This post is both mundane and pointless on an epic scale, but I just had a horrible day and whining about it this much in person to someone would probably get me shot. At least I’m out of range here on the boards.
The day started out normaly enough, heck, I remember thinking that it had the potential to actually be good. I rolled out of bed at 6:45, pulled my hair back into a clip, dressed in warm fleece pants and a long-sleeved tshirt and headed out the door for my 7 a.m. shift in the computer lab. I didn’t bother with a shower or my contacts because a) I like to sleep in as long as I can on days when I work early, and b) I have an hour between the end of my shift at 10 and my first class of the day. I always use that time for breakfast and grooming.
The sun was most of the way up (thank you Daylight Saving Time!) and the air was crisp and fall-like. (About damn time, too!) The ROTC guys even blocked the path for a little while as they did their morning “run shirtless en masse” thing. I love it when that happens.
At work, I didn’t have to do anything. Literally, nothing for three hours. No complaints from TAs who (barely) speak English as a second language, no paper jams, no email problems. Just SDMB and Livejournal. I might have taken a nap (I do that a lot during this shift) but I wasn’t even all that tired.
During breakfast, I was thinking about how nice it would be to skip my first class, Communications 103, a rediculosly low-level class that I’m taking as a senior to fulfill one of my last subject-specific requirements. “Hmmmm…” I thought. "I could ditch class, take my time in the shower, and watch some daytime TV. We never do anything important in Comm. Wait, didn’t we have something important…I probably should go today…TEST! FATHER GOD AND SONNY JESUS WE HAVE A TEST TODAY!
In case you were wondering, this is where the tailspin starts.
As I choked down the rest of my Crispix (best when chewed, but surprisingly easy to get down whole) and ran back to my room to get cleaned up, I reflected that I hadn’t studied for the test at all. No problem; this class covers a lot of things that I already know from high-level journalism classes and from being a multicellular organism on planet Earth. (I know the class is low level, but I don’t think “What is a cable network?” qualifies as a real brain-buster on a multiple-choice exam.) I decided to just look up a few key passages in the book while I dried my hair. No biggie.
I got home, dumped the solution from my contact bottle, popped the left one in, took the right one and…wait. No right contact. Contact missing. The contact that goes in my right eye? Not there. Frantically (The test started in 40 minutes in a building that will take at least 15 minutes to walk to. “Frantically” describes pretty much everything from here on out.) searching the sink, floor, and my clothing nets nothing. My contact was gone.
I blundered sightlessly down the hall to the shower, stomped on a spider so hard that I feared I might have cracked a bone somewhere in my foot, and blundered back to dry my hair and get dressed. I got a new haircut Friday, and I’d loved it up until that point, but it decided to dry in the most unattractive way possible. What’s more, my glasses are about two perscriptions behind my contacts (I almost never wear them except just before bed and right when I get up in the morning) and I couldn’t see for shit. I managed to throw some clothes together that kind of matched, grabbed my backpack, and locked the door behind me.
I was 100 yards down the path before I realized that I still hadn’t studied for the test. The contact emergency had driven it from my mind. Well, I reasoned, I might miss the questions the TA said we’d have on ratings and shares because they’re so easy to confuse. Big deal.
I must have had something going for me, because I actually made it to the test site on time. That’s the last good thing I get to say about this exam, because when they handed out the tests, I realized that I was in deep shit. The last test was during the first week in October, and I’d managed to get an 82% despite having skipped a third of the lectures, not reading a single page in the textbook, and not having studied a minute. This was not that kind of test. Since there were only six class periods between the last test and this one–and one of those was take up by a video–a lot of the questions were trivia-like filler. I had no clue what the answers were on at least 60% of the questions. My friends in the class agreed with me afterwards that even if I had studied, a lot of the things on the test were things I would have passed over in favor of focusing on macro concepts rather than micro details.
I don’t think I’ve ever out-and-out failed a test before. I got a C once on an algebra exam in high school, but I dropped the class not long after that. I am a senior in college and I just failed a Comm103 test. My mood at that point was a mix of anger and shame.
I walked home figuring that I would change the tunes on my Nomad player to get me in a better mood. No dice. The device was on, the docking station was securely in the parralel port, but the computer didn’t want to see it. “No, no,” it said. “The docking station is not connected or the device is not switched on. In fact, I don’t think you really own a Nomad.” So no happy tunes for me. I was already in enough of a funk over the test that I just took it in stride and let myself sink lower.
If you read my Livejournal or attended OhDope, you’ve seen/heard me bitch about how sick I’ve been for the last two months or so. I’m on $300 worth of antibiotics that give me stomach pain. One of the pills gives me a constant sweet taste at the top of my throat while the other leaves the rest of my mouth coated in a metal taste that gets worse when I drink anything or breathe through my mouth. Of course, I have a head cold so I can’t breathe through my nose. I’m constantly achy and stiff and bloated from whatever illnesses I have (the doctor can only pin down one of them and there are enough leftover symptoms to fill a medical textbook). I’ve had mood swings and almost constant depression since I got sick. These facts don’t have much relevance to the story at hand, except to remind the reader of the physical backdrop against which my drama of failure is set. It just makes things that much more fun to be angry and sad over a bad test and then have depression kick in and say Yeah, and you’re ugly, too. Why don’t you partake of some Sno-Balls for a little comfort eating and to get that nasty metal taste out of your mouth? Oh, that’s right! Because that would just make the sweet taste in the back of your mouth worse and you’re already fat on a land-whale scale! Worthless bitch. I ate the Sno-Balls anyway, because I apparently like to add grist to the self-hatred mill or something.
I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to walk back across campus for my last class of the day. Remember the cool, crisp weather of the early morning? Gone. It was 75 goddamned degrees for most of the day. It’s supposed to be much colder than this. It’s October 30, world. I grew up in Michigan, and the mild autumns of Missouri make we want to throw bricks through windows. I want cold! I want snow! Get those leaves off of those trees! So yeah, that helped my mood a lot, too. Reverse seasonal affective disorder: one more thing to make me a medical freak.
I usually like my computer assisted journalism class, because we get to do lots of SQL exercises and I think those are pretty fun. But today the first thing the instructor said to me was, “Where’s your assignment from the hunting accidents database? It was due last week and I don’t have a copy.” Now, I emailed the assignment in the day before it was due. I did it at work rather than in the lab, so it wasn’t in my folder on the class server. I might still have a copy here at home, but it looks like I might have to do a giant Access assignment all over again. And there are others due Thursday.
At that point in the day, I was thinking about driving my car into an overpass support, but it seemed like too much trouble to get it out of the garage.
So, at 2:30 p.m., the girl who started the day crisp, cool, and kind of happy was sweaty, tired, achy, suicidally depressed, overworked, and had a tension headache that would send a lesser creature to its knees. I walked home again, lay down on the bed, and passed out for three hours.
…and awoke with a worse headache and more aches and pains than I had when I started. I’m just as tired and just as depressed. And when I tried to check my email, Telnet couldn’t access the server and my mom was using the AOL account and then she IM’d me to say that one of her friends in New York had been feeling very depressed for a while, so she and another friend were going to send her a spa package as a surprise at work, so could I find the full address of her firm?
I went ahead and cried at that point. Really bawled for about 10 minutes. I’ve been depressed for months and I’ve had medical problems that make my days miserable, but I haven’t complained about it to mom because all it would do is make her worry and god knows I don’t want to make her worry because I’m not the only one in the family who gets on these spirals. I’m just the only one who acts like a grownup about it and goes the hell on with life. And because I’m too grown up to whine about it, my momis sending a massage and a facial to an internet friend? Meanwhile, I"m thinking about how long of a waiting period there is before you can buy a gun in Missouri. Love you too, mommy.
So, that’s my day. Buffy’s on tonight, but there’ll probably be some way that I miss it or Spike won’t be in it or something bad like that. I fully expect my MST3K tapes to melt in the fire that’ll probably start in my Penn and Teller collection before bedtime, because there hasn’t been enough joy sucked out of my life today.
I need a hug or something.
She looks like a real cutie, though!