They'll call me freedom

So, like, this week has been insane, because it's the last week of school and it's bound to be. From last Friday, when we had our spring recital and all the 6th graders learned the song "Wavin' Flag" in two days and then I was signing their posters and I started crying, to other (less happy) stuff I'd rather not mention, this whole week is just a whirlwind of insanity and I don't know what the fuck is going on half the time. Also I just found out I'm teaching 3rd grade language arts in English (as opposed to math in Spanish) which is just like.

Sometimes it's just like what the hell

Ok, so this is a problem I put on Friday's quiz:

"You have several options for a cake. You can have tres leches, chocolate, or strawberry cake. You can have chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry for the frosting. Draw all the possible results."

This is the answer one girl gave me:

Chocolate: cookie, M&M, vanilla
Vanilla: algocha*, jam
Strawberry: pineapple, peach, apple

I'm sorry, but what? What? What is going on here? Bless this girl's heart, she does try, but I don't know what kind of math they teach in Venezuela that makes her come up with the answers she comes up with. (Sidenote: She came to the US from Venezuela in January. Also the quiz was in Spanish so it's not like she doesn't understand it.)

*algocha is what she wrote in Spanish, I looked it up and I still have no idea what it means

Honey badger don't quit

Actual line of my (hopefully) last lesson plan for Institute: “Winning team will get gold medals. 2^nd place team will get silver medals. Everyone wins because we learned math! Everyone is a honey badger because they didn’t quit!”

Achievement gap: CLOSED. You’re welcome.

I am emotionally ill-equiped for all this

Graduation is tomorrow how did this happen

I wouldn't trade one stupid decision for another five years of life

Graduation is this week. Get ready for a week of overly sentimental posts of songs that are currently making me cry.

Turn around, bright eyes

My roommate Hana always buys meal points every semester (even though we have a huge kitchen and 4 fridges and 2 freezers) yet never ends up using even close to all of them by the end of the semester. So during finals week, the whole house ends up going on expeditions to the dining commons, those far-off lands we only ever enter when she decides to buy us all a nice fattening, salty, yet-somehow-also-bland meal.

So tonight we went to have dinner at Crossroads, the dining hall closest to our freshman dorm, to re-live that crazy time four years ago when we would get five plates of food for every meal and like no wonder I gained fifteen pounds freshman year.

Hana said it felt like The Freshmen* were giving us funny looks, like they could tell we are seniors and don't belong.

Or maybe it was because we were talking about The Freshmen really loudly and singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart".


*Yes, with Capital Letters.

The home stretch

My thesis is due on Friday. I am, predictably, behind and feel like there's no way I'll ever finish it on time. But obviously I will. Because I have to. And then on Friday I will start drinking at noon and not stop drinking for about two days. I think that is a fair and reasonable way to handle this situation.

Also, I had a phone interview on Thursday with a bilingual school in Kansas City to teach fourth grade. I scheduled it for 9 a.m., not thinking about how that meant 9 a.m. Central Time instead of Pacific Time and how it was really going to be 7 a.m. Oh well. I have a Skype interview with them tomorrow at 7 a.m. again. I hope I get this job. I want to teach children science in Spanish! I'll have to teach myself science in Spanish first, but hey, todo será posible después de esta pinche tesis.

Things that made today good

• It's not even 11:30 p.m. and I've pretty much finished the next part of my thesis that is due tomorrow! I just have to find some citations and proofread that shit. I'll probably go to bed before 1 a.m.!
• I studied with my friends Sarah and Luciano and ate a delicious torta and this cream cheese puff pastry.
• I had a good workout at the gym (yes, I am one of those people)
• I cut my bangs myself, and I think they look pretty cute

Countdown

I just keep telling myself, I can do it; this is my last semester.

Second to last time I will ever post about finals

I took an 8 a.m. final today. Ughhhhhh. I have another on Thursday at 8 a.m. The only thing sustaining me right now is the fact that it will be the last history final exam I will ever have to sit!

Although I still have a thesis and probably Spanish exams. Ehhhh.

Also, yesterday I found out that Alma Guillermoprieto is teaching a four-week course on the history of Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia and the difficulties of reporting there. I am hoping so hard to get into this class. Alma Guillermoprieto is, like, my lady hero. She is amazing. I could be studying with her! Ahhhh!

An inconvenient illness

I have two days (technically now one day) to finish a 3,000-word paper (I've written 1,500) and I guess today I decided it would be a good time to get an infection of some sort, complete with the headaches and bodyaches and fever and sore throat. Seriously, this was like Mexico-level infection sort of sick. I was sitting in my last class of the day (which I really wanted to skip but didn't because it was the last lecture of the semester plus it's the one I have to write this paper for so I thought they might mention something useful) and I was burning up even though it was really cold outside, and my eyes were glazing over because instead of talking about anything to do with the course material, other students were asking inane questions about how many pages our final paper had to be (however many pages 3,000 words takes up, dumbfuck) or asking what narrative flow on an ID answer meant or how many pages 800 words was handwritten while my blood pounded away on the inside of my skull and I wanted to die. Then we watched a shallow and uninformative documentary about the Zapatistas which was a complete waste of time.

But no matter. I have take one extra strength Tylenol and two Advil liquid gels. The fever is down; my body feels like it is at a normal temperature. I am going to crank this shit out.

No necesito bendiciones por que siempre tengo buena suerte

I feel like the only relaxing moment I have during the day is when I'm taking a shower.

Wait, no. I also feel relaxed when I work at the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, this place that helps immigrants petition for political asylum. I worked there last semester, and now that I have a good idea of how everything functions, when I go in I feel like I know what I'm doing. I'm always doing something, but I don't have to think about all the other shit I have to do and I feel good knowing that I'm helping people who need it. And I feel like I can take on whatever petty problems I have in my own life, because seriously, I have it pretty good.

But right now I have a linguistics midterm and a Spanish presentation tomorrow, plus a shit ton of Teach for America paperwork to fill out by tomorrow night, so I am having what is becoming a weekly Thursday night ritual of drinking coffee and freaking out and procrastinating into the wee hours of the morning.

Summer's out of reach

Yesterday it was so hot. I had to walk up a huge hill to an engineering building far, far away for my last class, and I couldn't do it without sitting down several times to take a break to stop sweating. I brought this new wool sweater I bought at Target last Saturday with me to school that morning because I knew I'd be on campus until at least 7 p.m., but when I walked out of the library with my compañeros after working on our Spanish 113 midterm, it turned out I brought it vain. It felt like a perfect summer night: warm air, clear sky, and no tangible humidity. It would've been perfect to lay on the grass and watch the stars or walk up to the Big C and look at the lights of the San Francisco Bay.

But I couldn't, because it's no longer summer, and I have shit to do.

I assumed the weather today would be more of the same. It wasn't. It was much chillier, and there I was on campus until 8 p.m., in a t-shirt and shorts, shivering slightly and trying not to let the cold get to me as I walked home as quickly as possible.

A la chingada

It's only week 4 (out of 15) of the semester and I'm already overwhelmed with reading. I feel like I do that a lot on this blog: drop off the face of the Internet, only to come back with a post three weeks later about how busy I am.

But it's true. I am busy.

And my downstairs neighbors have started this annoying thing where they play really loud techno music at really odd hours (9 a.m., 1 p.m., 10 p.m.) on weekdays (not even Fridays!) and I find it really infuriating. It makes my floor vibrate. I don't understand how this could possibly be necessary. Are they filming Jersey Shore downstairs and just forgot to tell us?

When I leave for the night I ain't coming back

The six-week bridge program I'm working as my second summer job started today. I'm teaching a workshop for a US history class, and to introduce the students to one of the central ideas of the course and the job of historians, the lecturer presented various portrayals of American women from the 1880s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and finally the present. I was pleased that the students were making interesting and even insightful observations, which means they're probably a) excited about the course and b) did not have their critical thinking stunted by the clusterfuck that is high school history.

But what was most interesting, I thought, were the observations they made about the contemporary portrayal. They made great comments about challenging patriarchal authority and pre-conceived social norms and gender roles of the "ideal woman", but also how this rebellion was still framed in comparison to men and was not considered socially acceptable behavior or even behavior to which they aspired.

The portrayal they were analyzing was* Ke$ha's video for "Tik Tok".

These next six weeks are going to be awesome.

*In case you hadn't figured it out from the title

What my life has come to

So you know when you have a deadline fast approaching for something you're dreading doing, and you just keep playing web sudoku and posting random shit on Facebook and blogging to put off the inevitable?

Oh, wait, they already have a word for that? And not-so-clever t-shirts too? Oh, damn. I guess I'm late to the party. Egg on my face!



Entirely unrelated: there is a boy I like, and I keep telling myself I'm going to ask him out next chance I get. SETTING GOALS IN LIFE, Y'ALL.

Busy bee

Just when I think I've had a semester where I out-busied myself and couldn't possibly out-busy myself any more the next semester, I go and raise the bar. This semester I have four classes, tutoring 5 hours a week, a 6 hour/week research apprenticeship, a director position in an organization that fancies itself 'professional', and an Overnight Stay Program that starts in April, which means all the frantic planning is starting now.

Why do I do this to myself?

The final frontier

I'm done with one final, and I have one tomorrow at 8 a.m. (UGH), and then two more on Friday. I am already so sick of looking at my computer screen that I want to stab myself in the eyes with chopsticks.

I'm at the library studying (this is super weird for me, I always study at home) with my friend Margaux and she is diligently writing shit down on note cards while I just play sudoku puzzles online. I know I should probably do some more studying, but I feel like there's not that much more for me to write. I think I'm just really lazy and she's just really thorough.

Also she just gave me a piece of poundcake. She is the best ♥

I'm tempted to blame this war on Germany too

The weather today was really lovely, especially for mid-November in the San Francisco Bay. I only know this because I was outside for approximately five minutes, walking to and from the grocery store to buy milk and pita bread and snag all the tasty samples Andronico's puts out on the weekends. Anyway, the reason I spent the rest of the day indoors is because I have this 7-10 page paper on the 'foreseeability' of WWI and it's due Thursday and it's technically all my fault for not starting sooner, but I'm sort of starting to see the appeal in blaming everything on Germany.

Also, I keep talking about war being 'unforeseeable' and it's really making me want to watch In the Loop.

Class Scheduling 101

So y'all, I have a really embarrassing story about my first day of class, which was on Thursday.

Just some background before I begin: I always make myself a pretty, colored schedule on Excel instead of just using the one on Tele-BEARS, our registration system. So the classrooms I have printed on that schedule are the ones I go to.

I go to my last class of the day: History of Germany from Bismark to WWI. I sit in the room while a bunch of freshmen natter away, excitedly introducing themselves because this whole thing is still novel to them (awwww, adorable!). I just sit there, quietly*, because I kinda don't want to be there, as it's already 3:30 and this class won't end until 5.

Finally, the professor walks in. She sets her stuff down on the podium, and opens a window.

"Welcome to Intro to Feminist Theory."

Oh. Shit.


*Hahahha, quietly. I know, right?