The Task at Hand

Well, I’m a little bit overwhelmed by the task at hand. I’m supposed to write a 5 or 6 page literary analysis of up to three short stories. We handed in our rough drafts last week, and I think every one of the class was dismayed to find we were supposed to have written it with "audience awareness." Come to find out, audience awareness is writing with the assumption that your audience has read the story in question. Well, there goes half the paper, because you can’t re-tell your details. We were all disheartened.

So here I am, having to start over from scratch. I don’t care much about literature to start with, and then for me to have to "invent" a meaning just to fulfill the requirements of the paper is very disgruntling. I mean... just tell me what it means, and let’s get on with it. I jotted some things down, then just couldn’t keep going So I decided to take a shower to give me some time to mull over it. So that’s what I’m doing now... mulling. Have you ever thought about the word ‘mull’? There’s something curious about it. It almost looks like a word that has been made up.

As if my paper isn’t bad enough, I now have to work on my first speech. When I got out of my car last night before going to my speech class, I was scrounging around in my trunk when I heard, "I see you’re still taking night classes." I looked up, and there was Henry from my first semester English 100 class. It was so good to see a familiar face. We caught up on the way in to the Fine Arts building. He also has a speech class on Monday nights. He’s convinced me to take an Art Appreciation class instead of Music Appreciation.

We finally got our communications tests back from two weeks ago. This was the test with seven essay questions on it that took sooo long to complete. I really did not have a good feeling about the essay part of it, because I had to bluff through some of it due to memory failure. Before our class commenced, I commented to Ms. B about how hard that test was. "But you did so well!" she said. Do what?? She had the tests graded but not scored. She said she was quite weary of grading 135 essays, and she’ll see if she can’t do something a little different on the next test. It turns out that there were 119 points possible on the test, and from what I could see, I didn’t get docked for anything. So plumb! I’ve got a 119 on the test I was expecting a low A on. She said she really didn’t grade very hard on the essays. She was just so tickled at the level of effort she saw. "And I’ll grade on the Bell Curve," she said brightly. If the highest grade is a 92, I’ll adjust everyone’s grades up. Suh-weet!

Speech...paper... paper....speech... Ok, ok... No more procrastinating... Back to the paper on... (drum roll, please)... The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.

Math Blues

I find myself getting extremely irritated at some of the younger kids these days because of their lazy attitudes and loud-mouthed disrespect. Yesterday my Math 100 teacher "blew her top," so to speak. She is VERY strict about staying in the classroom until 9:15 sharp, which, in my opinion, is borderline unreasonable, especially if she's not lecturing and all we're doing is sitting there watching the clock. Some kids need to catch the shuttle and never make it in time. But anyway, it doesn't matter how many times she tells the class we must stay till 9:15, these kids are always begging...pushing... not making good use of the time she gives us in class to work on homework. Well, this morning, after repeatedly telling the class "hot shot" to quiet down, she all at once lost it. She said, "You people are not appreciative of the time I give you to work on assignments in class! That's fine. If this is just a party time for you, I'll just lecture, lecture, lecture. And I won't care if you get it or not!" She ended it by angrily telling the class to just "leave." It was five minutes early, so we knew she was really mad.

Well, I for one, found this to be very annoying. I need that time in class desperately. I don't have much time for homework outside of class, and any time I can get it done in class is so helpful. I am predicting that she will increase the homework load just for spite. Argh. She's a math grad student and assumes we all are too. She gets irritated when we don't get a concept. And I'm very alarmed at the thought of her not caring if "we get it or not." I need a good base in the Math 100 stuff if I am to pass Math 116! And all because of a couple of kids... the whole class suffers. Sigh.

Well, "David" entered the room this morning, loud as usual. He was gabbing with another student about how some other students had griped at him about ruining it for everybody. The students all trickled in, and Ms. A entered the room right on time. I didn’t know what to expect after yesterday morning’s tirade, but I certainly wasn’t expecting David to say quite loudly, "Are you feeling better this morning, Ms. A?" (*bang head on wall*) This quite clearly proved my buddy William’s theory that "not a one of us in this class is a rocket scientist." It seems, however, that some of us are more NOT than others. (William is one of the three non-traditional students in the class. We often compare notes and commiserate about the class dynamics.)

Ms. A said, "What?" "I asked you a question," said David. (Doesn’t he know when to stop??) "I asked how you were feeling this morning," he repeated. "Are you still mad at me?" She obviously was feeling better this morning because she just smiled tightly and began class. Things went much better, although she had to say very pointedly at one point, "David, I do not want to hear the answers from this side of the class. I want to hear the answers from the other half of the classroom." Then she waited expectantly to hear what our half of the classroom had to say. Dead silence. We just looked at her with glassy eyes until about two of us squeaked out in our insect voices, "Negative five." (Yay for our team!!) A little later, she said, "I am not hearing anything from that side of the class. Are you getting this? Are you following me?" Several mute nods. And later still, "David! I am talking to Rebecca." Oh.

I managed to pull my quarterly trick of oversleeping this morning. When Sara called at 6:35 a.m. to warn us that our new renters are moving in today, I finally sensed that my short nights had at last caught up with me. I usually leave the house at 6:30 at the latest. Thank goodness Sharon got up and answered the phone because I did NOT have time to talk. It was rather useless, but I did grab my phone with the dead battery and kept trying to punch it on all the way in to my closet. Talk about swift moves... I was ready 10-12 minutes after being roused. I had a few more lumps in my hair than I normally plan to have, but overall, I was basically presentable. Thank goodness that parking places are not nearly so high in demand on Fridays. God even saved my usual parking space for me even though I was fifteen minutes later than usual.

I went with Dee to the teeny, tiny town of Marrow Bone, KY, this evening to visit a patient and his lady friend. Dee has befriended this lady, and we were invited to come and spend the evening with her. It took about an hour and fifteen minutes from Bowling Green. She fed us supper, and this proved to be an endurance test of sorts. She made quesadillas for us and some sort of southwestern salad that tricked the living daylights out of us. It was comprised of cherry tomatoes, black beans, corn, onions, some kind of green leaf thingys, and ranch dressing. It looked awful. And it tasted... well, different. The green leaf gave it a flavor that I just about couldn’t stomach. I managed to swallow the leaves, but picked out all my onions and made a discreet pile on the side of my plate. Dee couldn’t stand the leaf things either, so unbeknownst to me, she was spitting them into her napkin and was also making a pile of them on her plate.

We got into quite the conversation, including a discussion of the Mrs.’s past life as a Jehovah’s Witness. We were asking the Mr. some questions, and he began to talk about the kids he has nothing to do with. He says his son looks Hispanic and nothing whatsoever like him. "Was your wife Hispanic?" I asked. "I don’t know," he said. "I can’t remember what she looked like." Dee and I both about choked on our food at that. He was married to the woman for nine years, and he can’t even remember what she looked like. He said he paid for DNA testing recently just to make sure his son is his, and it came back as 99%. I shall ponder over that one for a while.

Literary Critiquing

My literature class this week was rather interesting, but certainly not from the content of what we were studying. Ms. P divided us into the dreaded groups of five again. This time we had to discuss our assigned questions from different perspectives: biographical, psychological, feminine, historical, etc. The teacher had made us read a section in our books about all these different methods of critiquing–then we had to do it. Our group was assigned the biographical perspective. We got into our group huddle at the back of the room very tentatively and sat there and stared at each other blankly. I said, "I suggest we re-read the section on biographical critiquing," to which they all agreed. In my group we had a brunette, a Vietnamese girl, a Mennonite, a Bosnian guy, and another guy. The Vietnamese girl and the Bosnian guy had language issues, and the other guy had nothing much to say about anything, so that left Kris and the Brunette to talk.

The first thing the brunette did was to tromp up to the teacher and ask for some clarification on how we were supposed to be doing this. We really were clueless. So Brunette would call out the questions, we would look at each other in blankness, toss some ideas around, come to a general "aha!" answer, and then I would translate the answer into something worthy and write it down.

We went to break shortly thereafter, and during the break, the Vietnamese girl (Vee) and I sat and got into a general discussion regarding her country. One of the stories we were supposed to be dissecting was about a little Chinese girl whose mother pressured into being successful. So I asked Vee if her own family was like that... She said it was very typical of Asian parents to try to live out their own dreams through their children. She said if it was up to her, she wouldn’t be in college right now. She would wait a couple years and then go to college. But her father will hear nothing of it. So she’s going to school to be an architect. I asked her a little bit more about her family. They’ve been over here about ten years. Her father was a lieutenant in the South Vietnam army during the Vietnam war. He was against communism. Well, when the U.S. withdrew their forces, the northern communist Vietnam army invaded and took over the country. Vietnam is a completely communist country today. She said what they did was took anyone who had been in the South Vietnam Army and sent them to concentration camps. They would try to convert them over to communism by brainwashing. Anyone who converted over was allowed to leave, but the rebellious ones are left in the concentration camps to starve and perform hard manual labor. Her own father had spent six years in the prison. He chose to pretend to convert to the communist way of thinking; then when he was let go, he took his family and fled the country. He now works as a painter, sort’ve like a janitor/repairman, so he’s been same as "demoted." I think it’s kind’ve hard on him. Vee said he takes great pride in his former status of lieutenant in the South Vietnam Army. Her mother has died since they’ve been over in the States, so now it’s just Vee, her father, and her younger sister. I just thought this was all very interesting.

We muddled through our "biographical presentation" of "Eveline" and "Two Kinds," and we all agreed this was the hardest assignment given to us yet. Critiquing literature really isn't my love language.

like a curtain?

What an awful test! I didn't spend as much time preparing for my Communications test as I would've liked. It's not like I didn't spend all weekend studying for the three tests I've got in a row. I even took off work an hour and a half early today so that I could hop over to the library to study.

There were about four of us who filed quietly into the classroom at 5:00 and sat there studying. The teacher from next door asked Mrs. B what in the world she does to get us to come so early. I said, "Just try having a test." Shoo, shoo.

This test had about 31 multiple choice & True/False questions on it, then the bad stuff--SEVEN essay questions. The m.c./t/f took me about all of seven minutes to complete and the rest of the next hour and a half was spent doing nothing but writing. Most of the questions she had given us prior warning on; however, my memory doesn't last that long when trying to recall what horizontal communication is, what its obstacles are, and what a manager can do to improve it. I just couldn't remember it. So what do I do when under pressure? I majorly babbled and hoped she wouldn't notice my answers weren't really there. I gave her a bunch of malarky to read.

I was certainly in the final ten percent to finish the test. After I had handed it in, I took a short break to the restroom, then headed back in because she was still going to lecture some after the test yet. On my way back to my seat, she whispered my name pretty loudly to call me up to her desk. "I love your pink dress," she said. "It reminds me of some curtains I made for my daughter's school classroom last summer. We made pink and orange and green and red and blue....."

"Well, isn't that interesting!?" I remarked with a tiny smile, feeling quite humbled to be likened to a curtain. Maybe the pink will give her rose-colored vision when she gets ahold of my test.

The nerves are beginning to throw fits. We have to come up with a topic for our first presentation by next week. Yikes! I'm not prepared for this. This is one time I should've maybe let procrastination take over. My approach so far has been to get the big, the bad, and the ugly classes overwith... but a speech class? *nervous* Anybody have any brilliant suggestions for my topic? It's supposed to be an informative speech, 4-6 minutes, business-related. At this moment, I'm thinking I'll do it on HIPAA. That way, I can do it on the clock, and it's something I should be refreshing in my mind anyway. How's that for brilliant?

I decided I'd try Mom's trick for the first time tonight of going to Swifty's and letting them pump my gas for me. I had had such a stressful evening, I deserved a small break. "WE PUMP THE GAS," it says in big, bold letters everywhere you look. I declare I sat there for at least ten minutes watching the attendant fill everyone else's gas tank, while my car sat there just as empty as could be. It was amazing that one could be so invisible. I thought about driving off in a huff and showing him a thing or two, but I just sat there quietly waiting. When everyone else had gone, he sort've made a move to come over my direction. "It's about time," I thought to myself. I may have just as well pumped my own gas for as long as it took. That was when happened to glance slightly to the south and realized I was sitting at a Self Service Pump. Oh, I was ticked alright. I don't even know what comment I made to the man, but I VERY HUMBLY (and very quickly) got out and smashed my gas tank lid back in place. I started my engines and left in a huff alright, though not in the manner of my original design. I went to Speedway down the road instead. I shall be satisfied to pump my own gas from now on. Bah! Why tempt fate?

Well, two more tests in the morning... Algebra and Sociology... both about as welcome as the one of this evening. I think maybe I'll wear a more subdued color.

A Thirteen Dollar Sandwich

My classmates seem to be getting a little friendlier as the term progresses. There seems to be a certain camaraderie and bonding when everyone feels they are on a sinking ship as we feel we are in Math 100. After spending four hours on Math homework last night and researching absolute values in inequalities in several different books, I thought I had gotten the concept pretty well. There were several problems, however, that I couldn't understand why the answer in the back of the book didn't jibe with mine. So this morning before class, I decided to compare answers with Crystal, the girl who sits behind me. It turns out she was much further off the mark than I was, and I ended up explaining to her what little I knew. She became quite vocal with her frustrations: "I should NOT be hearing this from you," she practically roared. "Ms. Arora should have told us this herself. You should not have had to research it at the library to figure it out!" To which I agreed.

The instructor addressed my issues during her lecture then, so the missing links have now been linked, although not without a certain amount of stress. No one in the class could understand what she was saying, and she herself became quite frustrated. "I can see by your faces there's a problem," she said. The language barrier has diminished somewhat as our ears become more familiar with the way she speaks. In fact, I find myself thinking in short, choppy sentences; I think to myself all the time, "Is there a problem?" and I have this compulsion to put "right?" at the end of all my declarative sentences.

Sharon and I attended an informal workshop last week at South Campus on how to use a scientific calculator. Things have been decidedly better since then. I haven't used it that much, but I certainly feel a little more "empowered" when it comes to this math thing. It fits so nicely into my backpack pocket. We both decided we are going to fight to get into that instructor's class for Math 116. We are students on "the hill," and are therefore prohibited from getting South Campus classes. I didn't really know what the difference was between the South Campus classes and the Hill classes until another student today told me that South Campus is actually for students who have not taken their ACT's. The students who end up there tend to be your non traditional, older people. Sharon managed to "sob story" her way into Mr. Downing's South Campus Math 100 class this semester, so maybe if I push the right buttons.... I shall make it an item of prayer. I really need to get a good instructor if I am to pass 116. This is, of course, presuming I can pass the 100 class with a grade greater than a C. Well, enough about Math, my continuing drama....

Last Sunday, our church had what they dubbed "Heritage Sunday." Elwood had a message on the Amish, and then Oliver had a message on the Mennonites. We sang in both English and in German, and afterward, we had a traditional Amish church meal. Now I knew about the Amish peanut butter, but I didn't know they had bean soup with mushy bread in it. That was a little too much. I could not partake of it. I had pictured mashed potatoes, green beans, meat, etc., for the meal. I think I may have been drawing on my experience with Amish weddings as opposed to any experience I may have had at an Amish church service. After lunch, they had a horse and buggy there to give the little children rides with. It was all very interesting. I invited Dee to come with me, so she did. She sent her child to her church with her husband because she was afraid Jayce would disrupt our church service. She said afterward she shouldn't have worried about it. It seemed our babies were in extra ill moods and fuss, fuss, fuss was all you heard.

Dee is three months pregnant, and it didn't take her long to discover the pickles sitting in various places on the tables. I have no idea exactly how many pickles she ate, but there was this one certain kind that she fell in love with. I had one--and one was all I could handle. It was the sourest pickle I've ever tasted. So sour it seemed to burn the inside of my mouth. Well, she made it her mission to track down whoever had made those pickles. It turned out to be Judy, who wasn't even there that morning. So one of the church ladies gave her her phone number, and wouldn't you know it... yesterday, I heard her make a phone call to Miss Judy. She plumb asked her for a jar of pickles because she was still craving it. I don't know what Judy thought, but she seemed to take it well enough. And Dee has a jar of pickles coming to her in the morning.

I have three tests coming up in three consecutive classes next week: Math, Sociology, and Speech. I knew I had to head on over to the library tonight to try to get a grip on myself and my subjects. I decided to grab a chicken sandwich from McDonald's because it was going to be a long evening. And only one thing is worse than studying when you're sleepy....studying when you're sleepy and hungry. If I had seen the line that was on the other side of the McDonald's building before I placed my order for yes....just a chicken sandwich please.... I would never have stopped there. As I've never been the type to place an order and then drive off in a huff, I ended up sitting there for about fifteen minutes waiting and waiting and... By the time I arrived at the window, I was ILL. The greasy guy who opened the window to collect my money was a real duffer. He was the epitome of a Kentucky redneck. And then he opened his mouth and out rolled a British accent. "$13.13" he said, only it came out sounding like "thuteen, thuteen." "Uhhh.....I only had a chicken sandwich," I said. "Oh," he said. He closed the window briefly, then came back... "Yes, that's right," he said. "Thuteen, thuteen." "For a sandwich????" I asked. "Yes," he said. "THIRTEEN dollars for a SANDWICH?" I couldn't help the rising decibal level. He consulted his screen again. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "It's thray, thuteen." I handed him a five so that he couldn't abuse my money. I think he was embarrassed because he apologized again and said, "I was reading it backwards." Ummm.. :-

I took my sandwich and scurried over to the library, trying to make up for lost time. I bit into the chilly chicken sandwich, out of which oozed an abhorrent amount of mayonnaise. No napkin. And the sandwich was in one of their everlasting environment-friendly boxes. I had to end up wiping my hands on the bag. As I contemplated The Sandwich, I stopped for a moment and considered the chicken salad sandwich Dee had had for lunch today. She had bit into it and found a long strand of hair tangled and twined in and out of her teeth. I turned my interior light on and Examined my sandwich. As far as I could tell, it was hair free, but I was grossed out just the same. I think it will be a long time before I venture to that particular McDonald's again. The sad thing was that I had chosen it because I figured it would be faster than going to Subway. Wrong.
I had an uneventful two hours at the library, my only company what I refer to as the Library Mafia. These library monitors go sailing around the perimeter of all nine floors routinely looking for students who are in violation of any of their many rules. They have little ear pieces and walkie talkies. The ones I have seen seem to always be dressed in black. The thing they don't realize is that the speed with which they march makes them sound like a herd of elephants coming. Their presence is well-announced. But I suppose if I have my CD player plugged into my head, however, like I did tonight, I might not hear them coming. Which brings to mind...

I had stopped in at Wal-Mart for some supplies prior to McDonald's and the library. I decided it was time for some fresh music, so I picked up an instrumental cd to help me while away the hours. Of course, I had to set the alarm off when I exited the store. Why wouldn't I when I was in a hurry? The first I was aware of it was when a tottery old grandma hollers after me, "Excuse me...excuse me!" I turned around, and she loudly announced to All that I had set the alarm off. Fine. I can be searched. I dug my receipt out of my wallet to prove that I had paid for my cd. She looked at the receipt and then, in turn, the cd. "C-E-L-T.." she spelled out slowly. "Celtic," I said. "But what is it?" she asked. Hello?? Is it not enough that I should be searched as if I were a common thief...but to have to explain my purchase to a little old grandma who has never heard of celtic music before?? That's a little uncalled for, and besides, I don't have the time for it! I just hope she likes McDonald's...

Dr. G informed us we are being photographed for a yellow pages ad tomorrow. "Wear something colorful," he told us. "Dee, you would look good in blue. Kim, what color can you wear? Shall we all wear scrubs?" Needless to say, I am hoping to avoid the entire thing altogether.

He "busted" me earlier this week when I was giving his daughter Isabel some Oreo cookies a drug rep had bestowed on us. Of course, he would pick the very moment I'm giving them to her to walk through the kitchen. Is it just me? or do I seem to have an unusual amount of bad luck? "Miss Kris," he said reproachfully. "Are you feeding my daughter partially hydrogenated oil?" Who, me?? "Isabel LOVES Double Stuff," I said authoritatively, as I beat a hasty retreat back to my office, not waiting for any other Comments from the afore-mentioned.

His Error of the Week was showing Isabel how to run stuff through the postage meter. So now as of this afternoon we have at least one lovely little post-it note with 37 cents postage on it. I walked in on him as he was trying to explain her error to her even as she was hiding behind the door. "But I guess we could use it as a postcard," I heard him say as I passed through. Yeah right. Whatever.

Issues of Stress

Sept 1, 2004

I am downright proud of myself; it is midnight, my homework is done, and I'm still awake! And that is literally an amazing thing! Sleep deprivation has been the bane of my existence since I've been back in school. I usually get up at 5:30 a.m. to make sure I am in the parking lot at Western by 7:00 a.m. If I don't, I may/may not get a parking space. I sit in my car and study until 7:30, then I make my way up to the Math building, aka Kris's Torture Chamber.

By the time I have gone to school and then put in 6-8 hours at work, it is usually nine or ten o'clock at night before I can sit down to do my homework. There is usually a good hour and a half's worth of Math homework to do every night.... minimum (!), plus anything else I may have for any other class. So I'll start the homework....and boom... I'm asleep. I wake up with my head in all sorts of positions, my light still on-- sometimes still sitting in my chair. Monday night was absolutely miserable. I had scads of Math to do, and I felt like I was paralyzed with sleepiness. I had a Math quiz to study for too and just couldn't do it. I tried to wake up extra early the next morning so I would have time to finish it. I finished it, but just barely. I was really stressed out about it and I once again froze up on the quiz.

These quizzes are nerve-wracking. Quiz one was awful too. I did not have a good feeling about it at all. When I got quiz 1 back on Monday, I looked at it and literally spazzed out. The grade was 3/15. There was just as much red on the paper as any other color. Upon closer examination, I realized I had the wrong paper. There is a Christine, a Crystal, a Kris, and a Chris in the class, and because she doesn't ever talk clearly enough to understand her, we get our papers confused sometimes. Thank goodness! Because I got the bonus question correct, my grade was acceptable by my standards; however, getting back to quiz 2... sheesh! There was simply a problem that gave me fits! Neither one of my answers checked out correctly. Everyone else in the class is beyond caring at this point, so they finish theirs faster than you can snap your fingers. And here's Kris... plugging along, carefully checking every answer... So, of course, I'm the last one to finish, and I take every possible minute to do it. It's embarrassing. My problem never did check out right, so I just went ahead and handed it in and stressfully went on my way down the hill to Musalia's class. He was in such a chipper mood, and I could barely even smile because just as I reached the classroom, I all of a sudden realized I had forgotten to copy my math homework assignment down. *Bang head against wall here.* I could NOT concentrate for the rest of the morning. What made it so bad was that the teacher had just announced to us at the beginning of class that we are not to contact her about homework. We need to get it from our classmates. Well, shy little Krissy here hasn't gotten a classmate's name yet, thank you very much! So just what does a buffalo do?

Well, after I got to work, I composed a Very Humble Email to my teacher. Just how does one beg gracefully? I won't divulge the details of the Great Humiliation, but the bottom line is... she sent me the homework assignment.

So how exactly have I managed to stay awake tonight? Well, Sharon and I discovered WKU's library Monday night. It is open until midnight! It is so "booky," and the lights are bright and not at all conducive to sleeping. It is like a labyrinth and has scads of empty tables and study stations. So after my literature class tonight, I walked over to the library, walked across the covered bridge, took the elevator up to the ninth floor, went to the farthest corner I could find, and there I sat for the duration of my homework assignment. I didn't get home until 11:20, but at least when I got home and walked into the subtle lighting of my bedroom, I could feel free to go into shut-down mode without fear of it damaging my grades. I think I shall be utilizing the library a lot this year! This thing of sleeping with your light on is simply not a good thing.

My English class isn't going to be quite as bad as I had feared, especially as my textbook has finally come. That was also an Issue of Stress. Me, being the el cheapo that I am, ordered my literature textbook on ebay. It took a week and a half to get here, and I was about to start chewing my fingernails from the suspense of its arrival. I was supposed to have read two stories by class time tonight, and it's kind've hard to do without a book. I decided that for the five dollars I saved, it wasn't worth the anxiety of waiting. It finally arrived yesterday.

The two stories we read and subsequently discussed were "A Rose for Emily" and "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." We had to discuss it in groups of four. We were supposed to discuss the author's meaning of the ending of "The Jilting..." and plumb...if I didn't sit there and tell three little girls about the concept of the church being the bride of Christ. They had never heard of such a thing. Two of the girls in my group also happen to be in my sociology class. They had to tell me that; I would never have recognized them on my own. I suppose I'm a little easier to spot than most.

As for "A Rose..." If you haven't read that story, you really need to. The ending is really quite shocking! Deliciously so.