Fun fact : this needle has three eyes.

You should see is blink!

Ahem. Anyhoo, I am safely on the other side of my Ethics exam. I got together with my partners in a study room in the Library (they got a bunch of them, it’s so cool) and we went over the stuff. And then another group joined us, which was surprising but rad. They even had flash cards with highly incisive and on-point questions regarding the material!

And while that was happening, I marveled at how I was doing a normal thing with normal people, and I felt fine. Well, mostly fine. The point is, it went quite well, and I am doing my best to emphasize that in order to make the most of this corrective experience.

I can hang with normal people (well, normal college students) and have it go fine without anyone looking at me like I am an alien shitting through his forehead while talking about making hamburgers out of your children. The cruel and traumatizing moments when I am “found out” as being weird AF and everyone withdraws from me leaving me socially isolated and miserable never came. We hung, we went over the material, and then we went to class. Simple.

Doing the damned group exam , on the other hand, was freaking excruciating. No shade thrown on my partners, though. They were great. It’s just that writing by committee sucks red hot donkey taint. Basically, we would come up with a sort of outline for the answer to a question , and one of us wrote it while the other two twiddled their thumbs and looked at the next question.

At first, the consensus was that we should NOT let me do any of the writing because mt handwriting is terrible. But I ended up doing the final question. No problem. My handwriting is bad, but ever since I ditched cursive and switched to printing, it’s readable.

Seriously. Fuck cursive. Fuck it in its curlicued asshole.

My study partners were surprised that I could take as many notes as I could using old fashioned pen and paper. Personally, I always feel like I am missing stuff because I can’t write things down fast enough and I have never mastered the skill of being able to condense things down to manageable size on the fly.

That really got me thinking about how I maybe should forget getting a new tablet and get a laptop instead. Then I could take notes like Luka (who tries not to act too proud) and save myself a lot of fucking around with binders and pens and such.

I have to admit, being able to organize everything on a computer would be marvelous. I am way better at keeping files on a computer organized than notes in the real world.

So I will look into getting a laptop instead. Having a modern tablet is less of a priority now that I have a modern computer. Take video games out of the picture, and my needs for a tablet are modest. I can probably get a cheap-ish one for the same price as I would pay for the tablet.

None of “just needs a new battery” crap, though. This thing will be NEW. Getting the new computer has shown me the enormous psychological value of having fresh, new, decent things in my life. It makes me feel like I amount to something and I am not relegated to the world in which the only things you can have are beat up hunks of junk.

Guess you can take the boy out of the middle class,but you can’t take the middle class out of the fully grown man. Middle class will always be the ideal for me, no matter how long I live in wretched poverty.

I found out some good news : the history exam I thought I was taking on Wednesday does not exist. I was mistaken. And boy am I glad! The needle has one less eye than it could have.

So now, I just have to survive tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day where I have Creative Writing (where I have that short story due) and then the dreaded Linguistics exam. I have the whole syntax diagram thing sort of figured out, and I am going to practice like hell before the exam.

It’s just a matter of internalizing the various rules of phrasing in English well enough that I am not stuck with situations I don’t know a rule for any more. That is what I am experiencing now.

After that exam, the craziness goes away… until the next day, when I have my eye exam, therapy, and VancouFur starts. But at least that is the fun kind of crazy. It’s going to be a little weird to be at the convention, then come home, then go to class (History of Popular Music, 10am-1pm), then go back to the convention.

But there are advantages to having the convention be like four blocks away from me. For one thing, I will be sleeping in my own bed…. possibly with guests. And if I get hungry, I have the option of just coming home to eat instead of having to eat out for every meal.

I will have to see what bus route will take me there. I know the 405 doesn’t turn onto Westminster, but the 401 does, and it is super frequent, so if I am lucky, I can bus there and back on the 401 without a lot of waiting.

So in a sense, not being able to get a hotel room is actually kind of freeing. We usually get a room even when the con is close by because it’s super convenient to have a room to store your stuff in and to retreat to when there is no programming on that I am interested in, and/or need to lower my social stimulation levels to sub-anxiety levels.

So I wouldn’t turn down a hotel room if one became available. But I can live without it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. Good night!