Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Ahead of my job interview tomorrow morning, my ambitious goal for today was to get a haircut, a real haircut!

The other day Facebook told me about a new-haircut selfie of what ended up being the last haircut that wasn't done by someone who now shares a house with me, so that was two years ago.

I had a lot of trepidation about it: would the place I liked at uni still be there? It's in the student union, would that be okay? They don't do appointments, just walk-ups, so would I have to loiter somewhere else to wait my turn in the queue? How would I know it was my turn in the queue? They don't even have a phone number, so the only way to find out is just to turn up. Would it be okay to explain I wanted a more "masculine" haircut this time? (I figured so, they've always been pretty cool, but...y'know.)

It was so rainy and dreary today that I absolutely would've talked myself out of going if I hadn't mentioned this to diffrentcolours last night. He'd offered to drive me, which at first seemed like a good idea from the standpoint of managing my anxiety, but ended up being really handy because I didn't have to wait for a bus in that weather.

And when we got there, via a little stroll around some roadworks that showed me most of the buildings I spent my third-year lectures and seminars in and therefore a lot of nostalgia on my part, it was totally fine. Julie was delighted to see me, when I stuck my head around the door and said hi and asked if there was a queue. There wasn't, she told me to come back in ten minutes and she'd be done with the haircut she was in the middle of, and before I closed the door she also said "I saw you on telly! I saw you on telly!" which is so funny because that was also almost two years ago so I was impressed she remembered; I'd forgotten!

So I went back outside to wait with diffrentcolours, who I'd left in the drizzle, for ten minutes. I got back just as the previous haircut was finishing up, and Julie and I were so excited to see each other again. We caught each other up on all the gossip -- I graduated, I'm getting divorced, she told me that Ruth has retired and told me what the place had been like since the pandemic -- my short hair is cut so quickly I felt like we hardly had time to get through everything in the time it took!

And my hair looks really nice! It's a little more normie since I mentioned the job interview but that's fine, it's just blended rather than a sharp line between the shaved bits and the longer bit like I usually ask for. She made sure to point out that after the interview I can shave it. And it turns out she still called me "this lady" to someone else who came into the shop but it doesn't matter because she gave me the haircut I wanted. They're so great there -- or I should say she's so great! I only saw her and Ruth for a couple of the apparently 34 years they worked together but they are such a pair it's strange to think it's only her now! -- I think the steady diet of students means they don't judge, they don't try to talk you out of what you say you want.

After the haircut we bimbled around a bit as I failed to make a good plan for lunch, ended up eating sandwiches and pastries in the rain, and then went to the Co-op for one thing we needed. It was really weird seeing this part of the campus again, I spent so much time here and it has that sense of timelessness because students look and act the same every year yet of course it's also been two years since I was there, which is almost as long as I was there in the first place.

It made me sad because I miss the intense experience of learning so many things so quickly, I miss reading and writing. But I don't miss the stress levels. And seeing those places again also brought back some feeling-memories that were stronger and more negative than I'd realized: uni, as a place, was an escape for me and now I can admit that to myself.

So yeah a lot of feelings went into this silly haircut, I'm trying hard not to have a lot of feelings about my interview tomorrow because they won't help. It feels like a weird time at the moment.

Okay remember how I said I only had that exam left, and it starts today and it's open-book so it's for a week so I'll be done in a week?

When I looked at the test paper this morning, I'm damn lucky I noticed that it said, along with all the introductory stuff I already knew like the date and the name of the course, "answers must be submitted within 24 hours." I'd already looked at the questions, and they seemed difficult even when I had a whole week to finish them. So I thought surely not, surely this lecturer just copied and pasted the wrong thing or mixed it up with something else... Surely the timetable collated for the whole School of Arts, Languages and Cultures hadn't been telling me the wrong thing for weeks.

So, more frantic emails. Luckily this time it didn't take two or three days to get a reply; I marked it as urgent and it really was treated as such. The answer was not what I was expecting: I only have 24 hours.

I'm really not thrilled about this; I would have organized some spoons differently if I'd known (and disabled students with chronic pain or fatigue or other conditions would be much more affected in this way than I was!), I wouldn't have stayed up until 1 last night, I would actually have gotten out of bed and been at my computer by the time the test paper was released (I was close but I was being pretty chill about it because it was still so early in the morning and, having woken up at 6, I was pretty underslept).

But, no time to argue now. The questions are hard. So these are all the words I have today. And...by tomorrow morning, I will officially not have anything else to do for uni, I guess!

I handed in my last essay today. (Well, my exam next week is likely to be a bunch of short-answer type of essays (my other quarantimes exam has been), but this is the last proper one.) I still don't have any sense of accomplishment or relief. I typed a message to diffrentcolours saying I'd finished it, and I was so tired and stressed I thought I might burst into tears. I sort of left a space in my head to cry in, but then I didn't do it. My eyes got a little wet, but that was all. I did spend a few minutes lying on the sofa listening to TMS and feeling wobbly. But then I got up to make lunch and got on with my day.

It's so anticlimactic, finishing uni all by myself three months late. I mean I was never going to go to graduation anyway, but even by those expectations I feel like I've been left in a box where no one can see or hear me and I guess that makes it difficult to feel like what I'm doing matters. If I fall in a forest and there's no one there to hear, have I made a noise?

8 If money, time, and energy were no object, what university degree would you go back and get, just for fun?

Haha, what a time to be asking this, when I'm just about to finish the one degree I will have.

Doing a master's is so off-the-cards because of money, time and energy that I haven't even thought about what exactly it'd be in. But it'd be some kind of linguistic anthropology.

I had a nap earlier and when a ringing phone woke me up, I'd just started what was apparently my version of drag queen library storytime because I was dressed up in fancy clothes, a leopard-print cape, a wig of long curly black hair...and I was reading a story about a family of mushrooms that lived in Oklahoma. One of them wanted to be in a mushroom version of the Spice Girls.

That's definitely the most exciting thing that's happened to me today. In the waking world, I did find a plausible answer for who did the audio description for that stupid movie. It only took jenett asking her colleague, that person recommending a Facebook group, me joining the group and asking there, and some guy there telling me a plausible name, not showing his working but it's not like I can fact-check it, it's good enough.

Well I say "guy," I dunno obviously but not only is it a male-coded name, he's found me on twitter and has started following me on there, which seems like such male behavior. I hadn't considered this would be a downside of changing my Twitter username to be less punny and more like my actual name, oh well! It's not like it hurts me for him to look at my tweets that I hardly ever make.

I'm mostly done with that essay, it'll be handed in tomorrow. That leaves me with ten days for the one I don't understand at all where I have to analyze graphs and I have to use enough R to make the graphs first. That'll be great.

25 What’s one thing you’ve been procrastinating on that you could take care of today?

Haha I ask myself this every damn day. I can't "take care of" my essays today but I can do what I did which is sit down and look at the structure I have for both of the remaining ones. I always think I could do more, I could've done more this week but I lost a couple days to depression. But I'm feeling okay if not great about the progress I've made this week.

Also the thing I wrote about audio description in Hamilton has been kindly accepted and will be up on the blog in a couple weeks, so that's nice. It's fun to write something with more immediate consequences and reactions for a change.

I spent today working on an essay and writing about Hamilton and audio description for Access for Us, so that's all the words I have I think!

Word count is over 800 now (I need 3000 eventually). In normal times, 800 words in a week wouldn't be much at all, but in quarantimes it's a fucking miracle and I'm proud of myself.

"Would it help to think out loud about one or more of the essays here?" radiantfracture asked me and I don't know but let's try.

( gloom )

The sad news is I had to skip work today to work on the loathsome open-book Historical Syntax exam. The good news though is that my effort is finally paying off. I've basically finished one question, and I've finally found the answer to that one that was stressing me out for three days.

I got to make syntax trees in LaTeX and everything. And I've finished another short-essay question (the bad data one, that's pretty easy). I still have to add some more words to another one (grammaticalization, that won't be too bad) and I have one more impossible one to tackle. It's a really vague question and the information I'm given with it which is presumably meant to help is making me significantly more confused.

So today was hard work and tomorrow will be hard work but hopefully I can do it. I'm feeling resigned rather than hopeless so that's an improvement on this morning.