Gotta get it together.

So, school has been a hectic journey from the very beginning. Transferring schools and figuring out where I stand as far as class year and course credits was stressful enough, but now I'm up to my eyeballs in things to do. Now, don't get me wrong - I fucking love my school. I'm the first person in my family to go to college, and I'm going to Clemson. One of the best schools in the south. In the country, maybe. (Hey, our football team is #5 nationally, thanks.)

I guess I just feel disconnected right now. I'm living at home and commuting to campus, which is about a 45 minute trip each way. By the time I get to school, I don't really feel like going to class, and by the time I get home, I don't really feel like doing homework for the next three or four hours. I feel more like taking a nap. Plus, it limits the social interaction I get. I only talk to the people in my classes, and I rarely see them outside of class. It's not that big of a deal though.

My main issue is the workload. We're getting ready to register for the spring semester, but I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to get through the fall. Just this week, I have a shitload of homework:
- read 133 pages of Oryx and Crake by Friday.
- start my second English essay (1000 words)
- study for a Spanish test

- complete 10 online Spanish activities on the supersite
- complete another 3 assignments on a different Spanish website
- make an outline for my Spanish presentation
- make some attempt at doing my LearnSmart assignments for biology
- play catch-up on my math class

It doesn't look like too much when I write it out like that, but it's just time-consuming. (And I know, you're probably thinking, "What a whiny little thing she is," but I'm really not whining. I'm just trying to put everything in perspective for myself.

Alas, I'll get it all done. I just have to hold a job, a home life, and a boyfriend together at the same time. Of course, all those are easy. John is always understanding (even though it's easy to pick spending time with him over schoolwork. What can I say? He's easy on the eyes :P ) It would be nice though, to have some sort of life without the stress of knowing school work awaits me whenever I return. But hey, that's life. And Clemson's not a bad place to be when you're stressed.

Now that I mention it, Clemson is the best place to be. I know a lot of people probably take it for granted, but this place is gorgeous. Especially now that it's fall. AND our football team is kicking ass this year. Right now we're 8-0 and ranked 5th in the whole country! That kind of stuff doesn't normally happen wherever I go to school (my high school team lost almost every game my junior and senior year, and Greenville Tech is so lame it doesn't have sports), so yeah I'm pretty fucking excited.

While all this is going on though, John's stuck in a rut with college. His "dream" school, Coastal Carolina, completely failed to meet his expectations, and now his parents are only concerned with the fact that he's "indecisive". So basically, he now has to start all over and find a really good school that's right for him. And in the midst of all this stress, I'm trying to be as supportive as I can. Really. He needs it. He has nobody else. I just hope it all works out for him because I can't stand seeing him get shot down at every turn.

Anyway, it's taken me long enough to post this, and whoever's reading it is probably bored by now. So I'm going to go enjoy the rest of my lunch here at Cooper Library and talk to my handsome boyfriend. Bye y'all!

The Road: pages 1-51.

This blog was originally going to be an extra credit site for my English class, but I never really followed through with it. However, I thought I'd leave the first post I ever made, in case my English teacher ever comes across it :)

We just started reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Already the book is different than most all the books I've read. McCarthy's style is unique, but it's making the reading a little more difficult to follow. He uses very little punctuation, and no quotation marks. There are no chapters - this is one long, continuous story, much like the journey this man and his son seem to be on. The very vivid descriptions of this post-apocalypse world remind me a great deal of the movie 2012, which is also about the end of the world and features natural disasters, and a cloud of ash that covers the entire United States. It's not the same exact story idea, but it gives me a really good image to consider while I'm reading. Also, I'm really curious about The Road movie. It seems to me like the movie would have some pretty big shoes to fill considering the compelling and dramatic nature of the novel.

On the first few pages of the novel, the narrator describes a dream of a creature in a cave. I feel like the dream symbolizes the dark things to come in the novel. On page 5, the man refers to his child as "his warrant" and "the word of God", perhaps hinting that he's lost all faith in this cold world, but this boy is the only thing he is able to have faith in. I've also noticed that McCarthy uses the word "plastic" a lot in the first scene of the novel. Perhaps he is trying to convey a sense safety in the dangerous world they're in, since plastic is usually thought of as a "safe" material.

Further into the novel, the man begins having flashbacks to the previous world. On page 18, he dreams of his "bride". The dream portrays her as beautiful, and it seems as though they were once happy, but the next sentence after the description of the dream talks about the snow that's falling. I think this is a symbolic way of saying that their marriage had a cold end. On page 36, the boy's dream about the wind-up penguin strikes me as very creepy. The boy seems to be afraid and it symbolizes the zombie-like state of the other survivors who are wandering around this desolate world. On the last page of today's reading, the man take a picture of his wife out of his wallet and lays it in the middle of the road and leaves it there. This is odd to me because in his flashbacks, he seems to have such warm, vivid memories of her, so why would he want to leave her memory behind?