There is something strange in the neighbourhood.

So I show up for my creative writing class and there is nobody there but me and my classmate Connor. Not a soul. No prof, no students, nada. We were supposed to take a quiz,  talk about our short stories, AND start the Poetry section of the course today. Instead, it’s a ghost town.

The first thing I do is check my email to see if there is a “class cancelled” notice I hadn’t seen because I was too busy studying. Nope!

Then I checked the official course website. Nope, nothing there either.

And thus, the mystery. I cannot conceive of a theory that would explain these circumstances. If class was, indeed, cancelled, either all of us would be notified or none of us. It wouldn’t have missed the three of us would(another student arrived later). If it was some kind d of traffic issue., the students who live here in Richmond would have made it, and that’s at least half the class.

Was there a natural disaster of some sort? Did my class get abducted by aliens, and if so,  why did they skip ME?  They must know I would be totally down with the probing! Was the cancellation of class announced telepathically and I was on the wrong frequency?

If this happens with my Linguistics class at 7, I will be super pissed. I don’t mind missing today’s story quiz, but I was REALLY looking forward to putting this goddamned Linguistics exam behind me. I would hate to have it hanging over me for another week.

Oh, and just to add to the mystery, all the stairwell and emergency doors have been marked with a piece ostensibly masking tape with BOTH written on it.

Twilight zone music!

So I dunno. Maybe my professor sent out a class cancelled notice to an incomplete mailing list. If so, grr on her.

Meanwhile, I haveh threevhours to fill.

Time to diagram some more sentences?

(–)

Everything I learned was worthless. The test covered stuff from AFTER sentence diagramming and I didn’t understand any of that stuff. How could I when I didn’t even get the simple stuff?

Oh, and mystery solved. Turns out the prof organized a field trip instead of the class we were supposed to have and told us all about it.

In an email TEN DAYS ago.

Which was never repeated. And which I would have had to think to check the announcements from TEN DAYS AGO. There was no indication on today’s webpage, or any day’s except for the day it was announced (once). I had no way of knowing WTF was up.

Now I will admit, I did get that email. But the subject line was about some field trip with no mention of the fact that this field trip was what we were getting INSTEAD of a class. So I didn’t read the email. It didn’t sound like it would interest me.

So I blame her. Sure, maybe I should read every email she sends, but there’s no excuse for announcing it only once, with no reminders, and nothing on today’s webpage to give me the slightest inkling of what the fuck was going on.

And I’m not alone. Two others fell into the same trap.

In every group, there’s going to be clueless people like me. You have to take that into account or you’re going to end up with my situation, and making it a one time only fucked if you missed it kind of thing is downright heartless.

So yeah. Grr her.

(–)

Home now. As you might have guessed, I totally crashed and burned on that Linguistics test. And I was very depressed about it during the test, which might be why I did so poorly.

In fact, I am pretty sure it was. Looking back, it was mostly stuff I could have figured out if I hadn’t had by cerebellum hijacked by anxiety and depression. In fact, near the end, I was almost kind of figured part of it out. But then, of course, it was too late.

All of this brings me to a question I find very uncomfortable to think about : I am recognized as disabled by KPU and the province. Could I claim my condition caused me to screw up that test and get a do-over? Or a tutor? Or both?

I mean, it’s factually true. I would have done a lot better without my depression/anxiety. Not only would it have been easier to think while I took the test, I wouldn’t have needed pretty much the entire reading week break in order to recover from my depression caused by the previous tangle with syntax trees.

So factually speaking, I could make my case. But it feels all kinds of wrong. I am a deeply honorable person, sometimes to a fault, and to try to use the system to get a better grade just seems lowly and sleazy to me, and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did it.

The fact that I have a solid case and might actually, on some level, deserve a higher grade means nothing to me. Fuck that shit.

And I know that isn’t very rational. It is, however, very me. And I am slowly learning that it is fine to be irrational.

In fact, sometimes it can be the most rational choice imaginable. No rational human being tries to pretend that all that matters is logic and reason and that we can somehow escape our emotional needs and our essential natures. Or like me, think I can always make the “smart” choice and bask in my own cleverness without their being dire consequences.

So it’s time to get in touch with myself. Find out who I really am, under all that mental machinery. Man (and woman, and whatever) can’t live by intellect alone, no matter what lunatics like Kant say, and it’s time I lived up to my own rhetoric and tried to live a more integrated life.

Time to put myself back together.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.