I should be sleeping…

It’s 5:03 a.m. and I should be sleeping right now, but I’m wide awake.  Apparently my body is starting to get used to my work schedule.

That, and I think it would be cool to surprise Justin on his first break with Dayquil and some Starbucks.  Poor kid has been sick all week and we ran out yesterday.

Probably the real reason I’m up this early is that I’m stressed out.  (Maybe if I vent for a while I’ll be able to go back to sleep for a bit, so forgive me.  I’m going to go into full-on whine mode for a while, because I need to, and this is my blog).  Going back to school has been… really hard.  Harder than I thought it would be, actually.  If I’d known… well, I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t fully know what I was getting myself into.  There’s no way I would have been able to muster up the courage.  As it is, it’s kind of a day-by-day battle.  It’s also a good thing that it’s too late to withdraw, I suppose.  There have been days I’ve strongly considered it.

I hate feeling this messy.

Part of it, I’m sure, is just the load I’m taking this quarter.  I needed a specific class to allow me to officially declare as an English major, and so I was limited in my choices.  Three lit classes were the result.  I’m just barely keeping up.  This past weekend, I felt like I barely saw Justin, I spent so much time in the office typing up papers.  I’d emerge for a minute, wave, and head back in.

I doubt my class load is going to look much different from here on out, however.  With enough credits to graduate already (if they were toward a particular thing — apparently my lack of direction shows in the number of credits I have as a Junior), all my classes each quarter will be literature or writing courses if I ever want to graduate. 

I like writing and literature courses.  But they are kicking my ass.

One in particular.  Frustration took over yesterday to the point where tears welled up in my eyes.  During class.  As if that weren’t enough, a few of them slid down my cheeks.  I’m glad the lights were low.  I was embarrassed enough as it was, and hope my weakness wasn’t noticed.

I genuinely like my prof.  There are days when I really enjoy class.  But the other days… really suck.  We’re learning a certain form of writing that for sure does not come naturally.  I think this is the case for nearly everyone in the class.  And the teacher is working really hard to explain it.  But for me, none of the words are gaining ground.  I believe him that there are huge benefits to learning how to write this way.  I’m on board.  But I… don’t… get… it.  I feel for a moment like I do.  And I write my papers during this moment.  And then I come back to class and realize I was way off.

I’m used to “getting” things.  Fairly easily, usually.  I’m very used to “getting” things when I apply myself and am working really hard.  This is killing me.

Remember these things?

These things, in case you were asleep for most of the mid-90’s, are Magic Eye pictures.  Apparently, if you look at them in a certain way, a beautiful 3-D picture will emerge.

I remember everyone telling me how to do it.

“Relax your eyes.”

“Try not to focus, try to look through the picture, and then the picture will start to come into focus.”

I could look at one of those things all day and wouldn’t see a thing.  Not once have I ever been able to see the damned picture.  I was a pretty happy camper when that craze died off and my next-door neighbors didn’t have one hanging on their living room wall anymore.  I don’t care what picture they saw in that thing — it was hideous.

This is how I feel in class.  My prof is explaining exactly how to do this (also, what not to do when you’re doing this).  Over and over and with greater detail he’s explaining how to do this.  “Relax your eyes.  Relax your eyes.  To the right, and with intensity! OK?”  But the words aren’t making sense, aren’t connecting, and despite trying really damn hard… for the life of me, the picture won’t come into focus.   

At this point, I’m pretty sure my essay will be about the Magic Eye picture that I can’t see.  It’ll be the hardest I’ve ever worked for a lousy grade in a class that I need to pass to declare my major.

Ack.

Justin and I are going to look at the class notes a little later and hopefully he’ll be able to help translate some for me.  It couldn’t hurt — I’m certainly not going to feel any more clueless than I do right now.

As much as this sucks, it helps to have someone who’ll jump in there with me and help sort it out when I feel nuts.  Being married to me for nearly a year is MORE than enough time for Justin to know how overwhelmed and crazy I get sometimes… but every time, he’s consistently there, listening, comforting, waiting for me to come around and gain my courage again.  School will only be for a season, and then there’ll be new challenges and new stresses — but it’s amazing to have such a partner through all of it. 

pumpkins!

We decided to forget we were students for a while and carve some pumpkins tonight!  I seriously needed the break.

I’m not sure I’ve ever carved a pumpkin before.  Seriously.  Ever.  Maybe once.  It’s been a while.

Justin looked like he had violence on his mind.

I’ll let you guess who’s pumpkin was who’s:

 No templates!!  No sharp knives to be found, either!

school, etc.

Hi friends!

School is kicking my arse!  Making it through last week was one of those sheer-force-of-will type of things… AND IT WAS ONLY WEEK TWO.  I am happy to say I kept on my homework and all that reading, but it came at significant cost to my sleep habits.  I didn’t even stay up to watch The Office on Thursday night — that says a lot. 

After a blustery, stormy weekend full of rest, relaxation, and hanging out with the Mr., I am feeling much more human today.  Being bundled up inside in comfy sweats with warm beverages was a welcome change from tromping all over campus in the cold.  Justin and I knew before school started that our Sundays and Mondays were going to be sacred, but I’m not sure we fully knew how much we’d need them in order to stay sane.   

It will be interesting to see how often the posts show up here on WEW… on the one hand, two of my classes require me to post thoughts on online forums which takes up quite a bit of time AND I’m pretty whooped most days, BUT — being in school always puts my little brain in overdrive (regarding things not remotely related to my actual subjects) and I’ll need somewhere to process… that’s usually here.  We’ll see.

Anyway, just figured I’d let you kids know we’re surviving. 

In other news, I got an email from a classmate this morning in response to something I wrote on the class forum — the type of response I usually see on the blog, in the general direction of I-can-relate-to-what-you-said-about-church-and-faith-and-kind-of-feel-like-an-oddball-too-and-was-wondering-if-we-could-have-coffee-sometime.  At the end of a week where I wondered if perhaps I’m crazy to be jumping back into school… it was a unique and very unexpected encouragement.  She’s the second classmate since Friday to suggest drinking caffeinated beverages and talking about our confusing lives for a while.

Kind of exciting.  I dig it.

Hope you all are doing splendidly… hoping to find some time to write more later. 

one (two) of the reasons I love living here…

Walking up to our apartment after work today, I was walking up the sidewalk towards our stairs, and curious eyes blinked back at me. 

A doe, chillin’ on the sidewalk, no big deal.

Typical me, I fumbed for my phone.

Seeing me, they promptly made their way toward the pond, but I still love that they were hanging out in my backyard for a while.

back to school

This past Wednesday I returned to school for the first time since 2003.

A clash of worlds, really, like one of those dreams where your best friend from junior high is suddenly eating lunch with you at your current job, and in the dream, it somehow makes perfect sense — then you wake up, disoriented, thinking What the hell…

Trudging up the stairs from the parking lot, hand in hand with my husband, I felt the colliding and was caught off-guard by it.  Justin knows me, knows as many stories as I’ve been able to think to tell him, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was, in some weird way, introducing him to me at twenty-two.

New husband.  Old school.  Old memories.  Old self.

Collision.

Some things are, thankfully, very different than when I last called Bellingham home.  The car accidents that prompted my departure from school in the first place don’t have the prevalence (in my body and in my thoughts) they did then.  That shoulder is still a little achy at times, and the damp Western Washington cold does nothing to encourage my knees to quit complaining, but the pain is nothing to what it was before, and my percoset-free state proves it. 

I’m thrilled about my studies (in creative non-fiction), which is something I couldn’t say before.  What a huge difference this makes!  Studying Communication back then, I knew I wasn’t being honest with myself about what I truly wanted, deep-down in my guts (my guts know more than I give them credit for, and yours probably do, too).  I knew I was chasing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, but I didn’t have the courage to admit a misstep and take a new direction.  There’d already been too many false starts.

In an odd and exquisitely painful way, the accidents were a blessing.  They forced a different course.

In other ways, my 27-year-old self isn’t much different.  I’m still neurotically insecure, the queen of critical thoughts.  Once Justin headed toward his class and I toward mine, I began thinking about where to look as I was walking by myself through campus.  I’m serious.  I had an entire thought process built around Do I stare blankly ahead, past all the oncoming faces?  Do I make eye contact?  Smile?  Should I look down to make sure I don’t trip on a brick out here in front of God and everybody? 

Does looking straight down make me look like some kind of freak?

Don’t get me started on what to do with my hands.  The whole stationary/swinging back and forth debate stole another few minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Not that I expected it to, but I don’t find that marriage has “fixed” any of my self-consciousness.  Being loved and embraced in all my oddness, I squirm a little less, that is all.  Squirming less, that is all – but what a relief I’ve found, even in that.  (I’ve said it before, but sometimes it’s real important to measure growth in millimeters). 

Going back to school is equal parts excitement and sheer terror for me.  I feel rusty and out of practice.  A little old, perhaps.  I listen to the magnitude of what people much younger than me know — the history, the philosophy, the facts and dates — and feel quite candidly that I’ve arrived at this party a little late; I wonder if I’ll ever be able to catch up.  I think about my decade-long pursuit of a degree and have to gulp down my very real embarrassment at not having had a more direct and successful path to an illustrious piece of paper saying I’ve finally finished something.  I think about how unfinished and un-figured-out I still am.  

Then, mercifully, I remember me at 22.

At 22, I didn’t know shit.  At 22, I don’t think anyone does.  Degree or not, I’m not sure anyone has a very good grasp on what they want to be when they grow up until they’re about 30, or, in the far more serious case of writers, 40.  Five years ago, I was on a very determined and steady, responsible path — in the wrong direction.  It happens.  For a lot of us, that’s part of the journey we travel toward becoming grown-up human beings.  For a lot of those barely-out-of-high-school faces I see in my classes, those twists and turns and changes-of-majors are not far off. 

I wouldn’t go back. 

This is my joy in returning to school now, clumsy and awkward as I am:  I still don’t know shit, but at least I know I don’t know shit.  Even though I’m not completely at peace with that, it seems like a good place to begin.  Humbled, perhaps – deep-red-blush embarrassed at times – but ready, at last, to learn.

So — here’s to not knowing shit.