tea for one

I have been a bad, bad blogger. But who knew that the second term of English would be so much tougher than the first? Seriously, sometimes it feels insane. Sprinkle the extra work I do with the A students on top of that, and get you a very, very tired me. Tired as in, ‘going to bed at 9.30′ tired. 9.30! Almost every night last week. I never EVER go to bed that early, but I simply couldn’t keep my eyes open. Of course, the week before that was the week from hell and I still suffered from the ramifications. Morphology? Evil. Syntax? Evil. Macbeth? Interesting, but still evil.

I have now finished Pride & Prejudice (which, love) and shall start with Emma this week. After I have ploughed through a hundred pages on syntax for tomorrow’s seminar and read the lovely and large essay on Atonement to prepare for Fridays’s seminar. And I have to figure out what to do with the A students for their first session after having started the grammar module.

Life? What life would that be?

I’ve just spent six-and-a-half hours straight working on my morphology assignment. Before that I had a half-hour break during which I walked home from uni, after having sat there and worked for an hour and a half after my lecture finished at three.

I have basically been studying and writing and drawing trees since three o’clock this afternoon. I don’t have a brain any longer. I only have mush. Mush for brains. And all of this for an assignment that ended up being 952 words. Damn you, morphology!

But I just sent it in. 30 minutes before deadline.

*collapses*

I think I’ve mentioned before how much I love Nick Hornby’s book A Long Way Down, but it deserves to be said more than once. It is seriously one of the most wonderful books I’ve ever read - four people who’ve never met before, all with the intention of killing themselves, meet on a rooftop on New Year’s Eve, and things turn out different from what they had expected. It’s so sad and so funny at the same time and the way it’s written, alternating between the four different points of view, makes it even better. It isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, more like the grinning-quietly kind of book, with the tragic stuff sprinkled throughout. Just… read it, ‘kay?

*A middle-aged woman who looked like someone’s cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talk-show host with an orange face… It didn’t add up. Suicide wasn’t invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

*And why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you’re told that you’ll be going to this marvellous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it’s a kind of queue jumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, ‘Excuse me, I was here first.’ They don’t say, ‘You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity.’ That would be a bit strong.

*I was still owed an explanation, I thought, but so what? What good was that going to do me? It wouldn’t have made me any happier. It was like scratching when you have chicken pox. You think it’s going to help, but the itch moves over, and then moves over again. My itch suddenly felt miles away, and I couldn’t have reached it with the longest arms in the world. Realizing that made me scared that I was going to be itchy for ever, and I didn’t want that.

*Martin had to explain to me that if I didn’t have a computer, then I wouldn’t have an email address. I wasn’t sure whether I’d have one or not. I thought it might have come in one of those envelopes you throw away.

*I was nervous because I knew that we were going to meet Matty, and I’m sort of not good with disabled people. It’s nothing personal, and I don’t think I’m disablist, because I know they’ve got rights to an education and bus passes and that; it’s just that they turn my stomach a bit. It’s all that having to pretend they’re just like you and me when they’re not, really, are they? I’m not talking ‘disabled’ like people who have only got one leg, say. They’re all right. I’m talking about the ones who aren’t right up top, and shout, and make funny faces. How can you say they’re like you and me? OK, I shout and make funny faces, but I know when I’m doing it. Most of the time I do, anyway.

*How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you just have to put a ‘fuck’. I’ll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I’d be like, ‘And the motherfuckers flew the fucking place right into the Twin Towers’. How could you not, if you’re a human being? Maybe they’re not so admirable. Maybe they’re robot zombies.

*Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.

*loves* 

Also, Liverpool just beat United! WHOO! (Sorry, Dawn. I’m bouncing over here.)

I am alive. Yes, I managed to get through the week and my two sessions with the students, despite having one hell of a cold. It was kind of funny, actually - during the actual meetings I felt all right. Not good, by any stretch, but all right. And then, as soon as they all left the room I completely crashed. I started sneezing, coughing, my eyes started running, the whole shebang. Guess the adrenaline kept me going for those hours, or something.

But yeah, it went all right. I think. At least for being my first sessions ever. The groups were really different, though! The first group wanted to talk phonetics almost immediately, while the second group really didn’t have any subject-specific questions at all. With them it was all, What’s a response paper? Do you really need that dictionary? Are the vocabulary tests really difficult? When I tried to direct them towards talking phonetics, since the teachers have suggested that we focus on that until the exam, one guy just looked at me and said, ‘You’re grasping for straws now, aren’t you?’ And I was all, ‘Why yes, I am.’

Nah, the first group was easier to work with this week. Although I did screw up some - I forgot the fika (the bag with cookis stood underneath a desk the whole time), I used a permanent marker on the whiteboard (though not much! Just for an ‘e’! And it wasn’t my fault the pens were already lying there!), and when I was writing the diphtong schwa-e, after I wrote the schwa I suddenly couldn’t remember how to write a regular e. Every time I tried it ended up upside down or backwards. Very embarrassing.

Now, hopefully this stupid cold will pass over the weekend so that I can hold a brilliant meeting on Monday when Sofia is coming to observe me.

So, tomorrow it’s time for my very first actual SI session. I’ve stocked up with cookies and tea. I’ve read up on what they’ve been doing in the three lectures they’ve had up until now, and I have a few vague ideas for what we can talk about. It’s going to be vowels and consonants, I’m thinking.

So, yeah, I’m relatively prepared. Except for how my nose is running, my head feels like it’s stuffed full of cotton and I sneeze like I’ve been sniffing pepper. Why now, huh? I’m going to have to face the students for the first time while sounding and looking like something the cat dragged in. It isn’t fair.

The only good thing about it is that I will hopefully be all well by Monday next week, when I am to be ‘observed’ by the person repsonsible for the SI development. That will be scary.