10/08/98, 5:47am

Yes, it's 5:47am and I'm still awake. I can feel the coffee and sugar I've ingested over the past nine hours burbling in my stomach (thanks Beth!). I'm pulling my first true college all-nighter for the purpose of getting massive amounts of work done. Tonight's task was to crank out a draft of my religion paper and get a good chunk of my calc take-home test done. Religion paper: mission accomplished. Granted, it's a shitty draft, but that can be fixed later. Math test: still working on it. This thing's a bitch! There'd better be some curve, or I'm sucking it down. Oh well. At this point I don't much care; I just hope I can stay caffeinated throughout tomorrow enough to get through my two tests. Erg. Arg. Erg. hee hee.

My shoulder hurts a bit. I'm going to have to carry around a sack full of notebooks and my Norton Anthology today, since the English midterm is open book, and that's our book. The thing weighs a ton, as near as I can calculate. Riding around on my bike with that thing is a feat of balance worthy of a circus performer. Say! If i flunk all these tests, I can be a circus performer! Or maybe just a dung shoveller or something.

Blarg! This math test is horrible! And I'm afraid the in-class test will be worse. I can't believe this is my life! Actually, I can. I just like the phrase "I can't believe this is my life!". I am capable of believing a whole heck of a lot.

What's pissing me off is that I'm going to have to spend all tomorrow afternoon on this f*cking test too! What a pain in my buttocks. It's going to take forever! Woo hoo, it's almost 6am! One hour until blastoff. I think i'll take a shower now, actually. And make myself some tea; otherwise I'm going to have to resort to drinking the school coffee, which I've been warned against by many people (all of whom seem to drink it anyway...). Maybe I'll go bug Beth for the use of her hot pot. Can't wait to get my own.

Speaking of Beth, she and I have been sharing these wickedly caffeinated hyper moments, where one or both of us will do something totally weird and crazy and we'll both just crack up. We're both tea freaks and Kerropi lovers, and we both like Ska and TMBG. So we have a lot in common, which helps. We're also in the same religion class, so we compare notes on the various books we're reading and stay up reeeeally late together writing papers. Snarfelicious. She's really cool. Tonight we're both pulling all-nighters, since she has a Russian Lit paper to write and I've got this damned calc test. Every so often we'll run down the hall and write weird things on each other's marker boards.

Goddess, I love college.

I'm feeling pretty well-adjusted to college life tonight, but I'm not sure if that's the caffeine speaking or my brain. I think the fact that I got through tonight without freaking out or bursting into tears plus the fact that I got a lot of what I set out to do done makes me proud of myself. The prospect of the rest of the day frightens me a bit, but I'm on a bit of a confidence high right now, so I'm attributing the weird feeling in my stomach to the two latte mugs full of coffee that i drank last night. I'll keep telling myself that...

Things between me and Katie are pretty good right now. Things between Katie and her family aren't so good, unfortuantely. But that's her deal. I wish Katie would make some other friends; right now it's Jess, Lindsay and me. So if something happens with one of us, it's a huge deal. Frankly, I can't spend all my time with one person without them starting to get under my skin, so i try to have more than three people who I can hang out with (especially if the three all tend to hang out together) for instances like that. Which is why I'm glad I'm getting to know Beth better. She's fun. She brings out my hyper-weird streak.

I need to search out more geeky friends, people to whom I can say things like "I'm having a little trouble with this recursive function, and I'm getting a parse error on line 115. Can you look this over for me?" and not have them stare blankly back at me. Right now the people I can say that to are... Katie. And Katie. That's it. The kids in my CSC 111 class are getting there, but we haven't learned much yet, so if I want to go on to bigger 'n better things (or if i want to regress to good old Pascal) I need to rely on myself or Katie. Which isn't all bad, but I would like to meet someone who can teach me, rather than asking me to teach them all the time. Not that I mind being the Alpha Geek of my hall (at least among the 1st years - Lauren down the hall is the TA of my CS class, so she beats me there), but it'd be nice to have someone to bounce my ideas off of.

Well, enough babbling. Wish me luck! I'll surely need it.

this page by sparky ( kumquat37@hotmail.com )