Work took forever yesterday. According to my desk clock I was here for 8 hours, but according to my senses it was much longer. It went in spurts, though. When people emailed me, it flew right by. When I was supposed to be concentrating, and people bugged me, and nothing was accomplished was the eternal part. Then the drive hom took an eon, and while I felt like I was at the grocery store for only a half-hour, the shopping actually took an hour and a half. When I got home, dinner took a half hour to cook, which felt like an hour because I was hungry, and then time dragged itself out forever until Shelly came over.
Then it flew right by, and poor Shelly didn't even get to leave until around midnight. We had a good time, and it was just like the way things always are with us. Sometimes we just core-dump when we're together. It just all bubbles its way out. Good things, bad things, silly things, whatever. What's cool is that I don't think either of us minds when the other rants on for an hour about something. Matter of fact, I think it's expected.
After Shel was gone, time went very quickly while I cleaned up the kitchen and put the whites in the laundry. Then I decided to go to bed, and try to get some sleep. Responsibly. I laid there with my eyes open. The clock rolled from one minute to the next, and I stared at it. Leeloo did her level-best to make me sleep, lying on my chest and purring hypnotically. There would be no reprieve until Forest came home.
The clock is truly a fickle contraption.
I wish I had the courage to sit down and talk to Jeff face-to-face. Our emails over the past months have become more and more frank, and today we actually discussed relationships, and what was going on in our lives. It went well, I think... but you never really know that over email. I'll be seeing him this weekend, and hopefully be able to get a read on things then. I would really like to be friends, and I hope that would make a lot of our mutual companions less antsy about things. I miss the old days of everyone sitting in one room and BSing. I didn't even know Marcellus had moved away!
Tonight I get to go sign away a great portion of my life to Tae Kwon Do classes. The registration procedure Forest describes sounds very much like the old "Pit" at MSU. They abolished the pit when I was a sophomore, probably because it was inhumane. You had to attend at exactly the assigned time, and get in line with hundreds of other people whose name started with the same letter. Lugging your finanical aid portfolio, your student ID, your checkbook and your schedule book, you were forced to navigate the building like a rat in a maze, looking for cheese. Everyone had to stay within the rope-wrought corridors. To duck under the rope for any reason moves you to the very back of the line.
At the first table you had to prove you existed, were a student at the university, and were cleared to enroll this semester. You were given a set of computer punch-cards that represented you. God forbid you should drop one of those cards, because if you lost one, you were forced to wait until late drops and adds, two weeks later, at which point all your classes would likely be full. At the second table you turned in your financial packet if you had one, and were given any cards representing that.
Then you had to wend your way through the building, risking life and limb to grab the cards representing your seat in the class you want. If there aren't any cards left, there aren't any seats. I once gave someone $50 for their card, so that I could get the professor I wanted. People would rush around at insane speeds, shoving and bumping one another, until they had the cards they wanted. Often I couldn't get the ones I wanted, and ended up filling in my schedule with things like Economics, or Ice Skating, in hopes of trading those cards in for something else, later. Often I was stuck actually taking those classes. At the end of the maze, of course, was the cashier, where you got to pay for all the education clutched in your stack of cards. Depending on the line, the process could take a half hour, or it could take hours. I waas once in the pit for 6 hours. That's my record. When my mom went back to college, she got so lost in the pit she ended up in tears.
It was awful. Anyhow, apparently LCC registration is a smaller, simpler version of the Pit. Instead of gathering cards, you get through the first few tables and then order up your schedule on a phone. Then you are sent to another building to pay. What's fun is that I don't even know if I *can* register today. I applied for admission back in December, and it's supposed to take a couple of days to be accepted. I still haven't heard! Wouldn't it suck to be rejected from community college?
Mmm. Bananas.
