my life is a little bit unmanageable...
What a crazy month September has been. D: Up and down, topsy-turvy, and ridiculously fast-paced. I feel like all my classes are assigning more busy work than ever, clumping papers and projects more closely together, and assigning way more reading... that is probably because I foolishly decided to major in English, baaaw cry moar right?
The first half of the month was really hard. I was having a lot of trouble balancing all my classes, especially the reading load, and felt sick and depressed a lot. sirigorn 's visit to campus was a highlgiht that got me going, but then I started slipping again. Overall, I have been sleeping very little and not eating well - since I use practically every waking moment during the week to do homework, that includes the time when I would be eating. It's been like eating one meal a day and snacking while reading. This is not healthy and I kept thinking I have to get more sleep and eat better - the problem is, my social life is floundering as it is with all this homework crap, and so are my hobbies etc. It's hard to figure out what to sacrifice.
My schedule is like this:
Monday: Victorian Lit, Creative Writing, Women in Japanese Lit
Tuesday: Special Topics in Lit, Sociolinguistics, Women's Choir, and I intend to go to the Japanese Table after the Choir sometimes.
Wednesday: My free day - Victorian Lit in the morning and Hand-drums at night, and meeting Elena to go over Sociolinguistics homework
Thursday: Special Topics, Creative Writing, Women in Japanese Lit, Women's choir, Literary Magazine meeting
Friday: Victorian Lit, Sociolinguistics
This plus a couple hundred of pages to read every night, plus writing assignments for most classes every day, plus papers and projects and presentations which you must keep track of yourself, plus performances for the ensemble and choir. P words are very bad for me it seems.
But for all that, I don't want to give anything up... although Special Topics is the real beast when it comes to the reading load (and my earliest class, making it doubly hard to get any sleep), the class's theme of magic realism is so interesting to me, and we're reading a lot of books that were on my reading list anyway (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight's Children). I think it's a major requirement too. I don't like the professor's style in Women in Japanese Lit, but she herself is a nice person and her class and the books we're reading are really awesome. Victorian Lit, I thought, would be my least favorite class, but actually I'm enjoying it a lot, and the teacher, who I thought was really strict, has made the atmosphere of the class really laid-back and free, probably because we're a small group, and so it's been a really fun time. If I were going to drop something, it would probably have to be Hand-drums, though that wouldn't make much difference since it's only once a week and on a day where I don't have much else to do besides homework anyway. The other option would be choir which I really don't want to drop because it's the first time I've done it. But I also can't go on with this bad sleeping and eating schedule.
Anyway. I have a plan - I'm gonna be more on top of everything over the next two weeks and see if I can make this schedule work for me. If I can't, then I'll revise it to something more reasonable. Everyone is stressed out and having trouble with their schedules right now, so my hope is that I've just been going through the re-adjustment period and soon I'll figure out how to do this without starving myself in the process.
This week has been especially interesting. Over the past couple weeks, I kinda got out of my depressed cloud, and had a lot of fun even though I was stressed over papers. I miss my friends who are all on study abroad right now, but I've been enjoying hanging out with other people who I did not see as much before.
Then this week, something really awesome happened - I was walking out of class when I ran into my adviser and Creative Writing professor. He said, "Hey, that monologue you wrote? It was spectacular. Spectacular." I was really shocked because I thought it was so far from my best work, and not one of the better pieces I'd written for that class either. Actually, I was feeling frustrated because I didn't like anything I was writing for that class, and the comments he wrote on my papers seemed very neutral. So getting that compliment had me floating on air for basically the rest of the week. On the monologue, he wrote "This is excellent" and said it of course needs more polishing and to be built upon, but he felt like I already had something great. I'm still completely thrilled about that.
The last day of the week was a bit of a bummer, because I stayed up really late writing a paper on Sherlock Holmes's influence on Victorian era literature to present in class on Friday. Basically the entire class was supposed to be me presenting and answering questions/having discussion. So I worked really hard and I had so much fun, because of course I was thrilled to be able to write about Sherlock Holmes! The result, though, was that I went to bed at 4 am, which I'd pretty much been doing the whole week and it was finally catching up with me. So - go figure - I overslept and missed the class. I was mortified - this presentation is pretty important and I was so worried about how it would affect my grade. But my teacher was really understanding. She hugged me (I guess I looked pretty distressed) and said not to worry about it because everyone gets a freebie. I was able to reschedule the presentation for Nov. 12 (so far off!) and turn in my paper then. She encouraged me to just think about this schedule and make sure it's really doable. I'm so grateful to her for being so kind. I was not expecting to get off so easy at all.
Now I have a presentation & paper due on Tuesday which I am doing with beastlover probably on language registers in the music profession, though we haven't decided for sure. There is a music workshop and then concert at 4 and 7:30 today. I also have to make flyers for Lit Mag and see what we can do about making a sign for the caf as well. And then there's homework which includes reading Middlemarch...
... actually, the more I think about it, the more I know there's no way I can keep up with all this reading (in the next two days I have to read a chunk of Middlemarch, Song of Solomon, and another book whose title I've forgotten, plus Socioling and Creative Writing readings too which at least are shorter). But what should I do? The thing about all these classes is, they are all important for my majors and I don't have time to do them in a different semester. So I guess I just have to bear with it.
Well... for now let's take it one step at a time.
The first half of the month was really hard. I was having a lot of trouble balancing all my classes, especially the reading load, and felt sick and depressed a lot. sirigorn 's visit to campus was a highlgiht that got me going, but then I started slipping again. Overall, I have been sleeping very little and not eating well - since I use practically every waking moment during the week to do homework, that includes the time when I would be eating. It's been like eating one meal a day and snacking while reading. This is not healthy and I kept thinking I have to get more sleep and eat better - the problem is, my social life is floundering as it is with all this homework crap, and so are my hobbies etc. It's hard to figure out what to sacrifice.
My schedule is like this:
Monday: Victorian Lit, Creative Writing, Women in Japanese Lit
Tuesday: Special Topics in Lit, Sociolinguistics, Women's Choir, and I intend to go to the Japanese Table after the Choir sometimes.
Wednesday: My free day - Victorian Lit in the morning and Hand-drums at night, and meeting Elena to go over Sociolinguistics homework
Thursday: Special Topics, Creative Writing, Women in Japanese Lit, Women's choir, Literary Magazine meeting
Friday: Victorian Lit, Sociolinguistics
This plus a couple hundred of pages to read every night, plus writing assignments for most classes every day, plus papers and projects and presentations which you must keep track of yourself, plus performances for the ensemble and choir. P words are very bad for me it seems.
But for all that, I don't want to give anything up... although Special Topics is the real beast when it comes to the reading load (and my earliest class, making it doubly hard to get any sleep), the class's theme of magic realism is so interesting to me, and we're reading a lot of books that were on my reading list anyway (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight's Children). I think it's a major requirement too. I don't like the professor's style in Women in Japanese Lit, but she herself is a nice person and her class and the books we're reading are really awesome. Victorian Lit, I thought, would be my least favorite class, but actually I'm enjoying it a lot, and the teacher, who I thought was really strict, has made the atmosphere of the class really laid-back and free, probably because we're a small group, and so it's been a really fun time. If I were going to drop something, it would probably have to be Hand-drums, though that wouldn't make much difference since it's only once a week and on a day where I don't have much else to do besides homework anyway. The other option would be choir which I really don't want to drop because it's the first time I've done it. But I also can't go on with this bad sleeping and eating schedule.
Anyway. I have a plan - I'm gonna be more on top of everything over the next two weeks and see if I can make this schedule work for me. If I can't, then I'll revise it to something more reasonable. Everyone is stressed out and having trouble with their schedules right now, so my hope is that I've just been going through the re-adjustment period and soon I'll figure out how to do this without starving myself in the process.
This week has been especially interesting. Over the past couple weeks, I kinda got out of my depressed cloud, and had a lot of fun even though I was stressed over papers. I miss my friends who are all on study abroad right now, but I've been enjoying hanging out with other people who I did not see as much before.
Then this week, something really awesome happened - I was walking out of class when I ran into my adviser and Creative Writing professor. He said, "Hey, that monologue you wrote? It was spectacular. Spectacular." I was really shocked because I thought it was so far from my best work, and not one of the better pieces I'd written for that class either. Actually, I was feeling frustrated because I didn't like anything I was writing for that class, and the comments he wrote on my papers seemed very neutral. So getting that compliment had me floating on air for basically the rest of the week. On the monologue, he wrote "This is excellent" and said it of course needs more polishing and to be built upon, but he felt like I already had something great. I'm still completely thrilled about that.
The last day of the week was a bit of a bummer, because I stayed up really late writing a paper on Sherlock Holmes's influence on Victorian era literature to present in class on Friday. Basically the entire class was supposed to be me presenting and answering questions/having discussion. So I worked really hard and I had so much fun, because of course I was thrilled to be able to write about Sherlock Holmes! The result, though, was that I went to bed at 4 am, which I'd pretty much been doing the whole week and it was finally catching up with me. So - go figure - I overslept and missed the class. I was mortified - this presentation is pretty important and I was so worried about how it would affect my grade. But my teacher was really understanding. She hugged me (I guess I looked pretty distressed) and said not to worry about it because everyone gets a freebie. I was able to reschedule the presentation for Nov. 12 (so far off!) and turn in my paper then. She encouraged me to just think about this schedule and make sure it's really doable. I'm so grateful to her for being so kind. I was not expecting to get off so easy at all.
Now I have a presentation & paper due on Tuesday which I am doing with beastlover probably on language registers in the music profession, though we haven't decided for sure. There is a music workshop and then concert at 4 and 7:30 today. I also have to make flyers for Lit Mag and see what we can do about making a sign for the caf as well. And then there's homework which includes reading Middlemarch...
... actually, the more I think about it, the more I know there's no way I can keep up with all this reading (in the next two days I have to read a chunk of Middlemarch, Song of Solomon, and another book whose title I've forgotten, plus Socioling and Creative Writing readings too which at least are shorter). But what should I do? The thing about all these classes is, they are all important for my majors and I don't have time to do them in a different semester. So I guess I just have to bear with it.
Well... for now let's take it one step at a time.