Can words describe?

Anyone who has interacted with me in person for more than about thirty seconds since this weekend has found me short tempered, loud, perhaps excessively vulgar (by even my standards), manic, stonily silent, or fighting tears, sometimes all within a very short span of time.

I was dealt a blow this weekend that hurt, and I’m finding myself at a loss for a way to recover from it. I keep telling myself that time and sleep will help, as will my on-going dialogue with Dulin–and I know those things will–but then I find myself staring off into space and pondering things I don’t want to ponder in shameful agony, only to “wake up” and realize that I haven’t eaten in too long and haven’t run or slept in even longer and that I forgot about this or that assignment due in a handful of hours.

I know I’m putting up a shell to those around me. I’m feeling ultra-protective of myself, and when I’m not retreating and playing walking-dead, I’m lashing out at anyone in range. I stood and vindictively picked on Luke for a good five minutes longer than I needed to this afternoon, particularly given the work I needed to do.

There’s something comforting about the distance and closeness of long e-mails with a close friend seven hundred (?) miles away that I’m clinging to, right now. Here, but not here.

The current level of homework is drowning me. Two computer science classes in one term may have been as stupid as three maths. If I can just absorb about half of this material, I will have learned so much. But my schedule feels fuller than it looks on paper, and I can only sit and breathe during these hours of the morning when I am not scurrying from class to job to class to meetings…

I’m sitting here in the Thorn office right now. I had two projects–one for Operating Systems, one for a Data Structures/Algorithm Analysis Intro course–both due tonight at midnight. It feels so silent in here now that I’m done, as though my frantic typing and clicking and hair-pulling (a habit I need to stop) were making a flurry of noise I hadn’t even detected until it was gone and my heart rate slowed accordingly.

I didn’t do well at all on the Data Structures (really “Fundamentals III”, but it’s soon to undergo a name change) assignment. I had an ah-ha at 23:55, but not enough time to run a quick check and upload the files before the server hit 00:00, and I don’t want to use one of my three “late days” so early in the quarter. I think my last test script execution gave me a grade of 125/210. I think I can fix it in the second part, due Monday; I’m not sure.

I had my epiphany with regards to the OS project around 23:00, so that got finished beautifully. C programming is for people with more time on their hands than I currently have, though, and me spending so much time troubleshooting pointers is likely to get someone killed.

My headache–running since last Wednesday or Thursday–has not abated. I can take Tylenol for it, but I need to take two pills every three hours to keep it at bay, and that’s a bit much, even for me. Plus, I’m running out of Tylenol. The headache has taken up residence in the muscles around and behind my eyes, and chooses the worst imaginable times to spike–like 23:45 tonight, which left me worthless for five minutes that could have been much better used.

The headache also flares up shortly after I eat, which isn’t a terribly compelling reason to do anything more than pick at my plate at lunch and dinner.

In a Lissa-Klutz move this weekend, I tripped going down the stairs at the movie theater and fucked up one of my ankles, leaving me running-free and gimpy for the past few days. Hmm. Ask me if I was in a state of mind to watch The Incredibles, anyway? It was nice to get to see Elfin-Bob and meet his girlfriend, though.

Work is killing me. The tech support gig requires working during school hours, and I’m there four days out of five, at least two hours each day. My shortest day has me in class or at work during 6 of the 10 class hours. My evenings are owned by my other job, NSBE, and Thorn, and school. The thing that hurts with my current schedule is that I have a class moderately heavy in reading and two computer science classes with reading, written assignments, and programming projects (time, time, time). There just aren’t enough hours, point-blank. And all the computer time is killing my eyes.

People will tell me to stop. I am telling me to stop. But I learned this weekend that I can hit a whole new level of masochism I hadn’t even touched last term, and I’m not ready to call safeword yet. I’m just using this space to vent a little, now that I can let the cap off without the internal pressure doing me [and others] damage.