30 VIII 2002 - 17:01 - quotidianus22

So this week has been a good one, more or less. I'm certainly ready for the extended Labor Day weekend; after all, one can never have too much holiday time. (This even from someone who enjoys school for its learning and not so much for its people -- how far I have fallen from my previous contented state!) It will definitely give me a chance to relearn all the things that I need to have in my head now that I've started my calculus course. Also, I had a pop quiz in Latin today, which consisted of rendering certain sentences (modeled after ones in Cicero's Pro Caelio oration) into simpler Latin. The entire class failed miserably, and although it's likely that I did a sight better than most of the others, I still managed to do some rather embarrassing things, mostly involving confusions of gender and tense formation (example: I know that everything I meant to write as a perfect subjunctive morphed into a pluperfect subjunctive. Oooooops--).

Not only last night but also a great part of today was a disaster in terms of my mood; a particularly long and painful cello lesson meant that my ego lay in tatters at my feet, and days like that are dangerous. I also had a wonderful thing going where it seemed as if, for a moment, the mechanisms by which I repress my irritation might fail completely. It scared me; I'm not a creature of reason, and the only reason I get along in society is because I whip myself into civility. Everything held, but I sort of broke down last night. This, when added to a case of writer's block that was severe enough to prevent me from writing a simple assignment for an English class, meant that I got very little sleep last night, and so I was irritable for most of the day.

I'm better now, though; screaming in my head at the hordes of people who have nothing better to do than to clog up the hallways that are *all mine* helped me to get rid of some of that anger. And I'm really just looking forward to the weekend, now. Especially considering the theme of this past week, which has been tardiness.

For some reason, I've had the greatest difficulty in getting to my first Tuesday and Thursday classes on time, which hasn't made the teachers very happy. It's never by very much -- two minutes at the most -- but it's still not a very good start to the year. Add to that getting stuck in traffic and being five minutes late to the volunteer orientation at Project Open Hand, my new organization of choice (since the lovely folks at Under One Roof may *snort* make me gay-er, according to some in the know, read: my family), and it hasn't been a very good week for my already precarious punctuality.

It's not even that my tardiness is a problem -- no one cares about two or even five minutes; I just talk to them afterwards, and they understand. It's rather how irritating it is for me that this one thing that I should have basic control over is for really stupid reasons getting the better of me.

And now I'm giving advice as I hope against hope that people in Britain (read: Dol) are willing to go online at 1 AM local time. Somehow, I don't think that's a realistic hope, although it might be nice to talk to someone (him) for once. The advice is something amusing of its own, though; I'm telling someone to ignore what displeases her and focus on what makes her happy.

It's not the best of advice for all situations, but trust me, the point is so small that just ignoring it would really make her life a lot happier.