school

Last weekend was insanely busy.

'Puter Learnin'

I'm halfway through a Web Designer certificate at the 'Gonk, which means a lot of weekend classes. Some are useful - who knew my HTML and CSS coding was so inelegant? - and some are beyond useless - Flash course, I'm looking at you and your rabidly offensive teacher.

Last weekend was Photoshop. It was a well paced course and I learned a lot. The teacher was pretty good, very patient.

Though if she'd stopped just clicking through stuff and then saying "See! There!" while we were all simultaneously trying to look at our screens and the big screen at the front, she might not have had to exercise said patience. But anyway.

It was totally worth doing, even though it meant basically not being at home for the second weekend in a row, but for reasons that are not nearly as nice as your lover's body.

Dammit! I Missed the Queers! Well, Mostly

And then, weeks after I booked the Photoshop course and my work nicely paid for it, the Radical Queer Weekend was announced. For the same weekend. It looked fucking awesome and, by all accounts, was.

I was busy all day Saturday, and too tired for Sunday night, but I did manage to make the Friday night kick-off, where the homos they bounced and the singer she shouted.

Secret Trial Five played a very short but fun hardcore set. I'd seen them in the movie Tawqacore - the only musicians in the film who were women, I believe.

If my ears did not deceive me, one song had a chorus comprised of this line: "We are not Tawqacore." I kinda wanted to stick around and ask them about it, ask them about the movie. Did they like the movie? What did they think of the movement? How was it being on the bus with all those guys?

But I hadn't had coffee for most of the day, which meant I'd spent the day in some severe withdrawal, which meant that I was going to spend Saturday trying to learn software with a mostly decaffeinated brain, since I wasn't going to have a real full coffee till Saturday night.

So the band announced the last song and I started making my way through the - very cute, as noted by Luna - crowd.

There is something perfect about standing in a crowd of slowly getting tipsy drunk dykes. To be woo, it feeds places in me that nothing else can touch. Or, put another way: dykes are fucking rad. And cute.

Okay. So What's This About a Camera?

And why was I not drinking coffee, you say? Is it that you just hate yourself that much?

Before I get to the camera part, just let me say that I was shocked by my reaction to the lack of caffeine. I knew it made me grumpy and headachey, but I didn't know it was going to make me fucking sick. By 8 pm on Friday night, 32 hours after my last dose of coffee, my head was stuffed too full of cotton, I was irritable, and I had started to sweat and shake. It made me thoroughly thoroughly grateful that my drug of choice is not only legal, but easily available.

I can sit my shaking ass down at a table in the Rideau Centre and down a shitty lukewarm coffee in big gulps, rather than having to having to scour the market for an even decently clean bathroom to get my fix and I don't have to worry about people harassing me. Heroin is, obviously, very different from caffeine, but I wonder how much of that difference comes from the way it's treated. Lots of it, I think I can say fairly safely. All of it? I don't know. I wonder if it isn't an issue of magnitude. Alcohol, par example, takes a far greater toll on the health and well being of pretty much any given population than does heroin.

That, at any rate, is what I thought about while sitting at the shitty stand of tables near the Solo shop at the Rideau Centre as the first webs of cotton melted from my brain. I will never go for that long without caffeine again.

In fact, I am starting to stockpile it for the End Times. Because lord knows you don't want to have cotton head during the apocalypse.

But the camera, yes.

The reason I went off coffee is because I volunteered to be part of a study called, verbatim, and take a deep breath now, "The Role of Early, Negative Experiences, Fear and Aversion, Couple Functioning, and Sexual Self View in Sexual Disorders Involving Pain."

The researchers needed both women who experience pain during "sexual activity and vaginal penetration" and women who do not. I'm in the latter camp - another thing to be grateful for - and it's always good to have something to blog about.

Except it's late and I'm tired and this is already too long, so more tomorrow, my pets.

By and large, I have made a career of being a very good student. It's been, as my therapist might say, one of those pillars on which my sense of self rests.

I've only fucked the dog on two other courses in my life. There was algebra and geometry in high school, which I dropped after getting a C on a test. Then several years later came Canadian Colonial Poetry, which I ended up taking in 4th year uni because it was the only Canadian course that fit my schedule, and during which I decided, for various reasons, to *not* hand in the final essay. I got a D, I believe, but maybe a C. I passed, at any rate.

Last night, I gave up on my computer programming course. It's too late for me to drop it, and I still have three assignments and two tests to hand in. The prognosis for passing is not good.

I had decided this in my head, and felt a bit weepy about it, as I had those other two times. Was I so stupid that I couldn't do it? So I'd look at Assignment 3 once more and still not have the foggiest notion of how to go about solving it, and think "it's too late." and "oh well."

I called Eric not long after, and during our conversation told him pretty much what you just read. Saying it out loud - "I have given up on my course" - sounded incredibly jarring when the words came out of my mouth and poked me in a soft soft spot. Eric was pretty surprised, I think, since this is pretty out of character for me.

Today I'm feeling better, and am going to give it another shot. I worked at home today, straight from 6:30 to 2:30, and now will go for a walk to rest my back and get some sunshine. Then I will have a few hours to try and pull some computer programs out of my ass.

I am still unlikely to pass, but it's probably better than not trying.