...my con law final and my first aikido belt test. The exam...well...asking how I feel about it is useless but I lived, and it was exhausting. The belt test was about what you would expect it to be considering I was so exhausted I was fighting back tears, our instructor hasn't been there for the last 2 practices, we found out about the test requirements Monday, and I've only been at this since spring break. Apparently I got a stripe on my white belt, which I am told is a good thing and not totally pathetic, but I feel like crap for some reason. I was too tired and stressed about everything that's going badly right now that I wasn't really as present as I should have been. So much for the whole no mind thing.
I have today to prepare for criminal law and contracts, which are next week, and tomorrow I focus entirely on property, since that test is Friday morning. At 9 am. I hope it doesn't rain, since I have to bike over to campus for the exam.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Monday, April 24, 2006
Things that suck when you have a huge exam in 29 hours
1 - you wake up nice and on time, decide to test your CD-RW drive just to be sure, and end up spending 5 hours troubleshooting the driver
2 - you find out the problem was a very simple preference setting
3 - your sister in law gets in a bike wreck and ends up having to have surgery on her wrist
4 - you discover one of your print drivers is missing and spend an hour trying to find a driver for a printer which is longer supported by the manufacturer. Then have to troubleshoot that for 20 minutes.
5 - you are flat broke
6 - your car will no longer shift in to any gear at all
7 - see #5. Can't go to the mechanic. Or the study group for the exam which is now 17 hours away.
Oh, and I have a belt test in aikido tomorrow after the final of doom, no way to get there (see about re:car), and my knee is inexplicably swollen.
All I really have the energy left to do right now is sob.
2 - you find out the problem was a very simple preference setting
3 - your sister in law gets in a bike wreck and ends up having to have surgery on her wrist
4 - you discover one of your print drivers is missing and spend an hour trying to find a driver for a printer which is longer supported by the manufacturer. Then have to troubleshoot that for 20 minutes.
5 - you are flat broke
6 - your car will no longer shift in to any gear at all
7 - see #5. Can't go to the mechanic. Or the study group for the exam which is now 17 hours away.
Oh, and I have a belt test in aikido tomorrow after the final of doom, no way to get there (see about re:car), and my knee is inexplicably swollen.
All I really have the energy left to do right now is sob.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Rough week
It's been a bad couple of weeks. The closer I get to exams, the less able to cope with life I seem to get. Of course, it hardly helps that I made a gross miscalculation and am now beyond broke. At least I have a couple of leads for an extra part time summer job. Yay for 60 hour weeks all summer, that should be nice and relaxing. It'd be one thing if I'd be making enough to actually save some money, but I have to do that just to subsist. How sad. I hate being poor.
The one thing keeping me sane is the LYM. I'm terribly afraid that he's going to get tired of me and chuck me, but focusing on that just causes me to push him away which means he gets tired of me, and it's a nasty self-fulfilling sort of thing and not good for anyway. So, yeah, stopping that. He seems to have a pretty good understanding of the whole school and money stress situation and the impact that has on me, and is being really supportive and wonderful, so I need to just not worry about it and enjoy it.
I had a really bad night at Aikido last night. My foreword break-falls suck the big one, not for any lack of ability but because of paralytic fear. Which just makes the whole thing hurt more. I think a lot of my life fears are the real problem and not some ingrained fear of falling down. When I get thrown quickly and don't have time to think about it and get all worked up, I'm fine. In fact, I don't even feel it. I don't know what the exact solution is, I guess just keep practicing.
I've found another major problem with the Starburst Sweater. It seems that the collar directions repeat themselves, which will confuse the pants off you if you don't re-read it about 15 times and have a pretty good understanding of how shawl collars are supposed to work in general. I have no idea if the solution I came up with is what they expected, but it seemed to work so I'm going with it. The collar is done, and I'm to the sleeves. So far, no issues with that, but we'll see. I'm looking forward to this being done, hopefully before it warms up and I can't wear it for months.
The one thing keeping me sane is the LYM. I'm terribly afraid that he's going to get tired of me and chuck me, but focusing on that just causes me to push him away which means he gets tired of me, and it's a nasty self-fulfilling sort of thing and not good for anyway. So, yeah, stopping that. He seems to have a pretty good understanding of the whole school and money stress situation and the impact that has on me, and is being really supportive and wonderful, so I need to just not worry about it and enjoy it.
I had a really bad night at Aikido last night. My foreword break-falls suck the big one, not for any lack of ability but because of paralytic fear. Which just makes the whole thing hurt more. I think a lot of my life fears are the real problem and not some ingrained fear of falling down. When I get thrown quickly and don't have time to think about it and get all worked up, I'm fine. In fact, I don't even feel it. I don't know what the exact solution is, I guess just keep practicing.
I've found another major problem with the Starburst Sweater. It seems that the collar directions repeat themselves, which will confuse the pants off you if you don't re-read it about 15 times and have a pretty good understanding of how shawl collars are supposed to work in general. I have no idea if the solution I came up with is what they expected, but it seemed to work so I'm going with it. The collar is done, and I'm to the sleeves. So far, no issues with that, but we'll see. I'm looking forward to this being done, hopefully before it warms up and I can't wear it for months.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Throw yourself at the ground and miss?
Or at least something like that. We learned forward break falls on Sunday and I am still sore. Why in the world anyone thinks it will be a trivial thing to fling myself head long into the floor, putting "more energy" in to it as I go along, I really don't know. At least I seemed to be getting it towards the end. Sempai said my form was good, I just need "more energy," which as far as I can tell means more thrust, as in jump over my head and into the mat harder. Ouch? The whole thing is very counter-intuitive and goes completely against my innate sense of self-preservation but there you go. It does hurt less if you do it right, but it's very hard to get my head to believe this.
I saw a cute little frolicking squirrel get hit by a car yesterday morning, that made me very sad. He was cute and the car didn't even slow down. Poor little guy, he had to drag his poor broken self off the road and I have no idea what happened to him. I felt bad for not picking up and taking him someplace, but I somehow don't think putting a broken squirrel in my car and driving all over Williamsburg in search of a squirrel hospital would have helped much. But still.
Not much else is going on. I ache. The LYM is getting lovelier every day, and the whole thing is getting less scary by the day. I survived a major thunder storm all by myself last night without any major freak outs. And the finals are coming and I just don't care. I've pretty much concluded that I don't care much about an actual career, if I can just get through this year I'll deal with my situation as it is and figure something out for the future. Ugh. If only someone had a hot tub I could soak in.
I got the other front section of the Starburst Sweater done last night during the thunder storm and started on the lower body "ruffle." This alleged ruffle is really just 2x2 ribbing, sort of gathered in at the top with a bunch of extra yarn overs. It looks pretty cool actually and show flare out nicely over my hips once it's done. It just takes forever to knit a row, since it's in ribbing, is ruffly, and goes clear around the sweater which has a cross over front. Gah. At least it does not have to be too deep. If I am good, I should be able to sit down and knit long enough to finish the ruffle this weekend, then it's on to the collar and the sleeves and I am done! Just in time for summer, when it's too hot to put on socks, never mind a sweater.
I saw a cute little frolicking squirrel get hit by a car yesterday morning, that made me very sad. He was cute and the car didn't even slow down. Poor little guy, he had to drag his poor broken self off the road and I have no idea what happened to him. I felt bad for not picking up and taking him someplace, but I somehow don't think putting a broken squirrel in my car and driving all over Williamsburg in search of a squirrel hospital would have helped much. But still.
Not much else is going on. I ache. The LYM is getting lovelier every day, and the whole thing is getting less scary by the day. I survived a major thunder storm all by myself last night without any major freak outs. And the finals are coming and I just don't care. I've pretty much concluded that I don't care much about an actual career, if I can just get through this year I'll deal with my situation as it is and figure something out for the future. Ugh. If only someone had a hot tub I could soak in.
I got the other front section of the Starburst Sweater done last night during the thunder storm and started on the lower body "ruffle." This alleged ruffle is really just 2x2 ribbing, sort of gathered in at the top with a bunch of extra yarn overs. It looks pretty cool actually and show flare out nicely over my hips once it's done. It just takes forever to knit a row, since it's in ribbing, is ruffly, and goes clear around the sweater which has a cross over front. Gah. At least it does not have to be too deep. If I am good, I should be able to sit down and knit long enough to finish the ruffle this weekend, then it's on to the collar and the sleeves and I am done! Just in time for summer, when it's too hot to put on socks, never mind a sweater.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Rescue me
This has been a bad week. At least it has been bad in my head, I'm more full of self-doubt and uncertainty than I have been in a long time. I suspect it's just the cumulative effect of the semester, but I feel as though what self confidence I had left has been undercut to the point that just functioning in the most basic sense is a huge victory.
It doesn't really help that I've been thinking about my long term goals. I need goals, I need to know what I am working towards. The goals I had set out for myself at the start of law school are either unattainable because of my less than stellar grades or so uncertain that they hinder more than help. And in some respects I really have no idea what I want. Do I really want a high-flying legal career? I don't think I do. At least not at the expense of the rest of my life. At the moment, I just want to run away from it all and hide someplace dark and safe, but that's not going to get me through exams.
In other news, I've started a crazy quilt. I made a quilt once, when I was about 12, but that's the extent of my quilt making experience, aside from helping ladies pick out fabrics when I was in college and working in a fabric store with a huge selection of quilting fabrics. As a result, I have a nice little collection of quilting cotton. In addition to that I have tons of scraps left over from various projects and swatches and bits and pieces I've collected. Not so many as I had before the move out here, but still enough to put together a respectable collection of random bits to piece together into a crazy quilt. I started last night and already have 4 squares done. Hurray! It's actually a lot of fun, and goes much faster than I had thought it would. I suppose it helps that crazy quilts can be totally random, I don't have to plan out to much other than the size of my blocks. The perfect project for me right now, it's very zen in a way. I just pick up bits and put them together and let the colors and shapes flow. No thinking, just reacting.
Aikido is going well, I think. It's a little hard to say for sure at this point since the instructor has been out for the last few classes, but the bruises are getting to be much less and I'm able to get up from break falls much faster and in a more organized manner. If I just let myself react to whatever is happening it seems to be much easer. Maybe this will help me to deal with my over-thinking problems some too.
It doesn't really help that I've been thinking about my long term goals. I need goals, I need to know what I am working towards. The goals I had set out for myself at the start of law school are either unattainable because of my less than stellar grades or so uncertain that they hinder more than help. And in some respects I really have no idea what I want. Do I really want a high-flying legal career? I don't think I do. At least not at the expense of the rest of my life. At the moment, I just want to run away from it all and hide someplace dark and safe, but that's not going to get me through exams.
In other news, I've started a crazy quilt. I made a quilt once, when I was about 12, but that's the extent of my quilt making experience, aside from helping ladies pick out fabrics when I was in college and working in a fabric store with a huge selection of quilting fabrics. As a result, I have a nice little collection of quilting cotton. In addition to that I have tons of scraps left over from various projects and swatches and bits and pieces I've collected. Not so many as I had before the move out here, but still enough to put together a respectable collection of random bits to piece together into a crazy quilt. I started last night and already have 4 squares done. Hurray! It's actually a lot of fun, and goes much faster than I had thought it would. I suppose it helps that crazy quilts can be totally random, I don't have to plan out to much other than the size of my blocks. The perfect project for me right now, it's very zen in a way. I just pick up bits and put them together and let the colors and shapes flow. No thinking, just reacting.
Aikido is going well, I think. It's a little hard to say for sure at this point since the instructor has been out for the last few classes, but the bruises are getting to be much less and I'm able to get up from break falls much faster and in a more organized manner. If I just let myself react to whatever is happening it seems to be much easer. Maybe this will help me to deal with my over-thinking problems some too.
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