Two am

When Jon and I first got together, I couldn't fall asleep until we'd had our good night phone call. If he was going out for the night, he would call me when he got home, and I would be in a fitful state of not-quite-asleep until my phone started buzzing. Part of it was habit - I'm not such a creature of habit that my routine can't be changed, but I am enough of one that I sometimes struggle to sleep if my routine is different. I can fall asleep anywhere, just let me brush my teeth, call my boyfriend and find a comfortable spot on the bed. That last one takes longer, but I will fall asleep eventually.

The past few weeks though, I've been out like a light not long after hitting the sheets. It doesn't matter if I know that I am going to get a call in hour - I'm out. When he calls, I wake up enough to have a conversation, usually one that I can't remember beyond the greeting, the good-bye and one or two words in between. I'm not good at having conversations when they require me waking up. I usually greet him with an over-enthusiastic "Hey!" that feels like it is louder than it probably is. Then I try to say that I wasn't that asleep, seriously, I was half awake when the phone rang. Nevermind that I vaguely remember looking at the phone and wondering why, exactly, it was there.  This is usually followed by a disbelieving statement from Jon, then lots of sleepy 'your pretty's and 'I love you's from me. I can only imagine what those conversations would look like if someone transcribed them. 

You can call me at two am and I'll swear I was still awake, but it's fairly likely that I won't even remember what I said in the morning.

The places you'll go

I am looking for bedding and rugs and towels and other various things I never really thought about me needing before on Targets website. I usually consider myself internet savvy - I can Google things faster than you can say 'hey, where'd the phone book go?' But on the rare occasion I try to utilize a websites search feature, it fails. Miserably.

I type in '6x4 rug,' hoping I'll find the rug featured in this weeks ad. I'm supposed to be getting things to make my room a wonderful living environment and that starts with a rug. At least, it starts with a rug in my head. I'm not really looking forward to living in the dorms, not one tiny bit, but I'm hoping that getting some bedding and things will change that. 

My search results in a few ugly rugs, rugs that look like people who own pets with digestion problems own for those occasions when Fluffy eats five pounds of granola. These do NOT look like rugs I would ever buy. So, I try a few other searches, after checking the bar at the top of the site to make sure I didn't miss a section labeled 'college 08.' 

Finally, I get fed up and go through the listings that drop down from those little tags at the top if you roll your mouse over them. Bed+Bath yields 'College 08,' of course. So, I find the rug sections, go through ELEVEN pages of thumbnails of rugs, to find that the rugs featured in this weeks ad?

They're only available in stores. Oh, and I never found the one I was looking for.

I really dislike trying to shop online.

That whole 'outlook on life' thing

Sometimes it really amazes me what can change my perspective on a situation, what can change my perspective on life.

Recently, I quit my job. I had been baby-sitting for this couple for nearly three years, had watched their son grow and seen their family grow. Had you asked me two years ago if I would ever leave the gig if I stayed here for school, I would have said no. 

Things changed. They started being home a LOT more when they had their daughter and their son stopped listening to me the way he used to. I became more hesitant with doling out time-outs, because my punishing him often got him in trouble with his parents. My two hours of peace when he napped went up in smoke when I started watching him and his sister - their naps never over-lapped for more than thirty minutes. I felt like a horrible person, disengaged and unhappy. I love those little kids, but I just could not take their parents being RIGHT THERE ALL THE TIME. It was like the ultimate pressure - I had to walk this fine line or else watch the little dude get in trouble or lose my patience because she would be screaming her head off and he would be trying to get my attention.

I knew it was time for me to leave many, many times over the past few months, but I knew I had to quit when I started wondering if I really wanted kids one day. Anyone that knows me knows that I coo at babies like a mad woman and that I’m beyond content to have one sided conversations with toddlers at the grocery store. I’m that girl, the girl that likes kids and knows she wants a bunch of them. Girls like me, we want kids and struggle with the concept of not wanting a few. And there I was, wondering if my conversations with teh boy about random things like baby names and awful habits our kids will inherit one day, you know, our future kids as conversation topic, was really a path I wanted to head down. 

So I finished. It was about as informal as it could get, my last day - some of their friends came into town, so I spent forty-five minutes at their house before giving up and going home. There aren’t words to express the mix of emotions I felt as I walked out of the door - a sense of freedom (I’ve likened it to the scene in the Rescuers Down Under, when the lizard gets out of the cage and dances around, singing ‘I’m free, I’m free!!!’), a little big of anger, and a touch of disappointment. 

Since last Friday, things have gotten better. I feel like I have a handle on things and I’ve been so happy, happier than I’ve been in a while. The last time I remember feeling like this, I was at teh boy’s for spring break. While I loved that job a great deal, it stopped being fun or enjoyable for me. I’ve got a job somewhere else now and other then a few scheduling conflicts, I’m far more at ease there. A weight has been removed, one that I didn’t even realize was there.

And it feels really, really good.

Sometimes, my education is worth every cent

"Today, in class, we learned about pyramids and Egypt and floods! They had time sheets with excuses for why people missed work, and there was one, this one hieroglyph, and it said the guy missed work because he had a hangover."

"..."

"There was a hieroglyph for hangover! THAT IS SO COOL!"

Addictive tendencies

Why does the internet have to be so distracting?

And why did Teh Boy's laptop have to decide to be ornery two days before he comes down to visit?

Kicking ass never looked so studious

I took my second final today, which means I can have a life again. In theory. Until I remember that I have expectations to meet, English and Spanish classes to take, and the ACT to prep for. BUT! Sometime in the near future, I will be able to completely veg out and be a person.

Do you know how weird that is?

I spent most of yesterday and all of this morning reviewing my notes and the chapters we had read for my history class and just generally trying to stuff my head with all of this seemingly important information. I managed to catch a chest cold late last week, so I spent much of my studying time, from Friday through yesterday, passing out when I was supposed to be writing about Chaucer, or the Hundred Years' War. If one of my friends hadn't typed up her notes and shared them, I don't know what I would be doing right now. Probably sitting in a corner and bawling uncontrollably, because, honestly, my brain just wasn't holding onto all of that stuff. Or laughing hysterically. Freaking out tends to have two outcomes for me, though after a certain point, one turns into the other.

Thanks to all the napping I was doing during the day, and all of the coughing I've been doing at night, I didn't really get much sleep last night. I finally stopped feeling like my eyelids were made of lead around 11:30, and made myself turn off the light at one. I spent the entire night being restless, waking up every hour on the hour, sometimes cause of the being sick thing, and sometimes because of the panic mode I entered the minute I started to feel semi-normal(I have never loved antibiotics more than I do right now).

Thanks to the restless night that resulted in about four hours of sleep, I was kinda loopy this morning. Not terribly so, but enough that when I looked up and registered which episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends my brother's were watching, I started laughing hysterically. I couldn't help it.

I had last seen it at 3 in the morning sometime in July of last year. One of the main characters, Mac, can't have sugar. You know those kids that could literally climb walls when given any sort of sugar? He's like that. And his imaginary friend, Bloo, manages to give him sugar. This is during a party that shouldn't be happening or something, so the colors are very rave-esque. And because I was about as out of it this morning as I was last July, I started laughing about as hard as I did when I saw it the first time. I don't know if it's actually really funny, or if I'm just always in a really screwed up state of mind when they show it.

Either way, I managed to pull myself together and go back to singing my notes, because reading them out loud was just too straight forward. Took the test, survived, and now I might not have to say "I can't have fun, I'm STUDYING!" to my mom for a while.

Leaves do fall

I'm trying to register for classes, classes that I spent many (okay, maybe two) hours picking out last night. But the registration section is down and I'm wondering why, exactly, the universe hates me.

Over dramatic? Sure. But one of the classes has 8 open spaces left, and I will be quite the unhappy creature if I don't get into it. Mostly because I have no idea quite what I want to take, beyond the three classes I've picked out, and I really want to take this class. It may not be the best class ever(philosophy 101, for the curious), but I'm curious what we'll be taught. Also, if I stay here, it'll rack up my tier II requirements, something that makes very little sense to me, but that is apparently very important to eventually graduating. I guess that's why they call them requirements.

It feels weird to be picking out classes when I'm not even done with the classes I'm in at the moment, but I think it would be even weirder to pick out classes once I was done. Because then I'd actually be able to think, and thinking is quite a dangerous thing when it comes to me. I'd have lists and charts and all sorts of things mapping out why I was taking the classes and how I was going to get from one building to the other quickly, etc. Because then I'd know for sure that I had the 'perfect' schedule.

Who needs lazy Sundays?