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Hey, everyone.
I'm still alive... I imagine that's good to know. School has been more or less eating my life -- I have so much to do, yet what feels like no time at all to get it done. Which is odd, because I know for a fact that I waste far too much time online playing flash games (Evony and Cafe World, the latter on Facebook, are the latest addictions)... but on the other hand, that's pretty much the only thing I do to decompress, since whenever I watch movies or TV, I'm usually doing schoolwork on the side.
Today I sorted through all 20+ interlibrary loan books that are currently on my bed for my senior thesis -- some sort of collective biography surrounding gay men in Nazi Germany, and managed to get notes done on the relevant sections of four of them. There's so much to do. I'm just grateful that the professors aren't making me translate anything German that I use. Reading German academic work is hard enough, and my translation skills are mediocre at best. I'm also really grateful that this isn't going to involve any writing in German -- my German academic writing is even worse than my English academic writing, and with German I have the added issue of not always knowing what gender a word is or which case I should be using at any given point. I feel like my whole academic career currently has just spiraled completely out of control and I'm floundering to keep up with anything. I take the GRE on Saturday and I've hardly studied. I know that I'll have enough time to retake it if I do horribly, but that's another $150 that I'd really rather not spend. (Can I just say that I'm a little annoyed that my parents didn't even offer to help me pay for the GRE? I understand that graduate school is going to be my expense a lot more than my undergrad has been, but still.)
Speaking of grad school, I'm not going straight out of my undergrad. I'm planning on spending a year or two volunteering, ideally in Berlin doing administrative work, organizing, and oral history with Aktion Suehnezeichen Friedensdienste, an organization founded after WWII in order to do reconciliation and preservation of the historical memory. But we'll see how that turns out. I really just want to get out of the ruts I've fallen into and do something somewhere new. That said, whenver I go anywhere to "do something somewhere new," I always end up feeling like Ani DiFranco did when she wrote North Main Street: it seems to me I'm not doing anything new; I'm just not doing what I used to. It's like I have this constant feeling of being stagnant and in a rut; I'm eternally restless. I feel like I should probably be blaming that on our society which has pelted me with overactive media my whole life, conditioning me to need huge amounts of stimuli at all time, but I don't really feel like that's the case.
I figured out how to crochet tonight, when my brain couldn't handle any more genocide. I'm currently slowly but surely working on a granny square, and I'm very proud of myself. We'll see if I become capable of doing any more, or if I ever actually get to the point where my crocheting is efficient. I'd eventually like to be able to make amigurumi, since a lot of the crochet patterns are way cuter than the knit ones.
I had what I think was a panic attack tonight, which has given me cause to call the therapist one of the professors here recommended to me when I asked her whether she knew someone... I'm going to call her tomorrow, and once I've worked out whether seeing her is even feasible, I'll start worrying about things like how to tell my mom that I'm in therapy again. (For those of you who haven't been around for years, i.e., almost all of you, I spent around a year in therapy when I was in the 8th grade; school was miserable, I hated life, and was cutting... it was definitely a lot more than your standard teenage angst.) I'm hoping that this therapy will be more effective than what I had back then -- really, I just want to get a formal Asperger's diagnosis and have someone to talk to about my issues with anxiety and depression. And someone who can help me figure out some ways to cope that work for me, because thus far, I don't have anything.
I'm still with Screech. That makes me happy.
Anyways, I should probably try to get to bed now. You should look at my photography, which are posted on my Flickr.
I'm still alive... I imagine that's good to know. School has been more or less eating my life -- I have so much to do, yet what feels like no time at all to get it done. Which is odd, because I know for a fact that I waste far too much time online playing flash games (Evony and Cafe World, the latter on Facebook, are the latest addictions)... but on the other hand, that's pretty much the only thing I do to decompress, since whenever I watch movies or TV, I'm usually doing schoolwork on the side.
Today I sorted through all 20+ interlibrary loan books that are currently on my bed for my senior thesis -- some sort of collective biography surrounding gay men in Nazi Germany, and managed to get notes done on the relevant sections of four of them. There's so much to do. I'm just grateful that the professors aren't making me translate anything German that I use. Reading German academic work is hard enough, and my translation skills are mediocre at best. I'm also really grateful that this isn't going to involve any writing in German -- my German academic writing is even worse than my English academic writing, and with German I have the added issue of not always knowing what gender a word is or which case I should be using at any given point. I feel like my whole academic career currently has just spiraled completely out of control and I'm floundering to keep up with anything. I take the GRE on Saturday and I've hardly studied. I know that I'll have enough time to retake it if I do horribly, but that's another $150 that I'd really rather not spend. (Can I just say that I'm a little annoyed that my parents didn't even offer to help me pay for the GRE? I understand that graduate school is going to be my expense a lot more than my undergrad has been, but still.)
Speaking of grad school, I'm not going straight out of my undergrad. I'm planning on spending a year or two volunteering, ideally in Berlin doing administrative work, organizing, and oral history with Aktion Suehnezeichen Friedensdienste, an organization founded after WWII in order to do reconciliation and preservation of the historical memory. But we'll see how that turns out. I really just want to get out of the ruts I've fallen into and do something somewhere new. That said, whenver I go anywhere to "do something somewhere new," I always end up feeling like Ani DiFranco did when she wrote North Main Street: it seems to me I'm not doing anything new; I'm just not doing what I used to. It's like I have this constant feeling of being stagnant and in a rut; I'm eternally restless. I feel like I should probably be blaming that on our society which has pelted me with overactive media my whole life, conditioning me to need huge amounts of stimuli at all time, but I don't really feel like that's the case.
I figured out how to crochet tonight, when my brain couldn't handle any more genocide. I'm currently slowly but surely working on a granny square, and I'm very proud of myself. We'll see if I become capable of doing any more, or if I ever actually get to the point where my crocheting is efficient. I'd eventually like to be able to make amigurumi, since a lot of the crochet patterns are way cuter than the knit ones.
I had what I think was a panic attack tonight, which has given me cause to call the therapist one of the professors here recommended to me when I asked her whether she knew someone... I'm going to call her tomorrow, and once I've worked out whether seeing her is even feasible, I'll start worrying about things like how to tell my mom that I'm in therapy again. (For those of you who haven't been around for years, i.e., almost all of you, I spent around a year in therapy when I was in the 8th grade; school was miserable, I hated life, and was cutting... it was definitely a lot more than your standard teenage angst.) I'm hoping that this therapy will be more effective than what I had back then -- really, I just want to get a formal Asperger's diagnosis and have someone to talk to about my issues with anxiety and depression. And someone who can help me figure out some ways to cope that work for me, because thus far, I don't have anything.
I'm still with Screech. That makes me happy.
Anyways, I should probably try to get to bed now. You should look at my photography, which are posted on my Flickr.