december 3

i had my chaucer recitation today. it went well-ish because i had the whole thing memorized perfectly, only when i was looking at my prof to prove it, i kept blanking on lines. i think i blanked 3 times and it took me about 5 seconds to find my place each time, which was embarrassing, and threw my pronounciation. definitely not my best performance, but he said it was ok and it's only 5% of my grade, so i won't worry further.

after that fiasco, we talked about my essay. what i'd had in mind ended up being not-so-good, but prof s. helped me to streamline it into something much more coherent and interesting. i'm going to miss this class :-( but i hope i will be able to prove myself with the final essay! i like him a lot and i want to impress him.

i am reading "mr. humble and dr. butcher", about robert white, the man who put head transplants on the table. the ethics of it are very interesting; i'm about 60% through right now. i wish the author would spend more time discussing the ethical questions she presents, but regardless, i'm having a good time with it. not so with "mbmbam" -- i guess i've been listening to it so much that it's getting to be too much! but it's good to listen to to go to sleep.

work today was a total drag. no chatty customers. lame! i had a sandwhich though, and i feel very loved today. i think i have been becoming more and more anxious this semester, but oh well...! now it is almost over, with only 2 finals left.

snowy day. cold! got to wear my owlcoat. happy :-)

december 4

i had such a horrible night last night; spent the whole time tossing and turning because of cramps. the time would not pass. finally got up at 3:50 am and shuffled downstairs to take an advil and felt better a short while after that. i slept until noon and only woke when my mom came home, but she wasn't angry with me. i am upset my brother did not think to wake me.

it's always so strange to be awake when everyone else is sleeping and the world is dark and the only noise is the hum of the fans and the dehumidifer and the pipes. outside, snow, and the black sky.

i couldn't do much in the morning because i had no morning to speak of, but i spent some time cleaning and then watched 'twilight' with jesse. i actually liked the intense colour-grading though i know a lot of people make fun of it. it gave the movie personality! all the extras had such cute costumes and hairstyles. i just wish 'twilight' didn't suck, because it did suck, it wasn't very good at all! but i did laugh watching it with them, which is what matters. i remember reading the book in the seventh grade, but not what happened in it or if i liked it or not.

i'm very tired and i am so excited to go to sleep. i feel like i'm forgetting something or like there is something i have to do, but i'm all caught up on all my schoolwork so i'm not sure why i feel that way. maybe it's because i have a deadline tomorrow and another on sunday, but i already have most of the work done for both of them so i don't know why that would be it.

today was the first properly cold day of the season—it was -16! i'm glad i didn't have to go outside because everyone came in half-frozen. -16 isn't even that cold by winter standards, but it's been a whole year since anyone had to deal with it...

hoping my cramps will go away soon... i'm going to go read my book now ^_^ feeling: happy! but a bit anxious. papa brought tangerines and those were very good. i was happy to sit at the table with mama and eat them and talk.

december 5

today was not a very good day. i was so tired and listless the whole time, and i'm not really sure why. i turned in my final for one of my classes and i'm not proud of it at all. i tried to take a risk with the story that i was telling and it didn't pan out because it was so far outside of the wheelhouse of what i'm interested in. i feel like i do that a lot—when the time to show my writing comes i'm not able to because i always choose to write something that doesn't align with my interests. this one ended up being literary fiction in a way that bores me. i'm sure i'll do ok when evaluated on it, but it's the principle of the thing...

i don't know how or why that happens. i guess i have a weird bias against anything i feel comfortable writing, which is totally the opposite of how i should approach it. mostly i'm out of practice and don't know my writing well enough, which is a funny thing to say because i've been writing basically my whole life, but it's true. i want to spend time working on that over the break, but it's hard to not feel like a doomer about it.

apart from that, nothing interesting really happened. i just don't feel very well at all. i can't even properly verbalize my feelings about the writing thing; the way i phrased it here isn't really accurate to how i feel.

hopefully tomorrow will be better. i have work so i'll have to find something good to listen to. probably i'll continue the audiobook for 'the condemnation of blackness'.

i guess i look up to so many literary giants and can so clearly see the things that make them great that it's uspetting when i can't track those same influences and changes in my work. also a stupid thing to say because i am not very old. i don't know! nothing i make is good enough, especially not by my standards. and everyone is pissed off.

december 6

i was basically finished writing this entry and then my tab crashed! >:-( anyway work today was so totally lame. that's typical of the december retail rush, especially on weekends, but that doesn't mean i have to be happy about it... plus all the customers that spoke to me today were irate and condescending so i guess something was in the water. i slept late last night so i was basically primed to be annoyed myself, but i feel like today really tested my patience. they bounced me around between my relatively quiet side of the store in health+beauty and food, which is always crowded and unpleasant, and people ask the stupidest questions! i hate my job in december.

i finished my book during the break ('mr.humble & dr. butcher') and i didn't like it. i had a hard time concentrating on it because some of my coworkers were having a very loud conversation right next to me. there's no options for places to sit during lunch apart from the breakroom so if it sucks, you're screwed. maybe i'll ask the managers if i can crash in their office next time. also, one of the annoying coworkers was my ex-friend from high school who stopped talking to me during the pandemic. we didn't fight or anything, he just stopped talking to me after [] which i am totally over because i am 21 and have better things to worry about, but it still hurts that he didn't bother getting my side of the story or anything. and then i just got sad because i don't really have a lot of friends the way most people do and i feel really lonely a lot of the time at school. that's part of why i want to get more involved with clubs next semester because i think the lack of that specific kind of interaction is making me nuts.

ok so before the pity part i was talking about how much i didn't like the book and that's because i think it presents itself as something it's not. i went into it expecting a dissection of the ethics of head transplantation and was unpleasantly surprised when it turned out to be nothing more than a plodding biography. every time the author got close to talking about something interesting, she drew back and refused to engage with it further. on the bright side, i got through a significant chunk of 'the condemnation of blackness' which is very very good! it's an extremely well-researched and -written documentation of how notions of crime were systemically associated with the black community in america. the work khalil gibran muhammad put into this book is apparent in every word. i highly recommend it, not just because it chronicles its subject with such meticulous detail and logic, but also because i think that it gives you the knowledge and language you need to fight a lot of right-wing rhetoric. overall i consider it a deeply valuable and indispensable book. i will definitely have to sit down with the physical book soon so i can read it more closely.

anyway, i'm going to go play re4 with my sister and then maybe later i will write some. i'm still experiencing a lot of, like, spiritual ennui about my writing and am dissatisfied with it overall but the only way to deal with that is to write more. when will it end...