Suzy

My archives class is sucking the enjoyment out of school and my life. I loathe it. It's not that there's a lot of readings or postings, although there certainly is. But she has a set of questions for every single reading that we have to answer. It feels like busy work! Six questions on an eight page chapter? I'm basically reading with the questions in front of me and only reading the bits I need to, because as it is, each set of questions is taking an hour to do. I've never encountered this in a graduate class, or even an undergraduate. I feel like I'm back in high school English. Which I also hated. There's no actual discussion, because we're all so tied up answering the damn questions with the same answers.

Pandora, however, is not sucking enjoyment out of my life. It's nearly balancing the amount that Archives is sucking out, as a matter of fact. I've had my Tchaikovsky channel on all weekend and have managed to spend some $25 on classical music that I fell in love with. According to the musical genome project, I have a deep and abiding love for major key tonalities and tonal harmonies. Who knew? Of course, because this is the way of the world, the pieces I love are invariably not for sale individually but only with an album. Every other work on the album is available by itself, and I will love the one that requires shelling out more money. And, also, they have a tendency to package all of Tchaikovsky's other works with The Nutcracker. I already owned two or three different orchestral versions, and now I own two or three more! Good thing I love it, I guess. But geez.

I do not understand how jeans that I wore when I was 5-10 pounds heavier could not be fitting me well right now. Two pairs! I've been feeling really discouraged with my weight loss and this is very much not helping. None of it really makes sense. I have been losing weight, certainly. I'm at my lowest that I've been in over five years, and less than I was at the start of the summer. Still, I just feel a fairly large sense of failure, which is frustrating. A few weeks ago, I weighed about four pounds less than I do now, for maybe one day, and haven't seen that number since. I want to see that number again, damn it, but the more I want to weigh less, the more I sabotage myself! I need to get back into my zen mindset where I don't think about it and have success. But that's hard.

I've long enjoyed Sarah Rees Brennan's LJ mistful and greatly look forward to her book coming out. In the meantime, one of her short stories, An Old-Fashioned Unicorn's Guide to Courtship got published in an e-zine and it's awesome. It's a fairytale with wit, irony and accountants. And unicorns as chaperons. Go on, you know you want to read!

(Watching the series premiere of House and wow was that the worst representation of a kindergarten classroom and teacher I have ever seen on a television show.)