A cold night in the wilderness

Today was not good.

It started off on the wrong foot when I either slept through my alarm or the damned thing didn’t go off. I have checked and rechecked all the relevant settings and as far as I can tell, there was no reason for it not to go off. Everything is 5 by 5.

So once more, an alarm clock has failed me in a way that seems impossible. I know I would not have slept through it had it gone off. The dang thing was only inches from my ear. Plus, most alarm clocks keep beeping till you tell them to stop/

And that’s clearly not what was going down. So I dunno.

All I know is that I lazily awoke at 7:36 am, convinced it must still be before 7 until I looked at the clock and shouted “Excrement!”.

Or words to that effect.

Luckily,. I have enough wiggle room in my schedule to accommodate such a SNAFU. It just meant that I would not get my usual “grade period” of time between waking up and actually having to pull myself together and act like a human.

Usually, I play video games during that time and that keeps my mind busy enough that it doesn’t interfere with my mind’s delicate and intricate booting up sequence.

Anyhowzit, I had a quick breakfast and got my big butt out of the door. Missed my bus by mere moments (I hate it when that happens) and had to walk. Not a huge deal – I only went back to taking the bus in the mornings last week – but definitely part of a sort of theme that was emerging from the events of the day.

And of course, it was a really cold morning.

Fast forward to class. Story Editing, last class of the year. I was dreading this class for two reasons : 1) my story editing report was going to get workshopped and it suuuucks and 2) we had a test for which I was not prepared because the instructor has the charming habit of testing you on the last day of class on things from the handout on the first day of class, and I am not very good at keeping things like that.

I have that instructor next term too, for Career Launch. I am thinking of taking everything she gives us on the first day and nailing it to my wall.

Also… Career Launch! I’ve been waiting for one of those my entire adult life. The whole thought of it makes me a-tingle with that feeling that is anticipation, excitement, and terror all rolled into one.

Call it…. teranticement.

Or don’t. I’m not your mother.

Anyhow, coming up on halfway through class I began to realize that my bowels were sending me urgent messages of dire need, so I went to the bathroom. All was well until I stood up at the end of the performance and realized I had made a rather substantial deposit. Uh oh, I thought.

And I was right to be concerned. Despite my pre-flush efforts, the toilet overflowed violently. Water fountaining over the sides of the toilet with me helplessly jiggling the handle. I had to go next door and tell the two program aides about it.

Patient readers know that this kind of thing freaks me the fuck out and throws me into a depressed, anxious, and freaked out mood filled with so many layers of Freudian shame that it it’s like a baklava of neurosis.

So I was deep in the depressive deep freeze when I went back to class. I felt cold and numb and like I was in shock, which was not that far from the truth.

Weird how our minds can throw our bodies into genuine medical distress just from emotions, don’t you think? Makes me feel like we need better safety circuits.

And then came the test. I knew I would not do super well, but I wasn’t too overly concerned (just overly concerned enough) because I test well and I figured that meant that I would at least pass.

But then it came time to mark our tests and I realized that I had missed two pages of a five page test. The pages had been stuck together and I had not seen them. No wonder I had finished so early.

So I went from “deep freeze” to “bathed in liquid nitrogen” I did do something very intelligent, though : I immediately got up and left the room so that I would not hear the answers for that section.

Because of this, the teacher let me do that part of the test over my lunch break and I handed it in to her before the next leg of my long day’s journey into neurosis.

Which consisted of getting together with my partner for that Writing for Video Games presentation (after a quick Subway lunch). I had not heard a thing from them since our creative jam session last Wednesday, and seeing as the presentation is to be given tomorrow morning, I was kind of eager to get down on it.

So yes. I still have that to dread. Yay me.

It quickly became apparent that our crazy ass plot from the jam session was going to be very hard to explain. After a fair bit of work, we (I hope) have it reduced to something that can be conveyed in a ten minute presentation.

Makes me really wish we had come up with something really simple involving penguins, though. Cute little penguins having cute little happy and harmless and LINEAR adventures that a child could understand.

Bit late for that though.

After we finished, I headed on home. Good news : I finally remembered to get some prescriptions filled that had been sitting in my wallet for more than a week. The bad news : the bag my pharmacist put them in had no bottom, so my four bottles of pills scattered all over Cook street while I was in the middle of crossing it.

So I had to risk life and limb to retrieve them. At least I realized that the spillage was not my fault. At first, I, of course, blamed myself immediately, assuming that I had somehow managed to turn the bag over while clumsily handling it.

But no. The bag had no bottom. For once, it was not my own fuckery at work.

Oh well, at least today is over, school wise. All I have to do before tomorrow’s double whammy of classes is study up on our presentation so I am ready to do my part.

And once tomorrow is over, I have five days off before I start Term 6 : Endgame.

That’s roughly the right amount of time off. I don’t want any more than that. I just need a nice stretch of days in which there is absolutely nothing expected of me so I can concentrate on relaxing, and I am good to go.

Only one term left!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.