october 14, 2000. It's Saturday the Fourteenth, much like that just forgotten horror spoof of the early eighties. (God, am I the only person who can make that connection? How lame.) Dinner is done, email half answered. My huge project setback of last night has been completely fixed, and I think what I have is better than what was destroyed by obnoxious Microsoft programming. Good stuff. I still have a million things to do, housework & homework, but it's not knotting me up too bad. Therefore, it's past time to write. Yesterday wasn't too bad, as cosmic convergences go. I finished 2 assignments that were nagging at me this week, and attended a drama group meeting that allayed all of my negative feelings about the drama assignment. I was feeling so good, and the day was so beautiful, that I decided to take a stroll. It's kind of nice being on a budget in semi-rural Nova Scotia. My coveting engine stays dormant most of the time because there just isn't too much for sale here that I want in more than a vague way. The lack of anything really good & frivolous means that we'll probably stay solvent in the next months…which is always a good thing. Any hoo, the only bad thing that happened occurred fairly late in the day. Part of my computer assignment is to create a web page with Netscape Composer; although I have explained my skill in coding by hand, I was asked specifically to do the work in this way. Frustrating in the extreme. There came a point when I decided to cheat a little & code colour by hand…so I opened Word, forgetting that this new improved version of Word will not display html documents as text, instead finding all kinds of ways to fuck them up in its own moronic web page editor. So after two days of painstaking work with a maddening interface, I found all my work converted to garbage in 30 seconds. All my tags that proved my honesty in using Composer were likewise trashed. It was devastating. Still, as bad luck goes, I'd rather have a web page to rebuild than a kitty to scrape off the highway. Touch wood. Perspective is a wonderful thing. I came to that conclusion this afternoon. We were made aware of a huge area craft sale that attracted large numbers of people, and not having anything else to do with our Saturday, we hustled on over. I bitched and moaned on the way in: 'Friday night I bake a meatloaf and go to bed early so that I can go the craft sale on Saturday? What the hell is wrong with me?' and the like. But as I said, we had nothing else to do. It was actually kind of amusing. I hadn't realized that there were so many ways of expressing one's discontent with housework in plaque form. I also had a chance to give serious thought to beginning a collection of wacky seasonal earrings - every teacher's gotta have 'em. It's one of those unwritten rules, like the one that makes all French teachers crazy as a basketball bat. You know. But I resisted…this time. The self-pity I've wallowed in recently would dictate that this was a hopelessly mediocre couple of days. But it was actually kind of fun. The meatloaf was good, and the craft sale funny. Like I said in the beginning, perspective is a wonderful thing. Or as Vince Lombardi said, "it's the only thing." I'm feeling sort of anxious & sad about my parents lately. After all the roughness and problematic encounters of the last year, I find their new attitude - meek passivity - unnerving & depressing. I don't know who to be any more, now that aggressiveness doesn't come into the picture. And I feel like it's my fault - like I've traumatized them, and my responsibility is to protect them. I never thought that getting my own space would make me feel like a monster child, like an atypical bad daughter. And I don't know how to make myself feel better.