Mindscape

I suck

Hello loves, I'm sorry for another long absence! I said I was back because I was off for summer and I ended up barely posting anything! I feel bad! This is supposed to be my vent space and I abandoned it! I don't know what came over me, but I just kept procrastinating writing anything like it was something unpleasant like schoolwork, but I actually wanted to do it so I don't know why I didn't. It was probably summer depression, which I'm new to because this was the first summer that I didn't have anything to distract me. I had no luck getting a summer job, so I basically just kept the house clean while my parents were working. It's coming back to bite me in the ass because I'm kinda broke now. But I should have an easier time getting a job next summer becaaaaaaaause.....

We're finally moving! We have the house sold, we're mostly packed up, and by the end of the year we'll be living with my grandpa until we can build a little house next door! So we're finally going to be out of the hellhole that is my current hometown! And now I can job search at my family's hometown, the bigger town next to it like 15 minutes away, or the big city that's 30-45 minutes away! And I know all the fastest back road routes to take now! It's all very exciting!
And since we're gonna be moving next door to my grandpa, we're also going to be living next to my goddaughter! And my soon-to-be-born new baby cousin! Yes, my aunt is having her second child! And we just found out it's a girl! So yay for reusing all of my and my goddaughter's old baby stuff!
My other cousins have also moved back closer! They were all the way in California but now they're back in the South (although still 6 hours away, but that's better than 29)! So we're all gonna be together for Thanksgiving and Christmas for the first time in many years! So exciting!

In other news, 2017 was not good health year for me and 2018 is not shaping up to be much better. Turns out I have sleep apnea, which means I stop breathing in my sleep and my brain wakes me up during the night to make sure I don't die! I wake up an average of 5.4x per hour! But the good news is that I'm getting a breathing machine! I had to do a sleep study to see if using one would actually help, and that was the closest thing to a decent night's sleep I've had in years! Right now I'm just jumping through hoops to try to get the prescription to my regular doctor since I go to school about 5 hours away, but by the end of this year I should have that machine.

This semester has been killing me with how busy it's been. I'm taking Persuasive Communication, Modern East Asian History, Poetry workshop, and Public History. And I was taking the honors forum and honors thesis classes, but I dropped out because the honors program at my school is a sham and I don't want to write some mediocre thesis for an accreditation that won't actually mean anything in the field I'm going into.
Modern East Asia is super interesting but the professor is kind of a jerk. I had to step out to answer a medical phone call (the sleep doctor with my results about getting a breathing machine) and he yelled at me in front of the rest of the class and wouldn't let me explain that it was my doctor (also ended up missing a different medical call because I didn't want him to yell again, that doctor didn't call back so I have to go through the process of trying to get ahold of them again).
Poetry is my absolute favorite class, 10/10 would recommend, the class is tiny, only 8 people and the professor, so we have fun and make jokes and it's teaching me so much about writing in general not just poetry, and definitely one of the top experiences of being in college, right there with ceramics.
Public history is alright. The instructor is great, I've had a class with him before, he's younger and funny and is a good teacher, but this is the first public history class ever at my college, so he's kind of testing the waters with it and it shows. The class is not super coherent, and the material is not quite what everybody was expecting. We all thought it would be more hands on, like going to museums and learning how to catalog and archive and such, but it's all just book learning. We have a textbook that we're supposed to read but haven't needed ever (it's also very tedious and oddly worded). We're doing book reviews for a different non-textbook book, these are supposed to be an analysis of the authors' arguments (there are about 7 or 8 chapters, each written by a different author) but they all keep making the same arguments so there's not much to write on. I'm doing more service learning for this class, same place as last time, and now I'm making a website for this place as my big project, which is going well.
Persuasive Communication, aka persuasion. *sigh* This is an interesting class, I will admit. Persuasive communication is a very useful skill, the only problem is that I don't know what's going on 75% or the time. The text book, which we use very frequently, is written for people that already know what's in it, which I don't, so it's hard to understand. What we do is read the chapter, take a quiz on it (pretty much everyone is failing these) then "go over" it, except we only barely go over it. This class is keeping me sooooo busy. I have something due pretty much every other day, so I'm exhausted. I'm procrastinating writing an editorial that might get published in the school's online newspaper as I write this. Other than that, we do debates, chapter applications (which suck when you barely understand the chapter) we had to try out for the student speech forum (which my professor hosts every semester) and one of my classmates actually participated in the forum while another coached her since he had done it last year. It's mainly a lot of busywork, but the busywork takes thought and comprehension so it's time consuming. The only test we have it the final exam, but she hasn't told us what kind of exam it's going to be so I'm dreading it.

So that's my semester. I was supposed to graduate with my bachelors degree in general studies next spring, but I've decided to stick around for one more year and get an associates degree in Safety Technology. My dad got put on 90% disability, so the military is paying for my school until I graduate or I turn 25, whichever comes first, so I might as well get as much schooling as I can before that happens.

Also last bit because this is getting long, I think I have a sinus infection! Woo! I'm slightly stuffed, coughing lots, vertigo, on-and-off fever, all that fun junk. The weirdest thing is the vertigo, since I've never really experienced it much before aside from the occasional head rush if I stand up too fast or something. I can't tell if it's a legit sinus infection or just a bad cold, and I can't tell if my body's successfully fighting it off or not, but if I gets worse I'm gonna go to the urgent care and get some antibiotics.

For real last bit, I can't guarantee that this is me legit coming back and posting semi-regularly because gosh I'm still so busy with this semester, but I really will try. I miss being here so much, and doing this makes me happy, so I will try. <3