Small Town Wren

So after being sick and then having Spring Break #1, and then the weather becoming pleasant for a turn….I stopped doing my homework. I just didn’t get to it. I needed some real time off, and then I just couldn’t get back in the swing of things. And now I have found myself in full out meltdown mode. I did 11 hours straight of homework today, about 13 hours of work total.

That is far too much, and I’m really kicking myself for letting me do this to myself. Really, Miss Wren, you should have been doing work for the past two weeks. I shouldn’t have let it get pushed back so far. Now I have three projects due this week and I’ve only just started on them. Ah crud.

And I got all my travel vaccines today (and I didn’t have to get my tetanus after all!). But three vaccines in both arms plus lots of heavy books put my arms completely out of commission after I got home from the library. It was really quite pathetic. I had to ask my father to pull my bag and books out of the car because it felt like my muscles were going to tear themselves to shreds if I even moved my arms. It’ll be totally worth it when I’m in Xela though. I’ve got another 12 hours or so of work lined up for tomorrow, too. At least I got my girl Aurora on my back. We’re library hopping tomorrow.

I just have to make it through Wednesday. Wednesdays are my new night off, so I just need to finish my Thursday project on Wednesday and I’m golden. Never mind the huge Tuesday Project and huge Monday project and presentation. I might actually cry.

I’ve had to deal with an astonishing amount of unprofessionalism today. I can’t even wrap my brain around all of it. Nothing like someone breaching your confidence, but then not evening getting that breach right. Nothing like having your ass over the fire due to something you never even said.

I have a very funny feeling that this new semester of graduate school is going to bring more than its fair share of funny/sad anecdotes. I don’t want to imply that I don’t like my professors or my fellow students–that’s hardly the case at all–I just find many of them to be…interesting. While I have enjoyed getting mad props for my crazy organizational colored pens and matching colored highlighters, that’s the only consistent thing about all of my classes so far that I’ve enjoyed (besides a few choice classmates who are in all of my classes).

As for the anecdotes…I somehow always get elected to be secretary of X, Y, & Z due to my compulsive organization. This leads me to reading much more of my classmates’ work than most others do. Today I had the pleasure of reading a summary that was twice as long as the text it was trying to summarize. I’m not even sure what to do with something like that. I’m not even sure how that works, period.

I’m still baffled.

My mouth tastes like cigarettes. Almost certainly because over the past three days I’ve smoke almost an entire pack of Marlboro Lights. My New Years resolution was to quit smoking. Already that has been a fantastic failure.

I really don’t want to do this anymore, but I don’t know what else to do.

Kane County held the first of several Monday clinics today at three local high schools.  For some silly reason, they decided 4pm to 9pm was reasonable. Which, in theory, it certainly is. But when you have people panicking about a possible pandemic…no, that is not reasonable. That is not reasonable at-fucking-all.

I’m supposedly at the front of the front of the line.  I’m in the at-risk group (under 24s) and I work with young children in a public school. Pretty much everyone wants people like me vaccinated.  And that’s all fine and well, if that whole “front of the line” idea actually meant something. Which it doesn’t.  It’s first come first serve, no matter what your risk is, who you are, etc.  In a “fair” and “equal” society that’s probably not a bad thing, but in the world of science and disease control, you really do want to get your vaccine to certain segments sooner.  First come first serve isn’t going to deliver that.  Neither is exceedingly stupid clinic hours.

Normal people, I hear, tend to work to 5pm. I get off at 3:45 (though I snuck out at 3:35 to try and get to St. Charles North High School in a timely manner). Considering I had no hope at all to get a vaccine, I think it’s safe to say that most people working full time didn’t either.  Not unless they wanted to take the day off.  A lot of us can’t afford to do that.  I can’t on a monetary or an ethical level.  Any day I take off work, my students–and particularly my special buddy–suffer.

I drove up Rt. 31 from Fabyan. I was lucky and managed to not hit the massive traffic jam also trying to get to St. Charles North until after Rt. 64.  But hooboy, when the traffic stopped, the traffic stopped.  It took me about an hour to get from Rt.64 to St. Charles North.  I tried to call my mother when I saw the line, only to be informed that the cellular network in the area was being reserved for 911 and emergency calls only.  Um, what?  Oh, and then there was the line of a couple thousand people that wrapped entirely around the high school which, as anyone from around here knows, is not a small one.  I turned around and left.  I don’t have endless time to wait outside in the rain.  I have homework to do.  Research reading + rain = not going to happen.

Entirely poor planning for something so in demand.  Turns out Kane County only has about 12000 doses.  And since they don’t seem to be planning this out in the smartest of ways, my only conclusion is that we are all doomed.

Law & Order is one of my guilty pleasures, though it’s not exactly guilty.  One of my favorite undergrad professors worked as a producer and writer for Criminal Intent, so I can’t bash it as a series/franchise by any means.

Tonight’s Law & Order episode, “Dignity,” took on the abortion debate.  The New York Times posted an article today about the franchise’s history of abortion coverage, which has been spotty at best.  This isn’t surprising consider the issue is, um, abortion.  Not exactly a bed of roses issue for prime time television to waltz through without thought.

It started out very promising: an obvious take on the tragic murder of Dr. Tiller. From there, it went downhill in its attempt to cover way too many aspects of the pro-choice/anti-abortion debate. A shout out to Mom Martyrs/Shamers was nice, but the detour into Jill Staneck crazyland that didn’t point out that babies being murdered after surviving abortion is a big fat (obvious) lie kind of killed it for me. And then they tried to divide the DA’s office along the pro-/anti- lines in a way that didn’t feel right for any of the characters. The show refused to explicitly say that their Dr. Tiller stand-in had as much right to his life as any that could be argued for unborn fetuses.  And that, ladies and gentleman, is where the EPIC FAIL lies. Law & Order completely failed to stand up to everything it has postured itself to believe in: that murder is wrong, that crime is wrong, that justice is what is important.

I watched this episode with my father. It was nice to hear him agree with my complaints. I like to think that he enjoyed my explanations of the nuanced references this episode made.