All throughout today, while I frantically finished the stats homework I'd started a week earlier (and left to sit), I thought about it and the final emotions paper. My hands wrung, eyes scrunched and heart beats grew constricted. I flicked on Elliot Smith's "Between the Bars" for whatever reason, listening to it for the first time..and second..third..fourth..fifth.. .

It all spoke to a kind of hopelessness, the loss to the forked flesh offering just a little release, a little way to let go. I cried for a half hour as it repeated. All the setbacks and bullshit and shoving, the constant march onward at the exclusion of everything and everyone else. Such a soft and simple poison. How good it would feel--and the inhuman punishment I would inflict on myself as a consequence.

After awhile I gradually composed myself, finished up the homework, went to recitation/stats lab, did the problems there.

But first, we got our midterms back.

90.7%. Anything about an 85% was very good. I'm probably a handful of A's in a class of 35.

I thought this would have made me happy.

Instead I focused on checking over the homework after recitation, and cursing the lives of every one of the undergrads who happened to have a class in the only available computer lab...and the sick fate that made no other computers available. I wanted to make some simple corrections, and I couldn't. I finally just wrote them out in pen, out of disgust, turning the thing in 5 minutes before it was due.

I could have finished it last night, but I was enjoying reading stats. I honestly was. It was great.

So now I suppose I'm allowed to feel happy about the midterm. In a cerebral way I am. It gives me a cushion if I fuck up later. But I don't feel any emotional happiness. I have a paper due in 12 1/2 days, at least 15 more articles to read for it, and to compile them all into something that sounds intelligent.

I don't get hung up on victories, and I only pay attention to defeats enuogh to learn from them. I'm glad I did well, but the totality of my celebration will be a quiet job well done. I'm also slightly relieved, since I'd planned on stopping online communication for a month if I really fucked up. You have to keep yourself in line, after all. Say for instance the time I forgot the 2nd paper during that emotions class that was back to back monday and tuesday. I saved myself from the situation and got the thing in the next day, no problems...but it was a bad mistake. Subsequently, I've put my foot down any time I've wanted to see a movie. I absolutely refuse to let myself indulge in such a thing. I would have cut eating out for dinner, but I'm too tired usually to bother cooking.

So I still get to talk to my friends on the few occasions I have free time. That is comforting. Speaking of which, I need to read a stats chapter and hopefully get through several articles.

I'll be busy until Nov 2nd. Xtian, Katie and Jason, our stats group, want me to go to some student union open-mic thing on thursday..then there's some party on Oct 30th that Tatianna was poking me about not attending. I don't know how they can find the time. It is poison, the temptation. I will deny it. I have to stay focused and deny doing something as unforgivably stupid as wasting half a day.

I could do that for this past thursday, I had to, but that was it.

I'm just holding on, and nothing will make me lose an inch of that ground, even if I get those odd concerned looks from them.

I just can't fathom how they can have the time. Well, I still read the stats book and they don't, true, but still...

previous - next