april 18, 2000.One down, one to go. God, these exams are killing me. Not because the material is significantly harder than anything I've studied before, but because there are a hundred more stress points to my current existence than ever before. The most significant thing is that I'm living outside the bubble for the first time. On the weekend I shut myself into the basement for two straight days of study. It's the quietest place I can go...although the facilities are manifestly unsuitable for desk work (I pushed together two teevee trays for a table and piled up cushions on the couch to get the right hunching height, but my back still hurts today). At least I could close the door and somewhat mitigate the astounding acoustic qualities of my house. I swear to God, I can hear anything that happens in the house from any point. And even in the sound-blocking basement, my family managed to kick up enough of a ruckus on Saturday to waste a full hour of my time. It's not a very encouraging thing when you need complete silence to absorb the vagrancies of the Thirty Years War. I can't concentrate when my head is pulsing and my back is wound up tighter than a drum. But. Despite the lack of a sound cocoon, despite the lack of any immediate support from a similarly-studious peer group (I know exactly one person who is working and going to school - Pixie Stix, my SILTB - and she lives in another city), despite the exhaustion of working full time, and despite the vast amount of applicable material, it hasn't been a bad couple of days. I didn't cram exactly, but I managed to access some deep reservoir in my head this weekend, and to my great surprise, details about Mirandola's 900 Theses and Capitalist culture in 19th century England didn't silently trickle away while my attention was elsewhere. For a girl who started studying 500 years of European history at 9:30 Saturday morning, I did an unbelievable job on this morning's exam. By the second essay I had really hit my stride, and was able to back up every point with an appropriate primary source reading from the textbook. Sure, at the end of three hours I was so faint from hunger and weariness that I expected the hallucinations to take over writing at any minute. But it was a good limit to reach. I used every minute of allotted time and still had more to say. That's always a good thing. My one regret is that I failed to incorporate the non-word funktopia into an answer on Utpoian Socialists. I had it all planned out - then I spaced out & didn't space back in until there was a crazy man yelling about being blind and I was on the bus home.
I can only recall a few things of note from the last little while. The first is that I managed to squeeze in a visit to the grade 6 class on Friday's lunch break, which was marvelous in all respects. For reasons that I'm not entirely sure of now, I was dressed like something of a raver: bells, small black tee, and two little pigtails sticking straight up from my head like pineapple leafs. It started out as a way to keep my hair out of my eyes, but by the time I got to work it had become a mental game: let's see how far I can take my own sense of whimsy before the suits slap me down. Quite a few people stared right through me, but that's more than typical. What made me happy was the number of people who got big goofy grins at the sight of me...even if they were laughing at me, at least there was a niceness to it all. All of this is prelude to junior high, of course. If I learned one thing from my second tour of duty in junior high, it's that my eccentricities make me a target to the 13 year old conformity vultures. A number of boys in my grade 6 class asked my "what had happened to my hair," as if I couldn't possibly be the agent of such a thing. They seemed unsatisfied with my answer, that it was just pigtails. But the girls all asked if I would visit them in grade 7 and hugged me goodbye and generally fawned all over me and made me feel really happy. It may be due to the fact that I'm not telling them to be quiet anymore, but I chose to believe that it's the coolness of me finally making an impact.
The only other thing of note is that my friendship with Julie Gloom continues to rapidly unfold. Yesterday we found out that we do know people in common through NERO...Guy, to be exact. We keep having conversations where we trip over common points of reference that require extensive explanation to most everybody else. She's a bit like my Mindy - instead of building up mutual interests over time, we've found our relationship half formed before we even met, rising like Venus from the murk. The only thing missing is emotion: I don't feel the attachment to her that I feel for my non-friends. Perhaps that's the crucial thing that comes with time. "Oh Mindy, you came and you
stopped me from flaking, but my something Ben Gay, oh Andy..." - the simpsons
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