On Becoming a Person

Well, the news is in. I heard tell this morning that the comps committee (i.e., all the professors in the program) was meeting this afternoon to finalize their decisions about who passed and who failed the written portion of comprehensive exams. They graded the answers blindly, so they finally opened up the envelopes today and paired answers with names.

I also heard tell that we should expect to receive a phone call around 3:30 or 4pm letting us know the verdict. Unfortunately, I was working in Intensive Treatment Services until 4, but afterwards I raced upstairs and found my phone and indeed, there was a voicemail from my adviser telling me to call him back ASAP. This made me a little nervous, but when I called, he joyfully told me that I PASSED COMPS. With honors. I definitely was not expecting that! Honors means that you didn’t fail any questions and earned above a certain score on all of them.

John said I could go anywhere I wanted this evening to celebrate. I picked Papa Gyros, a local Greek restaurant.  Italian food is actually my favorite, but Greek food is my second favorite.  I wasn’t in the mood for Italian today so we got pitas, feta cheese, and olives instead. Pitas, glorious pitas! I guess it makes weird sense somehow how I like both of these kinds of food—they originate in the same general area :).

Next step in the game is taking the oral portion of the exam. I’ve got that scheduled for sometime next Monday. Not sure when yet, and also not sure who will be on my committee (it will be my adviser plus two other professors). We will see, but I’m not too worried!

I fell asleep twice at work in the counseling center today. This makes me laugh a little to myself. I should have finished some classwork, but sleeping just seemed like a much better idea. I have a gigantic sleep debt to make up.

I had a 30-minute break between counseling paperwork and going to teach at 12, so I closed my office door, pulled two chairs together, and tried to take a nap. Unfortunately the chairs were not very comfortable, so eventually I resorted to laying on the floor. That was nice. So nice in fact that it was quite difficult to get up and go teach! I felt like a zombie!

Then I had another 30 minutes between clients (I’m doing intakes now and it is set up funnier than the 50-minute sessions on the hour) later in the afternoon, so it was nap time again! This time I put my head down on the desk and actually did fall asleep asleep such that the thing that woke me up was the alarm on my schedule telling me my next client was here. I had a big red mark on my cheek. How professional. But a woman needs her sleep, no matter where or when it happens!

On Saturday there was a medium-sized art show in Highland Square called Art in the Square.  I went with my friend Natalie and we enjoyed an open-mic poetry reading, perusing the tents of vendors, and lunch at Aladdin’s. I had a good time—a lot of the people were selling really beautiful pieces. I bought a homemade scented candle (courtesy of The Lit Wick),  a couple of bookmarks made with pressed flowers, and three photographs by a lady named Helen Strong. The photographs are of beaches and I have already framed them in white frames and am planning to hang them in my bathroom. Hurrah.

All of this made me feel a little depressed though. There were zillions of people peddling photography that was likely shot with a camera no better than mine. Now-a-days you don’t really need any “special” skill to get a good picture—a lot of it looked like the same stuff over and over again; the same idea duplicated by anyone who has seen it once before. All it takes is a nice camera that will do the work for you. Tilt it a little, point and shoot, the doctor it up in Photoshop to make the colors look vibrant or dark and moody. I kind of started missing the way that I learned photography, which was on a black and white film-filled Pentax that was completely manual. We developed all of the photos ourselves. A good shot was like 1 in 10 if you were lucky—you had to make an index print in order to find out which shot that happened to be before you wasted your time developing them all. In the days of film just “anybody” couldn’t be a photographer.

(Me, age 19, and my beloved Pentax in Chicago; my first film camera)

Anyway, I sort of felt (feel) like giving up on the photography thing because it doesn’t seem real or authentic to me anymore. I feel like just one more poser out of a street full of people with Nikon D60s. Bleh. I was irritated with myself too for buying some lady’s photos when I could have just as easily taken my own and framed them in my bathroom, which was the original plan anyway. But that is work I currently do not have energy or motivation for, so this was much easier. These were already matted as 8x10s and I bought $3 frames at Wal-Mart. Gorgeous.

The one thing I did feel good about was the open-mic though. I still feel like my poetry is just as good as if not better than most of the people who read on Saturday. I didn’t read anything because I completely forgot to bring something, but had I remembered I would have. Maybe next time.

These are fantastic (and short!) cartoons that depict the truth about life with cats. Whether you like cats or you don’t, you must find something to laugh about here. This guy did several of these, but I picked out these two because they seem to most fully exemplify Melvin! Like, a lot.

When I got home today I was in need of something soothing, so Melvin and I went outside.  Melvin loves to go outside.

I sat on the back patio and watched Melvin exploring the garden and grass. He was very excited. We saw that our tomato plant has 13 BIG green tomatoes on it now. Whenever those are ready I will have tomatoes coming out of my ears :). I forgot how nice it was to be outside listening to the birds and feeling the grass under my bare feet. Melvin didn’t like the grass part quite as much, but he did jump up on top of the air conditioner to try to get a better view of the yard. He was very proud of himself.

As I am trying to write this he is laying on my lap and sleeping and making these little half-meowing noises every so often. It is the cutest thing. I am glad he is so good for me.

I keep thinking about that statement. I don’t know who said it originally, but it wasn’t me. I just feel like whoever it was spoke the truth!

In my head during this first week I have been working on a time management strategy to streamline my process at home vs. at school. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Morning (approx 1 hour): 
     --Get ready 
     --Pack breakfast, lunch, and snack for me
     --Pack snack and lunch for John
     --Feed kitty
     --Play with kitty
     --Travel to school (approx. 1 additional hour)

Evening:
     --Feed kitty and play with kitty
     --Scoop litter box
     --Put away previous night’s clean dishes (our dishwasher is broken and that is killing me!)
     --Light housework (laundry, straightening, vacuuming, bathrooms, whatever needs to be done)
     --Cook dinner and clean up (John does most of the dishes now, yay!, but I put the food away and get dishes ready for him)
     --Do homework (approx. 2.5 hours)
     --Last half-hour before bed: relax

 
(In doing the above you will find me wearing something akin to this)

I am aware that there are some essential things missing from this schedule (like work out or take walks, do fun interactive things, or relax for more than 30 minutes), but this is what I can swing right now if I stay motivated and focused with my time. I give people with kids a LOT of credit!! For me to be good at all of the family things I wish I could be, I wouldn’t be able to work or at least maybe only work part time or full time (instead of overtime!).

It seems like right now for me, a kitten is responsibility enough. I am in the process of weaning Melvin off of his wet food that he got when he was a baby (he used to need it for medicine and now he just keeps wanting it!). This is proving quite difficult and stressful. I used to feed him on demand and now when he is hungry he is throwing fits. Quite literally—he won’t stop meowing and jumping on me and trying to get in my face. (I have raised a monster!) I have to have patience through this process so he doesn’t get rewarded for this behavior, but that is so hard when I am trying to get things done and already feeling stressed to the max! He also meows like that when he wants to play or get petted, which is pretty much any time he is not eating. SPOLIED BABY!!

Hopefully this will be the last time I post about comps aside from [crosses fingers] maybe that post that says that I passed.

Anyway, the saga began with the knowledge that we were allowed to take our comps answers home over the weekend to edit them for spelling and grammar mistakes (NO content alterations, NO citation alterations, NO meaning alterations). The professors received a copy of our original answers and we were instructed to save those on our personal jump drive and then turn in the “edited” answers today by noon.

Somewhere between that happening and Friday evening I realized that my jump drive was missing.

I tried not to freak out over the weekend because I figured that I probably left it in the computer lab or in my office on campus, and that I would pick it up Monday morning and bang out the edits before class started at 9:55. Great in theory, except when I went to campus at 9am the jump drive was nowhere to be found. So I spent the greater part of the morning hunting down the IT guy for the department and trying to find out if there was any way he could recover the answers I wrote during the exam so that I could turn them in by noon and still have them count.

THANKFULLY, he was able to do that, so I just turned in my original answers and crossed my fingers that they will be all right. I know there were some issues with its and it’s and me not knowing the difference between those words, but I really don’t think that will affect the way that my answers are scored. If it does, I’ll be darned.

I did find the jump drive this evening. It was in the pocket of the fleece sweatshirt I was wearing during comps. The sweatshirt was in the clothes hamper. L.O.L. At least now I have my teaching materials for tomorrow!

  
Behold, the evil sweatshirt, one of San Diego’s finest products.

Comprehensive exams, at least the written part, are over! Two days of testing, 7 hours each day. I wrote 40 single spaced pages of essays during that time. That is not even an exaggeration: 8 questions, 5 pages each.

I thought I would be more excited once it ended, but really, it was totally anticlimactic. I had originally dreamt of myself going out and having a drink or two, but after all of this mental drain that was kind of the last thing I wanted to do. So then John and I had plans to go to my parents’ house and have a bonfire with my brother who was in town, but then John was tired (and admittedly, so was I) so that didn’t happen either. What did happen: I went home and fell asleep in a chair.

I find out if I passed written exams in a few weeks. If I did pass (which I feel like will likely happen given my confidence level walking out of the exam), I get to move on to orals. Orals will pretty much be me and three professors in a room. They will ask me questions and I will answer them. Sweet.

School starts tomorrow. That also feels anticlimactic. In years past I felt this sense of angst about summer having to end, but this year, the summer was so horrible that it doesn’t feel like I am really losing that much by going back. That makes me sad. But it is what it is. Two more years of this crap!

This is our makeshift “linen closet”, which is really just the set of wire shelves in our bedroom closet. I guess this is what I get for making a big fluffy towel the liner of Melvin’s cat bed. That fluffy towel has seen better days though. Melvin threw up on it twice—once on the way there and once on the way back—in the car when we took him to my parents’ house while we were in San Diego. I am pretty sure he was carsick. It was quite sad because his meows got more and more desperate as time went on and eventually ended in puke.

I put albums up on Facebook, one for our general trip to San Diego, and one specifically for our trip to the zoo.

If you don’t have Facebook, you can access the pictures by following these links (top one general, bottom one zoo):

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2226678&id=39112535&l=50bd60c52b

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2226683&id=39112535&l=fd3cbe36c4

John is going to post an album of the USS Midway—I purposely left the majority of those pictures out so that he would have something cool to post. Once he does that I will get that link up here too!