Today the Apple desktop computer at my internship crashed.

I’ll give you a moment to stop choking on your wheatgrass.

Yes indeedy, MacPerfect couldn’t handle more than four tabs in Safari plus one open TextEdit.  (Question: when doing bulleted lists in TextEdit, how on earth do you reverse a bullet once you’ve indented it?

• Like this.
  - This is an indent.
• But then I want to go back like this.

Anyway.)

I tried to close the windows but kept getting that dancing little pinwheel.  I thought, “What this system needs is a Ctrl-Alt-Delete.”  I then attempted it and was disappointed.  Mac users tell me they have never had the glitch of a frozen window leaving a trail around their screen when they drag it, to which I say, O RLY?  Because your top-of-the-screen Finder bar (aka fake Start bar) certainly did.  And then the bloody thing wouldn’t let me restart.  It literally told me, “We will not restart until you close your programs.”  To which I say, WHAT FUCK?

“Do you usually have problems with this computer?”

“Ohhhh yeah,” replied one of your kind.

As long as I will be forced into dragging that slowass mouse around and accepting that “media” automatically equals “Apple,” I will bring the fight.

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I really punched last Friday the 13th in the face by having the most spectacular day, full of good grades and good progress and sub-par chili made by me but an understanding boyfriend who told me it was great.

But one does not deny the Hellbeast his chance to reign evil.  It pursued me through the shadows, letting Its wicked eyes gleam here and there in the shape of parental disappointment and uncertain future plans and a cold that is on day twelve and my skin is really dry lately.  Still, I battered It down with internships and interviews and lovely dinners and holiday plans and an ever-increasing feeling of success as I let no day go to waste.  I tackled my essays early on, hitting the library back in February, and did such a good job of not screwing myself over this time.

Yet the will is strong in that one and It continued to lurk.  (By the way, I think it helps to picture Gollum for this whole journey.)

As I settled back into my room on Sunday night, I had only a few more hours of work left on my essays–three of them were due Monday, today.  One on mermaids, one on Dickens, and one on Boston English.  “Thank God the Dickens one is done,” I said, scrolling through the 7 or so pages.  “Let me just double check everything, make sure I met all the requirements.  I’ll just take out my Visiting Student  Handbook and OH MY GOD.”

Oh my God is right.  An essay that I had thought was 1,500-2,000 words (and really, only merited so much!) was in fact meant to be 5,000-7,000.  That is a HELL OF A LOT OF EXTRA WORDS.  I proceeded to have an absolutely impressive freakout that I’m pretty glad no one was there to witness.  I texted a panicked “omg omg omg” and IMed anyone who happened to be online to inform them of this outrageous level of fuckupitude on my part.  How did I confuse numbers like that?  In fact, there is an explanation, but it’s so fucking stupid I’m not even going to subject you to it.  Fact of the matter is, I completely blew it.  The essay I’d started months earlier and leisurely typed my way through, the first one to have “finished,” wasn’t even one third of the way being done.  And I had two more essays to write.

I stormed around in my room for about 15 minutes, crying and watching myself cry and yelling at myself for being such a fucking idiot (and also thanking myself for even thinking to double check the word count).  Then I emailed my editor saying I would not be in until the afternoon on Monday, and my department head to say how I knew she had no reason to even entertain such an excuse but to please give me a short extension.

And then I got to work, until 4 AM.  I’d finished the two other papers by then, but still had the daunting task of writing my essay three times over again.  You can follow my journey into madness on my Twitter page.  I woke again at 8 AM and wrote madly, sitting in my underwear with leftover Kimberley’s and tea.  I told my editor I’d be in between 1 PM and 2 PM.  It was now 11:30 AM and I had 1,000 words to go.  I struck up the cursing of myself again at this point and am in fact still bewildered that this even happened.  I blew my nose another couple hundred times and checked my email compulsively.  Finally, I got this:

Well, there’s no excuse for this really as you were told about word lengths for essays both when we worked out your learning agreement and at the meeting about essays in the middle of last term AND it’s very clear in the handbook.

However I will take your difficulty at face value and yes, you may have till Wednesday 1230 …

Ohh shit ya’ll, that’s my department head right there telling me that I have been a big fuck up and it’s my own damn fault and if it weren’t for the concept of space and time she’d give me a big see ya later, but fine here have an extra day and a half, you absolute twit who can’t count for beans.

Mildly embarrassed, I put on pants and printed the two essays I did finish, which of course came out in black ink, which of course I’ve always known but again disregarded when I made colored maps and graphs and told the reader to refer to the colors rather than the data.  After a quick lunch, I rushed over to the office for the internship I’ll be doing for the next month.  “They won’t make you go out and survey people again today, will they?”  “Nah, surely not, the guy knows I’m on 3 hours sleep and freaking out, plus I think I did enough the last time…”

Thirty minutes later, of course, I am putting my jacket back on and heading out for the grey streets of Dublin, stopping strangers and asking them what their worst summer jobs have been while I’m falling asleep on my feet and thinking of a million better things I could be doing, including injecting some Dickensian bullshit into an emaciated paper.

And then a bird pooped on me.

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I’m about to sit down and write an entire essay on Nuala ní Dhomhnaill (even though I’m outrageously sick and am incapable of thinking because of all the mucus I keep sucking back up into my brain, green, green mucus that I’ve used half a roll of toilet paper to stymie just this morning but can’t because every time I give one of those hacking, rattling coughs it just loosens everything again and omg I’m going to the US ambassador’s house on Thursday I better be fixed by then), but before I do, I just had to share this.  Because I’m all snuggled up in bed right now, drinking tea and huffing eucalyptus and being very weak and vulnerable and innocent, and what song am I bopping to?  Oh, only “How About You,” the hit acrostic single from the hip-hop group called Envy that I formed with my cousin Amanda around the age of seven.

How about you, now how about me?
How about you, now can’t you see?
I like the rap and I like the roll.
I like the rap, it’s the groove of my soul.
I like the rap, now can’t you see,
Now here’s a few words that tell about me.
M is for the madness.
O is for the ocean breeze.
L is for the laughter.
L is for a long cool squeeze.
Now don’t forget the Y, you see,
It is for the yelling at me (HEY).

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Oh, hi!  Things are great.  You can usually bet that if I’m not writing, it’s because I’m happy.  Wish I had known this before I both took up an English major and the call to achieve balance in life.

So here’s nothing special or reflective.  I’m not necessarily anymore successful since my last post, but I am slightly less upset about the fact.  Well, no, that’s not true–I spend a few minutes everyday crying because everyday I get rejected from something else, and one day I didn’t get a “good luck” from my parents, and then every time I was confronted about it here tears sprang to my eyes and I said, “Let’s not talk about it right now!” all panicked like.  And probably if you were to sit down with me right now and say, “Don’t worry, something will come through,” I’d wave my hands at my face and say, “I don’t want to cry right now!” and then go ahead and do so anyway.

But aside from that persistent nagging and the dozen or so crushing rejections I’ve gotten so far, things are basically glorious.  I may be dirt poor (change for a good cause?), but I feel like an adult lately.  Not in the same stuck-up way I’ve felt like an adult the past 21 years of my life, not in the “I understand the universe without having to enter it” sort of way.  I feel like my interactions with people have taken a more mature turn, like I understand them on a different level that I wasn’t getting before.  Maybe it’s because I stopped pretending I wasn’t human and allowed myself to try it.  I was filled with this sense of outright panic on my last birthday that I would never amount to anything and that I would always be alone, but this time I thought nothing of it.  This time I had the most wonderfully relaxed 21st, forewent any sort of big bash, and simply felt amazing about myself in a human context.

I never feel amazing about myself in a human context.  Usually, I feel removed, an observer rather than a participant.  I usually step back and think, “Okay, so it’s been [this many] years, and this is what I have not done yet.”  But I didn’t look at my watch at midnight, and I didn’t get upset when important people didn’t remember, and I didn’t think about what I’ve wasted to get here.  I just felt… accomplished.  I felt like I’d come a really, really long way.  And when people told me that I still had my whole life ahead of me, I thought, “Yes.”

I’m not LIVING IN THE MOMENT, you know, just so we’re clear.  The majority of my day is spent planning for the future, thinking about what will happen next month, next summer, next year, the year after that.  If I could Google the future, I would be all up on that program.  But I sure as hell am not frittering away my days here; I’m enjoying every last drop of them and squeezing out what more I can get.  I’m scared about the way things will go, but I’m also happy beyond belief.

I’m not really in a reflective mood, though; these are just things.

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