February 16, 1999.

Sleep sleep sleep. That's all this place is good for, sometimes. Maybe I'll put on the step video and do my Tuesday routine in my pjs. Maybe I'll settle down with Clarissa and actually get something done. Maybe I'll just watch teevee and be useless. Who can tell?

It's Reading Week, and all my courses will rev up to the extreme in March. I feel horribly exposed...I don't even know what my essay topic is for the one due on the 3rd...and my professor (that dastardly nun) always fixes me with such a level headed stare when I ask questions that I come away feeling like an idiot. Hey, I already feel like an idiot, in anticipation of this stare. I can hardly wait until I actually ask the damn question.

Sometimes I wonder why I twist myself up into anxious little knots over things that I can't do anything about. Like Bruno Walton said, "never worry about what you can't avoid." Good advice, even for those who've stopped reading juvenile lit (or those who've pretended to stop).

On Valentine's Day, I attended an "optional" information session designed for students and parents interested in Geek Camp. (This would be the counseling job I applied for last month). It looks really kick-ass...if I was a parent, I'd sign my kid up in an instant. What the camp offers is a two-week program including two courses in fun subjects like juggling or drama or French cooking or short story writing or forensic anthropology (if you don't think that the last two would be fun to try out in a non-pressure environment, then you've never been a young overachiever).

As a counselor (and I should mention that I've been offered a position - yay, me!) I'm asked to T.A. two courses of my choice, which translates into four sessions of me having fun with the kids. I'm sooo excited. I'm going to sign up for one of the advanced web page design courses, partially at the instructor's behest. All the coding is to be done by hand, and she seemed to want somebody who knew what she was doing. I'm not sure if that describes me, but then again, I'm not expected to teach the course. Another one I'm stoked for is short story writing, taught by another 4th year English major at U of T whom I've never met. I need to get my fiction skills back online...I've been wallowing in prose for too long. Sure, it's great practice for fiction, but I haven't been flexing those muscles in some time - and with the Boy fountaining creativity right and left, I'm feeling a bit dull in comparison.

The scary stuff is the scheduling. A typical day runs from 7 a.m. until about 10:30 when the kids go to bed. After 10:30, I'm allowed to mix with my fellow counselors, but I'll be too fucking tired for the first little while. That's the other scary thing...I'll be in a completely new environment, without any allies. I don't make friends very easily or quickly - ask me how many people I talk to in class (and even then, I'm the gregarious one. U of T is a very cold school). Fortunately enough, the other counselors seem to have figured this out about me fairly quickly, and they made a few overtures during the information session. I think that I'll be one of their projects, just like a shy child. Watch me shed my shell...

Last night I went over to visit Little Spider and Violet. Ended up stopping at the 7-11 on the way over and stocking up on temporary heartbreak remedies. A Star Weekly to put her own problems in perspective (Brittany Spiers can't get a date?? You don't say...) Chocolate. Chips. A postcard pack of Leonardo diCaprio pictures, so he can be the first thing she sees in the morning (and she can think about how their house will look when she and Leo tie the knot). And a plastic wrapped three-pack of fruit, in case scurvy threatens.

Bandaid solutions, but at least chocolate affords real comfort when my idiotic platitudes lose effect. It's almost enough to make me wish that I was single, because there's nothing worse than getting breakup comfort from somebody with a SO.

My brother's being uncharacteristically adorable these days. I wish that he would hurry up & go to college - he really needs to meet some girls at his own level. He's 21, and his band activities put him into contact with highschool girls all of the time...but pedophiliac fantasies aside, who can stand talking to highschool girls for six years? He saw the condoms in my cabinet of sin, congratulated me on my responsibility, and remarked that he'd taken a girl to an abortion clinic last week. Not his unwanted lump of flesh, tho', which relieves me somewhat.

Just a little notice in case you want to reach me in the next week: as the journal says, I'm with my parents this week. That means I can't get at my email until the 21st. Respond accordingly.

Oh, and Mike: you're not stalking me. That guy who looked up my number last year and wanted to take me to Rent - that was stalking me. You're just being friendly (so far...)