I gave a presentation in class tonight. I totally choked. It was totally humiliating. I can’t believe I froze like that. Total deer in the headlight situation. Eventually I managed to bring it back and I gave a somewhat credible presentation, but I felt pathetically incompetent. Sigh I really suck today.

I was in a bad mood all day long. I was nasty and snippy pretty much from the minute I woke up. I snipped at Sara when she didn’t deserve it. When Jenny came home I practically yelled at her and she didn’t deserve it. She was quite patient with me after I blew up. I am continually impressed with how tolerant she is of me and my emotional vagaries. I am so glad that I get to live with her. She even handled my snipping about taking out the garbage. I am so lucky that she puts up with my shit.

Akien was awesome and helped me fix my wireless. I can now hide in my room and be anti-social again. Yay.

My Ed class was one of the worst experiences of my life. At least the last 30 minutes was. A student was giving a presentation and his entire manner was inappropriate. I should explain this in detail.

He laboriously had us count off by two’s. Then when it was done people started trying to congregate in two large groups—because normally in education settings if you count off like that you are going to form the number of groups that you have counted off. No. We were just forming pairs. He yelled at people who were moving around. It took him forever and ever and ever and ever to explain the process he wanted us to go through and he would only give us one step at a time. (The steps were: write for two minutes about why you like or dislike mathematics. Then spend three minutes correcting the spelling and grammar on your partner’s paper and asking them questions about what they wrote. Then take your own paper back and spend two minutes answering the questions. Then switch papers again and spend another three minutes correcting the spelling and grammar again and write if they did or did not answer your question. Then he slowly walked us through answering how we felt before, during, and after this process. Then we were to say what we were thinking before, during, and after. Then we had to say to say which we thought was harder: writing or editing. What worried us during the exercise. Are we glad the process is over. Did we feel stress? Etc. For each of these questions he spent more than a minute explaining the question and telling us how we were to answer. Throughout this process my fellow classmates were behaving like third graders. Laughing, talking, ignoring directions, being highly obnoxious, passing notes, throwing spit wads, and generally being incredibly disruptive and rude.

By the end of this experience I was so livid I was about to scream. I was angry with the guy leading the exercise because he was talking down to me and I never handle that well. I was pissed off at my fellow students for not getting the work done. My answers to these questions were absolutely hostile. When it was complete he asked the class what we thought the point of the exercise was. My quick outburst? “What to never do in a classroom?” “Uhhh no.” Fucking twatrag. Turns out he was trying to put us in a high stress environment so that we would understand the test anxiety of English language learners. I don’t think it worked. My frustration was not one of feeling stressed because I didn’t understand. Then I went and bombed the presentation.

I am so frustrated and angry. I still am. Hours later.

Between tonight and tomorrow I need to: bake and ice cupcakes, go grocery shopping, do laundry, clean my room and bathroom, talk to Chris about our date, and find a Tap plastics so that I can buy pressies for the Puppy’s birthday. (Plastic rods are the coolest canes ever.) I also need to do prep work for B’stilla’s and get my car loaded for the camping trip. I really hope I am in a better mood before my date with Chris and I really really really hope I am in a better mood before I take off for the beach.

Oooooooohhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! Puppy suspended me. In all honest bitchiness: not that well… but he is still learning. He has done one suspension before in a class with the instructor’s help. I was not really helping him. I went up, but it was far more painful than he was trying for because he doesn’t yet understand some of the principles involved. I kept my mouth shut during the suspension though because I wanted him to do what he was going to do and learn from the experience. He spent a really lot of time trying to remember what the instructor had said to do. I kept my mouth shut. When it was over he was really amazing about wanting constructive criticism. He understood the very specific things that need improvement. Many of his mistakes were simply out of over cautiousness. We reached an agreement after the processing. I want him to be brash and bold and try things. Don’t be afraid to fuck up! I am more than experienced enough to know what will work and won’t work and where the risks lie. I will keep myself physically safe enough; he just won’t learn much if he is terrified of doing it by the formula he learned in a class. He is now more confident in doing things to me in ways that might fail just so that he has the experience of trying them. I am entirely pleased with that result.

He can so stay. We are still getting along fabulously well. We have had a couple of little bumps that we have dealt with. He really likes face slapping. He really likes brattiness. Sometimes when I am sassing he will want to smack me because he thinks it is part of being fun and playful with it. I told him that when he slaps me after I smart off I feel like he is reprimanding me and I feel very sad and upset. He said that he was worried about that being the case. I told him that I can either be sassy and not get smacked when I do, or I will stop sassing because I don’t want to feel punished. He wants the feistiness to continue. He also doesn’t like me nit-picking at everything he says for minute correctness. *blush Yeah. That is a common complaint about me. It is one that I have worked on to greater and lesser degrees throughout my life. I think I am going to try pretty hard to stop picking at petty details. It doesn’t really matter anyway. I think what pleased me so much about this conversation (we went through both bumps at once) was how matter of factly we both brought up our difficulty and why it bothered us. There was no blame or anger towards the other. We simply both have a hard time with this particular behavior on the part of the other. It was discussed and negotiated and over quickly with both of us happy about the resolution.

Oh. I also had quite the conversation with him about expectations. Especially after this crack I made when we were walking through Safeway… Oh my. Yeah. I’m not going to tell you all about those things though. 😛

After writing that I talked to Puppy on the phone and felt better, then I went over to Dawn and Akien’s house for a while and had really cool conversations and got attention and it was really rad. I was a wee bit frustrated when I left cause they are both hot and sexy and wonderful–but I consider that a bonus. Yay. I then proceeded to not sleep much and be kind of a freak most of the night. But I made messloads of progress towards cleaning my room. I should now get up and get busy on all my many chores for the day. 🙂

Oh, and: http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/archive.asp?nextform=viewcomic&id=893