i could need this in my life

i've been staring at this blank page for almost an hour, starting sentences and deleting them, but there's too much to say that i can't say. not yet. and it's getting in the way of everything else. i think that writing in my journal and my ability to blog are somehow connected. around the time that i first started blogging (here), i also started journaling. i'd had a diary when i was younger that i went back to a few times as i was growing up, but i don't think i could ever write anything serious that started with "dear diary" and all of the entries that i remember either started with "dear diary, i've had a bad day" followed by whatever paltry reasons were behind the bad day, or with "dear diary, i have a crush on..." i was obviously not the deepest of rivers. there are only two entries that i think have any kind of realness to them, one mourning my cat that ran away/got left behind and one detailing my feelings about our move across country. but then again, my diary was often read by half of my family - a lot of the times because i would give it to them to read - so i knew that i couldn't ever write anything in it that i wouldn't say out loud to them.

and then i started this blog, and shortly after turned a notebook that was meant for genius stories and poetry that would be snatched up by publishers everywhere because it was just so amazingly great into some kind of safe haven for whining that shouldn't be seen by the public ever, and it all just worked. i didn't write in the journal regularly, but i did it regularly enough that half of the stuff in my head was poured out into a journal and half was poured out in to my blog, and this was about the time that i was starting to take hermitdom really seriously so there was no need to save any for social interactions because i was just not having very many of those. and then a while ago i got journal's block. every time i would go to write in it i would do something else instead until i just didn't go to write in it anymore. not long after that, i stopped writing in my blog regularly. and i think that they may be connected.

and when i don't blog regularly i get out of the practice of writing regularly. and if i don't write regularly then i forget how very badly i want to be a writer. and that is not good. so my new plan is to restart journaling which will hopefully restart regular blogging which will hopefully restart writing which will hopefully help with editing because editing is the hardest thing i have ever had to do. and i know i have said that before, but seriously. how do these people find the motivation to edit?

*If You're Gone - Matchbox 20

you always thought that i was stronger, i may have failed but i have loved you from the start

sometimes i can be a big procrastinator. and by sometimes i mean all the time, and by can be i mean am. it's really bad. and i want to change, but really it's more that i want to want to change and sometimes it's even that i want to want to want to change and who has time to do any changing when you're caught up in the number of want to's? not me, that's for sure.

take now for example, i'm supposed to be working on my independent study paper and instead i'm doing... well, everything else. i was supposed to have more done on this thing already. i was supposed to already have had a progress report meeting with the professor i'm reporting to. but i have nothing done, and because he likes me and thinks i'm a smart and responsible individual, he's okay with me not setting up a meeting yet. because he doesn't think i need someone to stand over my head to get something done. and he is so, so wrong.

i feel really bad because i really like this guy. he's awesome and possibly one of my favorite people here at mason. definitely in the top five. and he expects all this great stuff from me, because he really believes i have some potential for awesomeness and great achievement. and yet i'm sitting here doing not work and feeling bad about it but i cannot get myself to do any work. i can't.

this does not bode well for the rest of the phd process. i mean, the whole dissertation phase is basically me working on my own writing and stuff with occasional check ins with my advisers. and you know, i'm starting to realize just how impossible that is. i cannot work without a last minute breathing down my neck. you cannot write a forty page paper or an entire dissertation in the last minute. i need to get my act together.

just to clarify because the title may be misleading, this is not one of the professors that i fell in love with. i just think he's a super amazing and interesting person and in a world full of wastes of space he is most definitely the opposite of wasting his space.

*Fall for You - Secondhand Serenade

okay so i know that i already wrote a blog post today and that it's been literally years since i've spammed you guys with multiple posts in one day, but i am so incredibly excited right now that i have to document this moment.

long story short, please listen got its first stranger review, and he liked it! you can read the review here.  make sure you don't miss where he called it "brilliant and beautiful" and the part where he said that each poem "holds a great deal of emotional impact." i am seriously floating with excitement. does that make any sense? i don't care. i'm too excited to be coherent.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

immediately after putting out the book a bunch of things happened and i wasn't able to promote it as much as i was originally planning. i've started a little bit now, but i've been dragging my feet about it, thinking that maybe i should stop being full of myself and assuming that people that haven't known me for years will care what i have to say. you know, good old doubts and insecurities. this gave me the confidence that i had in the planning stage. i am so excited guys. so excited.

you should totally go buy my book. 

i think too much

my brother is turning eleven at the end of march, and having recently finished the harry potter series and loving it (the books inspired him to write his own novel which he got a couple of pages into before deciding that novel writing is more of a summer activity) and spending the past five years of his life telling me that i am destined to a life of miserable muggleness but that there is still hope for him to be a wizard, there was really nothing else to do but to get him a hogwarts acceptance letter. which will be delivered to his bed while he's sleeping with a stuffed owl. so that he'll wake up to it on his birthday. and then there's also a wand and stuff. needless to say, i'm really excited about his present. it's like when you're younger and you get your friend a really cool gift and you're equal parts excited that you get to give her something so awesome and jealous that you're not getting it and so on the day of the party you want to swap out the gift for something less awesome of yours and keep the new thing for yourself but your parents won't let you so you kind of hate her for the rest of the day? no? i guess that was only me then.

but anyway, all of my harry potter excitement for him has got me thinking about the series, and here are some things that i have realized.

i've read the series countless times, which means that yes, okay,  i know harry hears lily's final moments when a dementor comes near him and my gosh harry stop thinking you're special you're kind of annoying just shut up already. but recently i really thought about that, and oh my god it is horrifying. like, imagine you heard your mom begging someone not to kill you, knowing that she was probably going to die, and then actually getting killed. i mean, it was always sad and terrible that harry heard that, but i don't know why i didn't grasp the magnitude of how completely horrible it was until now. like, i know he doesn't really remember his mom and never really got to know her, so it would be a gajillion times worse for us that actually grew up with our moms and maybe that's what my mind was thinking, but still. goodness gracious rowling.

also, why do all of the pets in the series get cool names like hedwig and errol and crookshanks and then neville's toad is just named trevor. it's bad enough that no one likes you because you're a toad and that means the loser of the pets, but here, have a boring human name with no awesome greek mythology story or anything behind it. (i am not an expert in greek - or any other - mythology and may very well be wrong about this. if i am, please let me know.) no wonder he was always trying to run away.

oh, and on the topic of harry potter, i feel really stupid that it took me so long to get this, but spellotape is a play on words of sellotape which i somehow did not know was what they called tape over in not-america? i spent a year overseas with people who had either lived in england all their life or were taught british english all their life, and i kind of thought that i had figured out most of the american-british-english discrepancies. apparently not. but i feel like i should have known this. so i'm sharing it here to a) document my slowness and b) share the fact with you in case you are just as clueless as i am.

on a different note, my brother (the one in the first paragraph) was complaining to me about werewolves and vampires yesterday. he was saying that everyone always says that they're immortal but you can kill a vampire with a wooden stake or sunlight and a werewolf with a silver bullet to the heart. if they can die, then they shouldn't be called immortal. i was saying that, while true, i think it's more that they won't die until they're killed, to which he responded, "well, i'm immortal until i die, too." and you know what? he's right. so mythical creatures should not be called immortal. it should just be said that they live longer or don't age.

 *If You're Gone - Matchbox 20

these are things that i don't understand

okay, so i have a bookly confession to make (and also a moviely one) that i feel it is finally time to come to terms with. a few years ago i had heard enough reviews about how awesomely amazing the perks of being a wallflower was that i finally decided to just read it already. (most of the time i am very bad at reading recommended books and books that are known to be awesome. it takes me forever.) so i get the book and curl up with it, preparing for my mind to be blown. i was ready to laugh and cry and finally know the meaning of life. (those seemed to be the most common reactions to the book.) i started it and thought, meh. i got halfway through and thought, meh. i turned the last page and thought, okay i must be missing something here.

it wasn't a bad book, though i kind of wish it was. (at least bad books can be enjoyed for their sheer awfulness and incite some kind of strong reaction in me.) this book was just there. maybe, being in my first year or so of college, i was just too old to enjoy it. maybe there was the whole emperor's new clothes thing going on and i needed to be the little kid to point out that the guy was naked. maybe it was that we kept being told that charlie was some super english genius and yet we were reading his letters and i saw none of that genius in them. or maybe it just went right over my head. anything is possible. the point is, whenever someone would quote "and in that moment, we were infinite" and say it gave them chills, or refer to the book as the greatest thing they ever read and the book that made them who they are, i kind of wanted to demand they tell me what was so great about it and give them a list of actually great novels that they should read instead. 

and then the movie came out and i was like okay cool. it's been a few years since i read the book, the cast is awesome, maybe i'll finally understand the hype for this thing. but i came out of the theater thinking that i got it more in book form, and that's saying something. as people were going on and on about how amazing the movie was, i had to wonder if we were watching the same thing. the most i got out of the movie was that emma watson, though she had a flew slip ups, did a pretty good american accent and that the actors can, in fact, act. as for the story... well that went straight over my head. again. 

maybe i'm a book snob, (though considering some of the trash that i read and enjoy i highly doubt that.) or maybe i'm just stupid. but i really, really do not see what is so great about this book. there have been books that i didn't like but could see why other people thought they were the epitome of awesomeness. this is not one of those books. if you read and liked the perks of being a wallflower, please explain this to me. i kind of need to understand this.

on a completely random note, i had a pina colada yogurt for breakfast this morning and it just might have been the greatest most delicious thing i have ever eaten ever. 

*Things That I Don't Understand - Coldplay

it's always been the same, same old story

sometimes, i look at my academic career and my book and my family and i start to think, "you know, maybe i'm not doing too bad with this whole life thing." but then i think of james potter and my self-esteem plummets. james potter died trying to protect his family. james potter stood up to the greatest evil the world had ever seen - wandless, mind you - when he was twenty one years old. he was fighting and dying for what was right when other people were busy celebrating the fact that they could finally drink legally. and on top of all that, he could ride a freaking broomstick, turn himself into an animal, and change mice into wineglasses. and suddenly, collecting degrees and putting out a book that a handful of people will read just seems so pointless and stupid.

and then i remember that james didn't have the internet to distract him and i don't feel as bad about myself. because you just know if wizards had access to the internet they'd be too busy procrastinating to do anything cool. voldemort would be too busy writing mean anonymous comments to people and sniggering to himself to try and take over the world. which would work out fine because dumbledore would be too busy watching videos of cats on youtube to stop him. sirius would be changing his facebook profile picture every three seconds, peter would have a tumblr full of images of food and celebrities, and hermione would get lost in wikipedia for hours clicking the random article button. ron would play fantasy quidditch, and fred and george would probably spend their time between cracked and buzzfeed.

and harry would just be standing there in the middle of the room screaming about how important he is, and his parents (who would have never died) would tell him to shut up and go to his room. and he would just always have this nagging feeling that things were supposed to be different, that every child alive should know his name. he would write about it on his blog.

*Father and Son - Cat Stevens

there's so much i need to say to you, so many reasons why

before i get right into this blog post that will be jumping from point to point like an ADHD kid with a sugar high, i'm just going to give a quick explanation (i will never not write an i after the first a in that word and then have to go back and delete. i've resigned myself to that.) about why my blogging, which has become more sporadic that regular lately, pretty much became nonexistent for what felt a lot longer than two weeks. see, my parents went up to CT to visit my grandmother and ended up staying longer than they expected because of nemo. (if you do not keep up with the weather of the east coast, there was a big snow storm up in new england recently. it was named nemo.) since i am no longer living in my parents' house and since we had to balance a bunch of things (like school, office hours, tae kwan do, feeding and homeworking the boys, etc) between the three of us (my sister, husband, and i) there was a lot of time spent in the car. time which i could not spend blogging because i was too busy singing along to the same four songs that the radio decides to play over and over and over and over and over and over. times that i was not in the car were spent in class, doing homework, preparing to get into the car, or not feeling like blogging. but my parents came home yesterday so regular programming will commence.

i had a moment over the past two weeks when i thought about how writing (blogging, editing my novel, writing anything new) was automatically pushed to the end of my priority list the minute things like this popped up. and how could i consider myself a writer (or even a wannabe writer) if i did not write? the one thing i know about writers is that they write. but then i thought about how pretty much everything gets pushed to the bottom of my priority list when things like this pop up and i felt okay again. (i have this possibly unhealthy tendency to put my family's needs, wants, and errant thoughts above my own that has been viewed as both a good and bad thing depending on who you ask, and something that i don't plan on changing either way because it's just who i am.)

another light bulb moment over the past two weeks was when i realized how much i hate people who walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk. there is a side for coming and a side for going, and if you don't know which is which then just follow the crowd. stop trying to be special, because you're not. you're just annoying. (i am not talking about people who need to cross over to get to a building and end up walking on the wrong side for a bit. i'm talking about the people who insist on being idiots.) 

also, i decided that contacts are the devil's creation and possibly the worst thing that i subject myself to on a daily basis. seriously. they get dried out three seconds after i put them in, they are scratchy and annoying seven times out of ten, and they give me the worst possible headaches if i keep them in for over five hours. so why do i keep wearing them? a mixture of convenience and self-acknowledged stupidity i guess.

there is an almost finished description of the thought process that goes into choosing which shoes to wear when it's cold and slushy outside in my drafts from last week, to which i say... really self? really?! that's what you decide to write when you have three minutes of writing time? you should be ashamed of yourself. 

some good news for the week: i finally got someone to agree to be a member of my phd committee! he doesn't want to be the head because he doesn't think he could help much, but he also didn't laugh me out of his office or tell me to drop out. in fact, he's the one that suggested he become a member. i also may have fallen in love with him a little bit. i think it's a combination of the fact that he was the first nice guy i talked to outside of my forensics family and that he's intelligent and passionate about what he does. oh, and his looks are nothing to sneeze at. 

i also got an email last week telling me that one of the fanfiction authors i favorited in high school had written a new story, and i kind of got really excited because i remember loving her back in the day. i still haven't had the chance to read it, and i'm slightly surprised that she's putting up a story seven years later, but i thought it was kind of weird that it happened shortly after i posted about fanfiction. (no i don't think that it was written because of my post. weird in the way that i said i would probably have another fanfiction phase eventually and then she pops up to lure me back in.)

anyway, in case of any future absences from blogging, i think it would be a good idea to go buy my book so you can have a dose of my words on standby. do it for yourself. also, my grandma has had a hard couple of weeks and feb. sixth was her birthday. a great present for her would be to buy her granddaughter's book. she'd love you for it. (as would i. forever.) do it for the elderly. 

*Against All Odds (Take a Look At Me Now) - Phil Collins