you only think you're pretty

oh. my. christ. 

how am i already this tired and overworked? post-prelims better be fucking awesome compared to this because there's no way i can deal with feeling this way for the next 5 or 6 or 10 years straight. 

on the plus side (there's a plus side?), i like teaching so far. the first day was pretty goddamn awkward, but we seem to be developing more of a rapport now. i had them all sign up for office hours to talk about their first papers and it wasn't as awkward as it could have been (at least on my end). one girl told me about how she's kind of weirded out by her dorm experience so far because her roommate is 24 (which is a year older than i am). made me think about how simultaneously young and old i am. i may retract this when i am older, but there is no part of me that wishes i were 18 again. maybe this is because i thought dorms sucked, or because i was a pretty lame and awkward 18-year-old, or because the convenience of buying alcohol whenever the fuck i want (which is always) totally beats whatever thrill kids get from drinking illegally. but at any rate, i like where i'm at. i still don't feel entirely like an adult, though i'm not sure that i really ever will. there's still so much of me that is a 5-year-old little girl dancing around naked by the pool (because all southern california apartment complexes have pools, you know). 

but yeah, teaching. one kid today told me that i'm a "pretty cool ta." i can be down with that. i had a bit of a pleasant surprise when it turned out that one of the two kids who i had mentally pegged as potential slackers wrote one of the better papers in the class for the first short assignment. the other kid has yet to disprove my slacker assessment (i think he's at -3 right now in my mental points scale), but i'm still hopeful. 

although i'm not a fan of trite status updates, i would like to just say that my semester has not started with the bang i had hoped it would. it being the case that i am taking two classes in my area as well as japanese, i think i was hoping that the semester would instantly transport me into excited-for-schoolwork mode. i'm not saying i hate my classes, they're just not the instant boost of magic that i had previously wished for. there's still potential, though, especially in my poetry class. i'm presenting/leading discussion on the week we're doing aurora leigh. i'm pretty excited to revisit the poem that (as cliché as it sounds) is at the foundation of my literary endeavors. the name that became my alter-ego. the name that is everything i would be (could be?). me and aurora go way back.