I'd like to summarize the past month and then perhaps manage to post more regularly. For now, I feel happy again - and so happy, like a little bright ball of productivity... a space heater, I told Tara, humming in place and generating useful and positive things. I suppose I owe my happiness to the joint fruition of all my plots for self-improvement last semester (because good moods are something I have to be tricked into): I have a single now, and, although I liked Arielle personally, I can't communicate how much better I feel to have a space that's only mine on campus. It's my clean, warm place - a bunker for microwaveable soup, illegal mp3's, exorbitant reading material, and the promise of sleep.
Moreover, I am taking only humanities classes. Last semester was frustrating and humbling, and it wasn't helpful or improving at all to feel always overwhelmed and inadequate, thank-you-Bio-121. I learned afterwards that 40% of the 225 students received C's, which seems like a dire way to conduct grading. In any case, I learned a much-needed lesson: I'm not omni-gifted, I may not be gifted at all, and I shouldn't challenge myself to the extent that I spend days in bed, sulking and fearful. Now I have access to a wide range of exciting, attainable knowledge - I'm learning historiography of modern China, the first- and second-wave modernists in American poetry, intro ling, and (my favorite) "The Adultery Novel In and Out of Russia."
It's so reassuring to sit in class and feel my mind working, processing stray remarks and forming lumps or chains of ideas - it keeps me clean, it keeps that awful, degrading fog out. I feel worthwhile as a person because of my potential to construct new insights. And after class, I rush home to conduct interviews for the DP, which keeps me thinking and moving and counters lethargy. I enjoy the newspaper office partly (bizarrely) because it's windowless - I feel very focused and self-contained there, and in forced communion with the editorial staff. Intermittently, people abuse the intercom system. Tonight, weekly staff meeting was interrupted by the announcement, "The meeting in the small conference room is BYOC. That is, Bring Your Own Chair." We all laughed, half-appalled and disbelieving.
My other major plan for improving this semester was to break up with Seth, with his blessing. That, too, has had positive (albeit unintended) consequences. In the absence of a Relationship, we rebuilt the type of interaction that was so attractive to us in the first place. Our conversation lately has been without peer, and we've been improving both our lives, conjuring happiness - and I'm visiting him in a few days. If this present romance ends tomorrow, my life will still be better than it was before Winter Break, and for that I'm grateful. I'm lucky to have Seth as a best friend, for a year and nine months so far. [Summary of specific events still to come - really!]
