KK’s Blog

My family is a family of “losers.” Haha, that was supposed to be a joke and now it seems really stupid, but I’m going to leave it up anyway. Friday Kyle came down and had to leave too soon Saturday so that he could go drink expensive wine and listen to jazz with the Russians. Then I looked for a $280 check from G-town that they gave me for my tuition refund. I was going to use it to pay my mom back on a bunch of stuff and start payment on Lindsey’s bridesmaid dress. But I looked everywhere and I couldn’t find it. I remember cleaning my room and finding it, and I thought I had put it some place where I wouldn’t lose it. Apparently I might have put it in the trash pile instead. I’m afraid to go ask the business office to print me a new one, but looks like I might have to.

Then I couldn’t get my iTrip, which Kyle got me for Christmas, to work, so I got really mad, and I wanted to listen to mad music but I didn’t have any except on my iPod which I couldn’t get to play through my car. Ironic.

I went home and caught up with my mom. We hadn’t talked because she had dropped her cell phone in the toilet (for the 2nd time) so she was letting it dry out. It partially works now, but we had Joe’s old phone so we just put her SIM card in his phone and she just has to redo her contacts now.

We went down to my grandma’s after that, and I fell asleep at 10, trying to read about Native Americans. Then my mom and I went back to Lancaster and she was supposed to give me her school keys but she couldn’t find them. Later I found them. She had lost them by locking them in her classroom. I also managed to almost lose my insurance card that my mom had given me ten minutes before. It fell out of my hoodie pocket into the Camry but I found it before I left.

Today I lost my folder in the depths of all the pillows on my bed. I finally found it but it made me late to meet Melissa for dinner. One of Brendan’s Christmas presents from Maria was a set of little things that you hook on your stuff and then you have a remote to make them beep so you can find stuff.

Brendan lost his phone a while back and had to get a new one. And Ian just lost his phone and had complications getting a new one while in California with a Louisville number.

So I think I can say that I follow my family in being a complete loser.

I went and talked to my journalism teacher yesterday to have her go over one of my three articles I have to turn in throughout the class. It was an obituary. I did it on my dad, and she actually said it was really good. She’s a crazy lady, but nice. But she can also be a really hard grader. My first paper I got a 60 but since then I have gotten between 90 and 100 on quizzes and in-class writings. My last one I got a 97, so hopefully I’ll get a good grade on this one because it’s worth more.

So anyway, she really liked it, made a few suggestions, and then commented on how it was sad because it was my dad. I didn’t expect this, because she has a strange sense of humor and is somewhat cynical. At first, I didn’t really know her story, but she told it to us one day in class.

Her husband is paralyzed from the waist down and a couple years ago had both his legs amputated. I figured he was in a car accident because that’s what you think in most cases like this. Little did I know, he was, still is I think, a family court judge in G-town. 12 years ago, someone came to his house and shot at him with 6 bullets. The first one went into his chest, hit a rib, and then hit his spinal cord. The second went into his shoulder as he was falling and hit all his nerves, which was what almost killed him because of all the bleeding. The other four went into the window where his head would have been had not the first two knocked him to the ground.

His wife and two teenage sons were in the house when it happened, and she thought it was fireworks because it was in July. She had never heard a bullet shot before. One of his sons found him. They never caught the guy who did it.

So I think she has a right to be a little cynical and have a weird sense of humor. She says she has to in order to stay sane. She’s actually one of the really cool teachers at G-town. At first, I wasn’t sure, but now I like her. And it really caught me off guard when she said my obit was really sad. But she really liked it and said my dad sounded like a cool guy. She liked some of the funny stories. I’ll post it up here sometime. It’s on my laptop and I’m at work so I can’t put it up now. But I just thought I would share. My dad was a really cool guy, even if I didn’t know him that well.

So I fell asleep last night at 8:00 because my head was hurting so bad that I couldn’t do anything else. I had taken an advil and tylenol sinus, but sleep was the only thing that would make it go away. So I slept, woke up when Kyle called, and then slept some more. I still had trouble waking up at 7 this morning. I told myself that I could sleep all night if I made myself get up early and do some work before I met with someone at 8:30 and went to work at 9. I got a little work done, but not much.

I also did one yoga move. I want to start working out again because I went skiing Friday and had a lot of muscle pain after it. It was a lot of fun though. I didn’t fall down a single time, but I did stay on pretty easy hills. I made some new friends as well. Alex went too and by the end of the night, she had improved quite a bit. I might have burned just as many calories laughing at the beginning of the night. She would start sliding backwards and then just couldn’t stop herself. Our ski instructor even gave up on her once. He said he would go get her later. I think we all failed our ski lesson, but we did improve, so that shows you how bad we were to begin with. But I would still love to go again, if only it weren’t so expensive.

So now I’m back at the Equine center, “working.” So starts another Monday and another week.

So Creepy John told me he couldn’t come into work today so Dr. Sadlon got Jordan, this really nice guy, to work for him. I was okay with working alone but then my mom and Kyle got me freaked out about it so I e-mailed Dr. Sadlon. So Jordan saved me tonight. Alex had told me that if I couldn’t find anybody else, she could work, but she has a ton of stuff due and tests and stuff this week so she would rather not. But then she came by to check on me to make sure someone had gotten here. She’s so sweet. She also brought other people so we had some fun stories.

Nobody has come in yet. One fun thing was that I managed to step on my butt, which really hurt. Never realized I could do that. And it’s too hard to explain so I won’t try to.

I talked to my history teacher today about my paper. I wasn’t really satisfied with her answer, but I’m just hoping it will get better for now. Dr. Hadaway said that if it doesn’t improve, I should voice my concerns to the department chair. We’ll see.

So that’s all for now.

So I’m actually not feeling overwhelmed at the moment. I’ve gotten a lot done today and I’m starting to be able to work ahead on stuff a bit. Which means I’ll get to start applying for scholarships and internships in my free time, which used to be nonexistent.

Kyle’s birthday this weekend was fun. We went bowling with some of his friends and then Saturday we came back to Richmond to see his family. I went and saw my mom too, though she had gotten snowed in for some of the weekend. Kelley Ridge and 4th Street look good. I got away with doing pretty much no homework this weekend, which was nice, and I’m still doing okay for classes tomorrow.

I set up a meeting with the woman prof I don’t like right after my meeting with Dr. Hadaway, where he’ll make me feel better about myself, on Wednesday afternoon. Tomorrow I’m going to meet with Dr. Taul to talk about international scholarships and such. I’m going to wear my Oxford hoodie to class tomorrow, see if the woman notices. It’s been at home because it was dirty but now it is clean so I brought it back. Yay!!

Now I’m going to go try to revise a story that I don’t know how to revise. Should be fun!

So today is Kyle’s 21st birthday. One of his best friends is going to pick me up and we’re going to Louisville tonight. Some other guys from high school are going to come up later. I don’t know if I’ll be hanging out with them the whole night or not. I’ll be the only girl if I do, but I will try very hard to have lots of fun.

Not much is happening here. I got a B- on a 1-page paper from the professor who is the absolute worst professor I’ve ever had. I have learned nothing in that class and have a total of I think 3 pages of notes for 4 weeks of class, including writing down “Why does it matter?” three times. And 1 1/2 of those pages came from student presentations, not from her. The last B I got on a paper was from a teacher I actually respect. It was 15-20 pages, we had the whole semester to work on it, and he gave me an 88, a high B. This paper, she sent us an e-mail Wednesday afternoon to ask us to do it for class Thursday, said it should be one page, and it was over stuff we hadn’t been able to discuss in class that we had read a week before that because she talks about nothing all day. And she had C+ marked on it, then changed it to B-. Alex said she had heard since the woman had gotten a reputation as being easy, she’s now just grading unreasonably hard. She wrote 2 comments on the entire page and gave me a B-. I’m going to go talk to her, but I don’t know when because she has a total of 4 office hours throughout the week and I have class or work during all of them.

So then I got really upset. I cried. Whitney cheered me up. And when Melissa came back, we complained about her. Melissa has her too, but in a different class. I wouldn’t care that much but the class is a complete waste of my time. I could learn a lot more by sitting in my room for an hour and 15 minutes reading through stuff. After the student presentations yesterday, we had 25 minutes left of class. So we had two fairly large readings that she said we would go over in class, so I thought we would start on that. Instead, a girl asked how the Indians up north kept warm, and we talked about fur, fur keeping you warm in Russia, PETA, how PETA people are crazy, though she used to be a member until her mother bought her a fur coat in Russia to keep her warm, and how artificial fur doesn’t keep the wind out as well. I can see fur relating to a history of American Indians class, but the rest, no.

And she let us out late because the clock on the wall is 10 minutes slow. In Melissa’s class, the students set the clock 10 minutes fast so they are always let out early. This woman apparently does not have a watch and doesn’t pay any attention to time. I was almost late to my next class but made it.

So yeah, not much happening, just me getting mad. I don’t understand how we can have some really great, really awesome people here and then have people like her, who somehow managed to get a doctorate, though she acts quite stupid very often. It’s a huge, unfair disparity.

So Brendan at least still reads my blog. Yay!!

I’m working at the writing center right now. No one is here except the other guy who is working with me. He came in 15 minutes late and didn’t even say hi or anything to me. I also have him in my magazine editing and publishing class and I have to work on a project with him in my group, which he is not too thrilled about. It’s a project to publicize G-town’s literary magazine. He said to me that some people aren’t interested in that part of publishing but just in the editing/writing part of it so he thinks we shouldn’t be required to do the project. Which I just nodded, but it’s a class and that’s part of the class so you do it, right? You can’t just go in and say that you aren’t interested in the writing essays part of history so you shouldn’t have to write the term papers or take the tests that aren’t multiple choice. He’s an English major and apparently he’s known by other English majors as “creepy John” according to Alex. At first I wasn’t sure about this, but now I think I can see it. He just sort of rubs me the wrong way, and maybe I shouldn’t be mean, but he wasn’t very nice to me either. Oh well.

I guess I should start on my homework so I don’t get too overwhelmed, though I’m almost there already.

I know I haven’t posted in a long time. I have been quite busy trying to get back into Georgetown-style things. It’s hard when you have to go to class more than once a week. While I was at Oxford, I wanted to be at Georgetown with American-style education. Now that I’m here, I want to be doing English-style education. Like my mom told me, the saying is true: the grass is always greener on the other side.

So I think I’ve pretty much decided to go as long as I can finance it in some form. I just got an e-mail from the financial aid person here that the bursar at Regent’s (David Harper, whom I actually like, unlike Georgetown’s financial aid person) said I could use Stafford loans, which is good. Other than that G-town has pretty much said they can’t help me now. President Crouch is going to write a letter that I can send to all my friends and family to ask for help and Mr. Calhoun is going to try to look into some alumni stuff. But that’s it. Of course, they are setting up an endowment fund specifically for the Oxford program that I won’t benefit from because I was too soon. No one expected me to actually get in. Of course, I didn’t either. But it still sucks.

So now I’m working 4 jobs while on campus to try make a bit of money at $5.65/hour. I’m at the Equine center now, which is pretty awesome because I get to just do homework most of the time and maybe do some publicity stuff that I can put in my portfolio. I just finished writing a short story based on my visit to Bruce in the hospital, and now I have to think up something else to write another one on. My prof told me the saying to write what you know isn’t true, but I’m using it because that’s all I can think of on short notice, and I haven’t gotten to the point where I can write something well in advance of when I have to turn it in.

Okay so I’m trying to make these entries a little bit shorter than my one’s in England so I’m going to stop now, although maybe no one ever checks this thing anymore so it might never get read except by me.