Is it asking too much to want to worry about only one thing at a time? Because I don’t see why it is that on top of everything else I’m trying to do right now, someone has to pick now of all times to try and take leave of me.

Well, the dirty work is finally done. I’ll miss you, stinks.

Alejandro: more dignified in death than in life…. but I’ll miss him anyway :-)

I *am* coping, just not very well. You never realize notice how much your life is structured around certain things until they’re gone. Sure, I knew that having ratties had dictated the layout of my room–after two years of impromptu innovations in my last apartment, I moved into this one with a much better sense of what my kiddos could mess up if I wasn’t careful. But that’s the thing that is making the absence of ratties so difficult I think. Up until Friday, Alejandro had lived in this apartment for as long as I had. Moreover, he’d been my sole rat for almost a whole year (since his brother only lived for such a short time). So in a big way, my everyday habits for the past year had been shaped around his needs as well as my own. And I feel it everyday in the littlest daily activities.

Sitting at the computer in the evenings was a habit that was as much about me checking my email and chatting with a friend or two for a bit as it was about giving Alejandro his time out of the cage without my doing something that required any real concentration. If you’ve ever tried to read a book with a little rattie crawling on you trying to eat the pages, you’ve also realized that any attempts to be genuinly productive while your rat is out are doomed to fail, so dinking around on the computer was the perfect task–it kept me from incessantly smothering Alejandro with attention, and yet was something I could easily get up from at any second to make sure that we still spent ample time bonding. Now when I sit at my computer, I find myself just automatically turning around, keeping an eye on a rat that isn’t there.

Or if I watch tv in the evenings–I used to feel guilty if I got sucked into an extra episode of SVU or some stupid movie late at night because I knew I was cutting into Alejandro’s time out. So around 11pm if I’m still in front of the tv (which I have been for the past few days), I feel that little twinge of guilt and I half get up to head down to my bedroom before I remember that there isn’t any reason to anymore.

If I eat yogurt or a piece of fruit, I don’t need to save and extra little bit for a rat snack, nor do I have to feel bad when I drop something on the floor because it just startled the bejesus out of a sleeping rat. And I can wear headphones or listen to my stereo now when I ‘m in here, because I don’t need to hear if someone is getting himself into trouble, or worry about scaring him with my loud angry music. Just all of those stupid little things, things that I do without thinking and then realize suddenly, painfully, that they serve no purpose anymore.

Combine that with the fact that I’m completely burned out of studying for my comps and I’m just at a complete loss as to how to spend my time and fill the void. Not only has losing Alejandro made me realize that while this whole academic gig is important to me on some level, it has never been *the* important thing in my life, or even one of the most important things. It’s not the reason I’d get out of bed in the morning, nor is it the thing that I’d look forward to working on when I was home in the evenings. And frankly, after a partial ‘practice test’ on Thursday, I realized what an inane and time-consuming task these comps have been. I cut myself off for so long because I knew so little about the subjects I was studying that I couldn’t imagine I was well-prepared for anything I might be asked about the subjects. But it seems now like the things I wanted to know, the things I thought I *ought* to know aren’t at stake at all. And what is at stake is a bunch of bs that I’ve cobbled together in about two weeks. Granted, this isn’t true of the whole exam, which has two different parts, but it seems to be true of enough of the exam that I just find the whole process to be frustrating and disillusioning. As if my whole academic experience hasn’t been frustrating and disillusioning enough as it is, but without the comforting distraction of a furry little rat face with beady eyes, twitchy whiskers, and a nose always on the alert for the scent of treats, my anger at the stupidity of it all just never seems to dissipate.

Okay, that’s my rant. Thanks to everyone who’s been offering their support and condolences. I know you guys are all at a loss what to do with me as much as I am ;-)

At last, the comps are over.

I PASSED!!!

Not that I actually expected to fail, but let me tell you, the exam was way more of a bogus journey than an excellent adventure, so I honestly wasn’t sure at one point how it was going to go.

Updates coming soon, including the results of the great Celebratory Hair Dye-o-rama of 2007!

It’s 4 am and I’m still awake. Physically, emotionally, and mentally I’m exhausted, yet I can’t quite make my sense of restlessness go away.

It’s been a long day. I couldn’t have gotten more than 2 -3 hours sleep last night. I was up quite late doing some last minute cramming for my exams (which proved to be a very good thing, but we’ll get there in a minute) and then of course when I finally tried to go to sleep, I had a hard time shutting down. But the exam was early in the day, so at least I knew I’d be able to coast on adrenaline to get through it.

And get through it I did. The first part went fine. I probably could have been a little better prepared–I felt like I was talking in circles a few times. But overall I had a sense that I was answering the questions more or less, and that I wasn’t completely fumbling or making things up. The second one though… lord where to begin. Let’s just say that I’d been having some issues with this exam for the past month because my prof. seemed to keep changing his mind about what he wanted me to know. Long story short: pretty much the first thing that he asked me was exactly the thing that he had told me about a month ago *wasn’t* what I needed to know.

Now, the long story. Basically, the first syllabus that I had presented had been heavy on the primary sources and light on the secondary because I was thinking of my exams as preparation for teaching an undergraduate class. Well, he told me that syllabus was no good and that I should be thinking about my exams as though I would be teaching a graduate seminar, meaning I should become familiar with as many secondary sources as humanly possible. In light of this very clear new direction, I stopped worrying about the primary sources and made a *huge* syllabus of secondary sources like I had been told to do. And in fact, although that process was a bitch and a half, it managed to satisfy my prof and it seemed like we were on the same page for the first time since we’d started working on these exams. And in my practice exam last week, he asked me things about the syllabus like he said he would, we had a rather general discussion about some of the key texts, and while I was told I needed to brush up a few areas a bit, everything seemed to go well.

So why the hell it is that today the first thing he asked me was to give an impromtu list of all the important *primary* sources I would use to teach and *undergraduate* class is completely beyond me. Now thank god that was what I had been cramming because I figured I would have to illustrate some major themes with a few specific examples. However, I did not spend all night memorizing the goddamn 14th amendment for the exam, which is clearly what I should have been doing since we dwelt on it for about 25 minutes as I kept fumbling to figure out what the hell it is he wanted and why he was asking me such *entirely* different questions than what we’d talked about for the past three weeks!!!

In essence, that part of the exam went terribly. I mean really quite terribly. This isn’t to say that I probably wouldn’t have punched him had he failed me since I think it was entirely his fault that the exam went terribly, but there’s still something hugely frustrating about spending so much time preparing and then not being able to demonstrate these fruits of those efforts. I know that he knows I worked my ass off for these exams, which is probably why I passed despite a conversation that kept growing increasingly worse. But god damn! Why couldn’t he have let me say even one tiny little thing about what I was interested in and what I knew instead of beating a dead horse over and over because I had no idea why he was asking me the things he was asking me?

In other news, I think the purple came out quite fantastically. Sure, my scalp’s still a little tingly from all the hell it’s been through today, and we might not have done the most even bleaching/dyeing job, but overall, I think it looks pretty decent. So I’ll give you a little sneak peak for now….but don’t let the picture fool you. It’s really quite tricky showing off the ‘real’ color. It seems to depend a great deal on the amount and quality of lighting I’m in just exactly what color people see. Sometimes it looks almost pink, other times it’s such a deep looking purple it looks almost blue. Anyway, full documentation (including some significant evidence why I should never be blonde) will be coming soon. For now, I’m going to try to catch some z’s.

I know many folks have been waiting to see the results of the purple dye job, so I’m finally putting a picture up. Honestly, I ‘m not sure that it quite does justice to the dye job. Maybe people who’ve seen the color in real life can say if they think this looks pretty close to it’s actual appearance. The color is really quite bright, and the brighter the light, the more brilliant the purple color. It’s been quite hard to capture that accurately on camera, probably in part because the apartment just doesn’t have the kind of bright lighting that you need for decent photos and my camera’s flash tends to wach things out. But I think this photo does honestly reflect the kind of coloring of my hair right now. If I can get better pictures in the next few days, I’ll post them. But I am coming to realize that my problem over the next few weeks is not going to be keeping the purple color bright, it’s going to be my roots growing out super fast and making me look like a super freak :-P

Click me!

As any of your timestamp checkers may notice, I’m still on vampire hours. I thought maybe they’d go away after all the comps studying was over, but alas, I am just as bad as ever. Not that I don’t have to be productive any more (I still preparing for the class that I have to teach exactly one week from now!!! AAHHHHH!!!) but I can’t help but feel like being up at 3 in the morning is something to feel guilty about, even if I am getting work done from time to time.

Then again, maybe I just feel guilty because right now the real reason I’m still up is that all keyed up from watching too much anime. Don’t get me wrong, its actually been a surprising motivator for working on my dissertation proposal, which I’ll be getting feedback on later today. But it still feels too much like I’m up late having fun instead of working. And that of course is just wrong because I want to get out of graduate school before I’m 40.

Anyhow, there isn’t really a point to this post. My being up late isn’t really breaking news. Nor is my being up late watching anime. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try to come up with some real news, and maybe make a few new anime-related animated gifs to further my class-preparation procrastination. Now won’t that be exciting?

My first class is tomorrow.

You’d think I wouldn’t be nervous about it. Tomorrow should be much less scary than the lecture I gave last year to a class of seventy-some students. Then I actually had to say something useful. For a whole hour and a half. But tomorrow, it’s the first day. I don’t really have to say much of anything at all. Just hand out the syllabus, make the students go around the room and say something about themselves, and maybe give a quick intro to the class generally. Throw in a horror story or two about how diseases ravaged the Native Americans before the Europeans even began making permanent settlements and I’m done. I know they’re not going to complain if when let them out early. And yet, I’m jittery. Ugh.

I know all of you have been on the edge of your seats since my last post, desperately wondering how my class went, right? Ha ha, riiight. Anyway, the class was fine. I may have rambled a bit in parts, but I think I managed to keep myself from looking too terrified and/or idiotic. And as far as I know, there wasn’t a mad rush to drop my class last week, so I’m going to take that as a good sign. I’m still nervous about how things will go next week when I actually have to keep them for a while and try to get a real discussion going. At least I have some rather unsettling media for them this time. I can always pull it out early if things really start to bomb.

In other news, don’t expect many updates from me this weekend. I have a guest! Yes, the fabled and illustrious Sam has come to visit me, and we have already managed to acheive great things like eating a big old Chicago style pizza (which we would have finished today if *someone* would have eaten her fair share!), conducting a whirlwind tour of the Art Institute’s free Thursday evenings ( turns out I like Henri Fuseli and El Greco, and I need to read the physiognomic work of Johann Caspar Lavater), and watching the tension-filled and super-exciting conclusion to R.O.D.! Man, what a day. I forsee much sleeping in tomorrow…