March 21st, 23:03 | panic-rambling

Just when I thought I was finally getting to the point where I was starting to clear some of the clutter and crap out of my life (detachment from materialism now!), I find myself making mental shopping lists (long mental shopping lists) for crap I totally don't need. Examples? Everytime I walk past a lingerie store, Marvel 1602 (which I've wanted sinced I flipped through a couple pages two years ago), suddenly experiencing a revival in my lust for the Fable series, a second pair of cords (the first one was so good!), a muffin tray that's actually non-stick, miscellaneous sewing paraphernelia (the actual term is "notions"), the list goes on.

If I'd been hoping that my bathroom-goods purge and general sense of one-ness in my body were the precursors to some form of ascetic awakening where I would minimize the amount of Crap adorning my life, I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

Worse still, what had previously been mere dabblage into vegetarian or vegan cooking has turned into a gripping fixation with recipe blogs. We're talking train-wreck-level obsession here. I've read more uses/debates about how to sneak tofu in/make sure it's not ptomaineous in the past 24 hours than I'm ever going to admit while sober. Someone save me from the clutches of hippiedom -- I'm actually starting to feel guilty about eating meat. (No, it's not because of the so-cute baby animals. If you'll remember, I'm from Canada, and I think clubbing a goodly number of those goddamn baby seals wouldn't be amiss, since there are (were?) too many of them, and the ecosystem is (was?) direly out of whack.) There is hope though; after all, I did have chili for lunch. Con much carne.

I'm sincerely hoping this is a phase I'll grow out of. Any minute now, my Brit-gened cynicism will kick in, scoffing at this new tendril of "social conscience" that suggests that feeding whole fields of grains to animals that will then feed fewer people than said fields would have fed might possibly be a bad thing. Right?

Well lilephyte, you might now be thinking, you seem to be rambling about your denial of dirty hippiedom for... what? the 18th time this week? Clearly you're trying to avoid some distasteful task (or possibly you're trying to tear yourself away from yet another one of your dirty hippie food blogs). Why don't you tell us what it is you're avoiding?

Umm... the answer is that I'm avoiding writing a cover letter, because the sorry excuse for a first draft I produced was so woefully bad (see above; reference: train-wreck) that I'm completely disheartened and trying to convince myself that I am actually capable of stringing sentences and, yes, possibly even whole paragraphs together without 1 - Personal injury caused by extreme expenditure of mental energy, or 2 - Sounding like a complete idiot.

So obviously I chose to ramble about topics that I've not only exhausted in like 8 previous entries, but also come out as huge run-on rants anyway. I know. Brilliant.

Still, I'm hoping it'll calm me down enough that I'll be able to just write what I actually think, instead of all the panicky shrieking that appears to take over at the metacarpal helm when I try to sit down to write something that Other People Will Be Judging Me On.

In the meantime, however, I highly recommend this for the Sudoku enthusiasts who can't solve their grids in under 4 minutes or whatever. (Yet.) It's not hard, per se, but it's annoying.

Update at 00h07

Well, I have a second attempt, and I'm giving myself permission to sleep. We'll see what bright, early-morning sunshine can add tomorrow, but before I forget, I wanted to document this:

Tonight, the library was overflowing with highschool students needing help with something or other. If only all of the tutors could have combined their Bored Hours from past weeks when no one showed up to help them!

Among the mini-throng of students were my ESL girl (very independent, so very low-maintenance), the girl who faked her physics results last week, being helped by Allan, our resident physics expert and Person Who Isn't Afraid Of Highschool Calculus, and a girl who needed help with organic chemistry. (I have to say, there was a brief couple minutes of initial panic when I got oxidation and reduction all fucked up, but it's okay, you can give me my degree back, because I totally got it sorted, and then was helpful.)

I spent two hours helping her study for her quiz, reviewing reaction and compound types, breaking everything into patterns for her, and making a summary sheet at the end (she had to make up the examples to illustrate it), to show her that it's really not so much to keep track of once you break it down.

And she got it. She totally got it. The girl who was getting halogen substitution mixed up with alcohol oxidation (Her: "Oh! I replace it with bromine, right?" Me: "...what bromine??") because her teacher happened to put them in the same chapter totally understood by the end, and aced all the questions I made up for her. (Although I send kudos to her teacher; s/he prepped them with lots of example questions to sift through.)

She probably won't get perfect on tomorrow's quiz -- she still seemed a little hazy on a couple tricky details -- but she was definitely looking for the right patterns, and kicking ass when we were going through examples.

It's a good feeling.

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