It’s my birthday. I turned 43 today.

Can’t say it seems any different than 42. That’s what is nice about being far away from any “special” years. I imagine 45 will feel a little different, and 50 will be a major milestone.

But 43? Meh.

The best thing so far about this day is that my classmates found out about my birthday without me having to figure out how to tell them. You have no idea how much that means to a shy person like me. I got wished a happy birthday a bunch of times, and one student even bought me a pre-wrapped slice of marble cake to mark the occasion.

And I love marble cake, especially when it has extra crunchy marbles.

This morning was Story class, which wound up ending very early because we are in the workshop phase now and one of the two people who was supposed to present today just didn’t show up.

Thanks for lowering the bar, J! Clearly you won’t be very hard to out-compete.

But that left with with a bunch of sudden free time. Class ended around 10:30 am and I didn’t have another class till 1 pm, so I had a lot of time to fill.

The young’ns all took off in search of pancakes, and maybe some day I will be healed up enough (and financially secure enough) to be able to join them when they do things like that. Like, tomorrow night they are going to karaoke somewhere. And I wish I could join them in that too. But I am not there yet.

Soon, though. Maybe. Soon.

Back to sudden free time. At first, I just kind of wandered over to the lounge and sat down, at loose ends. Eventually it occurred to me that the Writing department had lots of computers and I could be getting something useful done on one of those.

And everything went fine at first. ^[1] But then I got the idea in my head that I wanted to hang with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries, and that was the beginning of a very frustrating search for a web based MUSH client that actually works. And I never found one. I even, in my desperation, downloaded a client and tried to install it, even though I knew damned well that public terminals don’t let you install things, for security reasons.

I mean, I know better than to install skeezy stuff from shady websites, but it only takes one idiot to compromise the whole system.

Luckily, one thing I can do from there is load up Facebook in the web browser. ^[2] So not only was I able to catch up some on my Facebook feed, I could use Facebook Chat to chat with dear Felicity, and I really needed that because not being able to connect with my fuzzy friends had left me feeling very lonely.

Thank you so much, Felicity.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook, mine has apparently decided that I speak Portuguese. All the Facebook generated text is in Portuguese now, and let me tell you, it is a strange looking language. Like, the window you use to type in a post says “Gostaria de compartihar algo?”, which translates into “I would like to share something?”.

It looks kind of like Spanish, but…. not really. Not at all. In fact, to me, it looks like the result of a Spanish speaking kid trying to make up a magic language.

And I honestly don’t know how it happened. My best guess is that I friended a classmate from Brazil, and Facebook made the switch because apparently Facebook cannot imagine someone being friends with a Portuguese speaker without speaking it.

Thinking I spoke French, I can understand. A lot of web ads seem to assume that because I am in Canada, I must speak French, which is a hell of a leap. So I would not be surprised if my Facebook spontaneously switched into French. And I probably wouldn’t even switch it back. I know enough French to avoid confusion, and it would be a very low effort way to add vocabulary.

Let’s see… oh, the afternoon class was Script Structure, in the dreaded Writing Theatre. So I spend the first hour and a half fighting off sleep, because when you sit literally three feet from the prof’s desk, falling asleep in class is really not an option.

Canned oxygen is beginning to seem like a very attractive option. Or maybe hiding an oxygen tend somewhere on campus, and wandering off for a few deep breaths now and then.

Or I could just get my fucking CPAP machine working again. That would help a lot. Once more, my sleep apnea is going untreated. And eventually that is going to catch up to me. It has already cost me some lung capacity (temporarily I hope). It could be doing all kinds of bad things to my brain and my heart.

And I use those all the time!

Oh, turns out I had the completely wrong idea of what workshopping would be like. I thought we would be breaking down into smaller groups and working together on some intense project. But no, all it involves is doing the assignment then presenting it to the class for comments and suggestions.

That is way, way easier for me. Trying to help others with their stuff is a lot more fun than lectures. Being in the hotseat myself will be less fun, because the whole time, I will be restraining the lunatic voice that wants to scream “How dare you insult my babies! You don’t DESERVE my genius!” at the slightest hint of criticism.

Well, I guess that’s my day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

“Me transformar em uma galinha!” dijo el asistente!^[3]