Twice in the past two days, I have been told by student and teacher alike that they are surprised to find out I’m a freshman, because “Oh, I thought all this time that you were a junior.”

This either means that I’m no longer the gangly pre-teen I’ve been all these years, or that I brag way too much about how damn smart I am.

I like my Irish professor very much. He’s lively, he swears, he makes some inappropriate comments, he crawls all over the floor when he gets into something, and he often gets into something–his tirades are lengthy and involved. It’s all an interesting way to begin the day at nine in the morning, and sometimes I’m afraid to go to class: He’s extremely opinionated, and if you are not forming your thoughts quickly or persuasively enough, he will cut you off and laugh at whatever it is you’re trying to say.

We read a selection from The Islandman by Tomas O’Crohan for today; O’Crohan grew up on the Blasket Islands off the coast of Ireland, which is no longer occupied, but at the time was a marine-centric life. We spent the first forty-five minutes discussing how quaint and pleasant the area sounded, how optimistic were its people, how endearing his voice was. My professor nodded along and supplied succinct summaries of what we were fumbling with. Then he took out his book and read a passage from much later in the book, about how O’Crohan’s daughter and her friend were playing in the water and began to drown, and his son went out to save the friend but drowned with her. And Professor stopped mid-sentence with his back to us (he paces around the room as he reads) and pressed his fingers to his eyes. It was very quiet, and then he said,

“Sorry. I read this when I was a young boy.”

He turned around, eyes watery, finished the passage, and then summarized it as any English teacher should, commenting on the tone and the mood and such. And then, as he often does, he stared at each of us directly in the eyes. And we stared back. And no one said a damn thing. Then he said, “Anything else?”

No one had anything else to say. “Right, well then, thanks, you all, very much, I really, really do appreciate what you do.” He always ends class this way, and it’s always sort of touching.

I raised my hand. “Did you say we’re to read all of The Poor Mouth?”

“The whole feckin’ thing,” he said, lively again. “Every feckin’ page, one after another, and I promise you will laugh.”

I don’t know what happened, but there was an extremely vulnerable moment in class today, one where he reluctantly revealed that there is a very tender and hurt side to him, that he knows more about life than I ever should, a moment that said everything and nothing all at once.

And all at once I felt better and worse.

It’s bitter and petty and small, but I can’t push away this feeling that it’s just a little unfair that I was born with the need to have children and nurture and be a mother, and I’ve got no real hope for any of that yet. I’m the type to turn to the person next to me at any given time and say, “I wish I was pregnant. Right now.” I realize that I am eighteen, soon to be nineteen, and that this is no time to be birthing babies, but the want to is so strong that I’m almost distracted by it. Because the fact is that I’m almost NINETEEN and there isn’t even a pinprick of hope that any of this will happen. Most people my age feel like no, things are not working out for them at the moment, but there is so much time ahead of us. I don’t feel like there is time. I feel like. like.

I feel like I’m tired of this. I feel like I look good in the morning, but the only people who will acknowledge that are my professors and other girls. I feel like when people laugh at my jokes and tell me, “I can’t WAIT until you’re a mom, you are going to be the best ever,” that they’re giving me false hope, and it hurts me every time.

You will you will you will, I know, I hear it, but I don’t believe it.

Overall, I am feeling just particularly heartbroken at this time.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a very long time, and since last Thursday I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to figure out someway to create a blog without having to archive everything on my own, which is a waste of time and space. As smart as I think I am at this website building thing, it turns out that the Internet has taken off without me and left me to rely on HTML and CSS while it’s having fun with PHP. I don’t know what that is, but I tried to learn it and it’s too hard. But I’ve finally installed Greymatter, and I love it so far.

There is really nothing here to explore yet, because I’m not sure if you know this or not, but I’m in college, and I actually should be writing my Bible paper at the moment. Hopefully as things progress this will turn into the greatest and best website in the world. For now, take a look around. In the last hour I tried to uniform all the pages (archives, comments, etc.) but I know I’ve missed some. If you see where it looks a lot different, or if something isn’t working, let me know.

This is my very first entry ever. So exciting!!!!