Black Days

Happy Holiday. 
Yay.  
Truth be told the only thing that I really wanted to do today was to drink myself into a stuper and then pass out.   But you know.  Adulting and all of that.  
So, instead it was some video games, a little bit of sleep and now back to work to clean up the mess of the day that others who spent the time with friends and family.

 
Only one week of class left and then the winter break. 
Which is going to be a loooong break for me. 
Financial aid never came through and being unable to consolidate the costs of summer means that I'm basically working to pay the interest on the summer expenses and rent.   A nice meal from time to time and movies at the discount theater.  
But hey, you do what you can.  
But school, unfortuantly,  will be on hold until I can pay the school for the current term.  
Hopefully I can do that before the costs go to a collections agency.  
Doubt it. 
But with the previous term unpaid for I'll never get the grades for the classes I took anyways.

Education : Pay to Win. 

Breathing and Stretching

Trying to find focus in these crazy times.

Trying to keep my grades up and largely failing. 

Trying to connect with other humans and largely failing. 

Kids my own age...ha. 

"So, how do you stay awake and largely focused on the tasks at hand?" 
Stretching, regulating my heart rate, staying moving physically and mentally. 
The only "drug" I'm using is caffeine.  And that has to be carefully regulated to avoid caffeine crashes.
Stretching to wake up the body. 
Trying not to get to warm or comfortable. 
Trying not to let my self doubts weigh me down and hold me back.

Recognizing when the nods are happening and letting the fifteen or so minutes take over to freshen  the focus. 

Finding litmus tests for myself to catch myself slipping and pull it back together.

"So spoiled."
"Shut your mouth"
"You don't understand."

Oh no, I get it. 
I get it much more than people think. 
That's...mostly the problem.
I open my mouth and speak truth and it's always going to piss someone off. 
So, I'll just let it run, and if I step on toes I step on toes.
 
You say "watch this" and the pieces move around the board and end up in nearly the exact position you said they would. 
And that scares people. 


One day I will learn to trust my instincts the first time rather than making myself run in circles chasing the same leads and having the same conversations over and over again.
But until that happens.
Until I learn to trust myself I'll be checking and double checking my work.
Verifying facts as I can.
Looking to more experienced individuals to provide honest and accurate information. 
But I'm rambling.  Trying to avoid sleeping to see how much worse it is for the brain space and getting facts in order than it is to catch the naps here and there. 

Kind of damned if I do, damned if I don't. 
Catch a nap and people think I'm taking advantage of...whatever. 
Self care and they think I'm being uppity. 
Utilize resources and they think I'm looking for a handout.


Either the folks that mean me harm will find me and do me harm. 
Or I'll succeed and end up pulling off the craziest hat trick in history.

We'll see though. 
I think I did okay on my Spanish test, but we'll see. 
I forgot a few words.
Math is next, test wise. 
We'll see if the number crunching comes as easily as it did a couple of nights ago. 

Still need to see a play to "inspire me" for my acting class.
Yay. 
It's not so much the money that's keeping me from doing it. 
It's the time. 
Trying to pull my belongings together, my life, take care of my body through this crazy experiment, and scrape together the money to pay bills and tuition has eaten up most of my time. Then there's the shows available.  Good lord, I know people at almost every theater in the valley and not many of them like me all that well. 
But what else is new. 
I'll have to get over it and go see a show eventually.

"But you're eating out all of the time."
Fuck off.
I've gone to bed hungry too many damn times to skimp on feeding the machine.

"I've never gone anywhere."
"I've never traveled."

Do it man.
Go, see, do. 
If you want to you will.
You have to be your own damned wizard.
And if no one wants to go with you, go by yourself.
There ain't no one out there that's going to come and do it for you.
That's the fairy tale.
And if you "can't afford it"  find a way. 
You can always find a way to work for it, trade for it, or make things stretch if it really means a lot to you. 

Okay...fragmented writing.
Jumping from topic to topic.
Fifteen minutes, a dose of caffeine, class, then fifteen more minutes and hopefully work keeps me busy enough to keep my brain active.  Then to bed as quick as I can get to it to recoup and do it all over again.

I will survive this term.
I will pass my classes.
I will pay for all of it.
Late maybe, but it will be paid for.

And I will run this stupid ass presidential campaign.
And if I get elected I'll do the damned job.

2020 is going to be a wacky ass year, that's for sure.
Even more wacky than my sleepless brain is writing out the gobeldygook.
Even more wacky than this last year and most of the rest of my life. 
Because in 2020 the kid that first saw a president and started setting up the chess board will be old enough to play the game at the big table. 
The question is, did the opening gambit succeed?
Or am I just loosing my damned mind?
More than likely a little of both.
Ah well, it's a hell of a ride.

Spanishing

Man, 
My struggle with the college level studying isn't so much going over the information and trying to learn the information.  It's figuring out what information to focus on and study that. 
I keep finding all of these side resources and things to help with work on Spanish. 
In Spanish, the class, we're learning muy gramatica.  But, I'm wanting to be able to hablas. 
So I'm finding things that teach me hablas over gramatica, but the focus of the class es gramatica at the moment. 
The other issue is that much of the vocabulary that I've picked up in my extracurricular studies is just now being gotten to in the class work and the vocabulary from class is just now being covered in my extracurricular. 
Gah!!

So.  Yeah, I'm struggling.  Also, with this last section I haven't had as much time to sit and study as I would like.  What I need is a study partner with a similar schedule to my own.  But working nights, doing myself no favors in making friends at work, and being as socially awkward as I am I just randomly spout contextually appropriate phrases around people that seem like they know Spanish and see if they respond with the appropriate answer. 
It's worked a little, and those that actually know Spanish that I've been saying "Buenos Dias" or "Como estas" too have been polite about suffering the bad accent and responding in kind. 

But, the extracarriculars and class work are starting to overlap, so if I keep on keeping on hopefully it all start to mesh and I'll be able to hold at least a kindergarten level conversation  in the near future.

Also, I'll be needing to study spelling more.  The online part of the class I'm taking is brutal when it comes to that and I'm constantly mucking up when to use accent letters and spellings based on the pronunciation of my weird accent that blends together spanglish, texmex, mexican, itallian, and latin pronunciations.  It sounds pretty, kinda, but it does not help with sounding out words for spelling. 

Other than that, classes are going decently.  I still haven't learned to slow down when it comes to doing the simple arithmetic in my math class.  Trying to blast through the "show your" work portions of the assignments and writing out equations about as fast as I read them.  Then transposing a number here, or forgetting to factor a coefficient there, or forgetting to flip the negative to a positive when finding GCF's etc. 
So, yeah, I'm picking up the way to show the work and not just jump to the answer, but my brain being so impatient to get to the answer keeps making simple transcription errors that flub up the whole damned equation. 

Ah well, I'll get it all together and hopefully have a good GPA at the end of the term.
Then there's acting class. 
Which as I'm slowly getting rid of the jitters of being in front of my class mates now have to meet up with another individual to practice a scene with.  Which, in this last week the one bit of rehearsal time I had they forgot about so...we ended up going into class at what felt like a cold read.  But hey, group projects,  Am I right?
Not to mention my social awkwardness and being unable to ask simple questions of like "when are you available" and then bulling ahead with how I see the way the script should be performed. 
To many years as a DM coaching players through character motivations and awarding/penalizing them for going with or against the character choices they made at creation and their overall goals for that characters career/character arc.   Which, again, is why I'm taking acting  classes.   Both to learn how to work better with other people and  how to let go of the reigns and let someone else be the director of the action. 
As well as learn to, well, act better.

Outside of that the research class I'm in is interesting and I'll be needing to sit down and actually work on the paper that will be my final before long.  The hard part won't writing the paper as it will whittling out the  personal exposition and focusing on the actual academic professionals of the subjects on the findings.  Well, that, and remembering to appropriately site sources. 
The digging for info and putting things together part... Well that's my jam, jelly, and peanut butter all slathered over a tall stack of fluffy pancakes.  I'll just have to remember not to spend too much time on that and remember to focus on the actual course work. 

Anywho, back to homework, studying my vocab and verbs, pecking away at my math problems and remembering to CHECK MY DAG NABBED WORK and not to rush through the simple arrhythmic to show how fast I can run an equation.  When there's no one watching me do the work, just checking the papers at the end.
That and giving myself the mental down time to run around in Destiny and dig into the lore....oh yeah and wreck some fools in the crucible. 

"Haha Guardian! More effort like that and we just might win this!"