Best. Podcast. Ever.

I love Dan Savage's podcast "Savage Lovecast". It's funny, and educational and I highly recommend it.
I leave for Utah on Saturday. I was scared, but now I feel better. I talked to the project leader the other day, and he told me we have a week of training before we start work. That was very reassuring.
I've already started planning out letters that I'm going to write. I love writing letters, but I recognize the silliness of planning out what I'm going to say about the stars before I even see them myself.
I love SCA, I'm so glad I get to do this.

I'm Not Very Bright You Know

Without going into details, I got my worst report card in a long time. I should feel upset, but I really just feel relieved. I'm glad I finally got my grades. They are going to haunt me, and my life is arguably ruined, if you have a very loose definition of ruined (ruined = ...yeah ok, my life is clearly not ruined.), but now I feel like it's summer. I can let go of this past semester, heck, this past year, and move onto the next thing as a wiser person. It has been a long year. I wouldn't say it's been a bad year, but lots of bad things happened. More than usual. Here I am though, on the other side, feeling optimistic. I'm going to do better next semester, and things will work out. This all reminded me of Puzzle, from The Last Battle. He's a very sweet character, even if he is stupid, but I understand Eustace when he tells him that things would have been better if instead of harping on about how not bright he is, he instead tried to be as bright as possible. Smith is a hard school. It might be a little too hard for me to do as well as I did at Geneseo, but that isn't any reason to not do my best. It's more reason to work as hard as I possibly can. So I'm not going to beat myself up about my grades, but I am going to learn from this experience and do better. I'm also going to unpack my stuff, because it really is summer, and my parents want their living room back.

Sleep

I could not for the life of me get to sleep last night, and so I instead experienced what I came to call the Self-Loathing Spiral. It was not fun at all, and went something like this: "God I need to be less grumpy with people, it isn't their fault I'm bored" -> "I'm really just not used to being around people after an entire semester of not having any friends" -> "But did I really have friends at Geneseo? One of the reasons I left was because I felt alone." -> "Pretty much no one likes me. It's entirely probable that more people dislike me than like me." -> "Because I am a bad person." -> "Part of the reason I want to go into the Peace Corp. is because I am a worse person than other people, and so I have to make up for it." -> "I don't even know how to make friends, and even when I somehow get them I inevitably push them away or fail to hold their interest. I should just be quarantined." -> "And forget about dating. As soon as someone expresses interest in me I get bored, and that's no way to treat someone. I should never act on my attractions. Ever. It never turns out well." -> "I'm not even a good student, the Peace Corp. is just a defense mechanism to spare myself from applying to grad school."
And of course I revisited the infamous Spring Break Facebook thread. And then I thought about my speeches from when I ran for the rugby Board (and lost three times) and felt like a moron. I don't have any reason to think people on the team even like me, running for Board was just stupid. It was pretty miserable. I usually like myself, but lately I've been wondering why that is. No one else seems to like me, and my theory that if people really understood me they would like me doesn't hold water when good friends dismiss you as a bad person. That's one of the things I like about Smith though, is that no one really knows me there. Even after a semester, I still have a pretty blank slate. I don't have to be my old self, I can see where I went wrong and try to be better.

Whoa We're Halfway There!

Assuming I passed everything, I'm halfway through college.

We've Reached That Point in Finals Week

Drawback to schisming with your mostly companion #597:
No one else fully appreciates my love of dancing to the Chuck Berry song "You Never Can Tell" from Pulp Fiction when I'm stressed to the teeth.

If in Twenty Years Neither of Us is Married...

Offhand, I can think of three guys that have offered to marry me if we're both still unmarried down the line. They don't want to marry me under normal circumstances, so I'm not bragging, but it's still weird. My life is pretty mapped out right now, so I hope I meet someone along the way, because I'm booked until I'm like thirty. I wouldn't like to marry any of those Lotharios anyway, I think they offered because they're also worried about finding mates. These are also coincidentally the boys that have been encouraging me to date girls while I'm at Smith, so I'm getting some mixed messages.

Utah. Utah. Utah.

I'm going to be ok. I'll be home in a week, I can handle these papers and exams right now. There's always something to look forward to that keeps me going. The prospect of going to a farm got me through one week, a summer in Utah should be more than enough to help me survive now. I'm so close to done. Less than twenty pages to go, and then I'll be a junior in college. I can do this.

Pride

It's Pride Weekend in Northampton, an event that always makes me feel slightly guilty. I'm totally not homophobic, but...I did catch myself thinking that it would be nice, if only for the sake of simplicity, if girls would look like girls and boys would look like boys. And if everyone would just use their biologically assigned pronoun. It's clearly more important that people do what makes them happy, and I understand that it isn't a choice, and it's about what feels natural and right to the individual, I understand and support that. We recently voted on whether or not we should change our House Constitution to say "the resident" instead of "she" out of consideration for trans students. I almost didn't think it would pass (even though I voted for it. I don't see the harm in helping people feel included; that's actually what I'm all about.), a lot of girls pointed out that we chose to go to a women's college, and so we should get to revel in the feminine pronoun while we're here. So it isn't that I don't like equality and making people feel comfortable, I just don't like it when you have to play Guess The Gender. And I refuse to use "zhe", I just won't. A lot of the time it isn't any of my business, but I would still like to know. Someone, I can't remember who, told me that people are uncomfortable when they don't know a person's gender because they want to assess whether they could be a potential mate. I don't know about that, but there are situations that people get into where they don't want to be surprised by that kind of plot twist. I met a very nice person last night at the Mount Holyoake-Smith Rugby, Ice Hockey, Ultimate Frisbee party, but darned if I know what pronoun they prefer, and that's a little distracting. It doesn't matter to me, as I'm not looking to mate with anyone that attends MoHo, but I like knowing.
Gay Pride aside, tomorrow is the Rugby Banquet. We have a circus theme, and I'm going as a human cannonball. (Scrum cap and swim goggles.) It should be fun, my Big Sib is going to reveal herself. The Smith ruggers are great, really, but they aren't like the Geneseo team. I wish my rookie class hand bonded more. I think I would have been a good social chair, I could have taken steps to bond next year's rookies.
Sometimes, when I'm riding in the car with the Smith rugby team, the song "All These Things That I've Done" by the Killers comes on, and it makes me think of Geneseo. They would play it toward the end of the night at the IB, and all the ruggers would put their arms around each other in a circle and jump up and down. I remember one night in particular, I was between Chase and CWB (I was trying to include her, even though she wasn't on rugby. It was moderately successful, a male rugger pulled her out of the circle, but I got her back in.) and it was just a really fun night, but also the kind of night that I don't miss having. So, in the movie that is my life, I am in the car, with my new teammates, at my new school, and things are good, and this song comes on, and it flashes back to that night, and then you see me, and I'm happy, and the movie ends. And I live happily ever after.