Lilac Colored Glasses

Or at least a cookie, can I get that? An Oreo please.  I’d kill for an Oreo right now.

Why, you ask? Why do I want to eat a ten pound bag of Oreos on top of about a quart of Ben n Jerry’s Chubby Hubby?

Well, there are several reasons.

The dreams have started again.  Seems I typically only remember my dreams (or have dreams worth remembering) during times of extreme stress.  They dissapeared a few months ago but this morning I had a real fun one where CB took me to register for a new class and the professor wouldn’t let me take the course until I could read out loud for him in front of the whole class.  Only he spoke in gibberish.  Not the gibberish I’ve come to associate with extrememly elderly people from West Flanders (heh, Flemish people probably get that joke…see how well I’m integrating?), but actual total gibberish.  Then he handed me a very think text book and it was in English.  Only I thought he said I had to be able to read in Dutch for the class.  So I looked at the English text and asked CB if I was supposed to read this in Dutch or in English and he just looked at me as if to say “What’s the matter with you, this is obvious, why don’t you know what to do?” And a whole class full of snotty little 22 year olds are staring at me and chatting away in Dutch and the professor is ignoring me and CB is looking at me like I’m the biggest dissapointment in the world all because I can’t turn English into Dutch.

Symbolic much?

That could explain why I’ve procrastinated the past 12 days when I should have logged onto the testsite for my Developmental Disorders class and gotten my electronic case study out of the way.  I was really worried that I totally wouldn’t get what was going on.  But the deadline was midnight on December 11 and despite the fact that I do procrastinate I’m not foolhardy enough to procrastinate that long when I’m not confident in my abilities, so today around 4 pm I started the case study*. The professor told us in class that it would take about 3 hours to finish the case.  He even gave us an example in class that neatly listed a bunch of demographic info and symptoms as well as a video of the child the study revolved around.  The video I found almost impossible to understand linguistically but dude, if a kid has Tourette’s a film is pretty obvious so I figured the case study would take 3 hours if and only if I was rediculously thorough.

So yeah, I started at about 4 pm this evening and I finished around 10:30.  Yes, that’s right, 10:30.  Granted I took an hour off for dinner so it took me five and a half hours, not six and a half.  This case study was a hell of a lot more in depth than the example in class and in all honesty, I didn’t quite latch on to where it was going till about halfway through.  So the first half did not look so good.  Once I realized how it was progressing though, I was able to narrow down the scope of my thinking and I think for the most part the rest of my answers were pretty close to what was required.

Oh and there was that whole “the damn thing’s in Dutch” part that, while expected, was much more difficult to pick through and translate than I’d thought.  I guess that’s because class is usually taught via slides so I can focus on keywords and use them in context.  This was paragraph after paragraph of psychobabble in Dutch.  One section that focused on the ADI-R was only 12 questions long but took me an hour to get through because I had to type every other word into my computerized Van-Dale dictionary just to know what the kid’s symptoms actually were.

Suffice it to say that my brain is pretty whupped.  Like, wimpering puppy with a tale between it’s legs sitting out in a puddle in the rain whupped.

Oh and for anyone curious about my cloistering comment, here’s a quick explanation:

CB has been working on his doctorate for quite some time.  He’s in the final stages of writing articles and resubmitting edited articles but things aren’t really moving at the desired pace.  He wants to be defending his thesis this spring, preferably before our trip to Pittsburgh in April.  In order to do so he will be spending one week this month and two weeks next month staying in a monastery in Leuven, the city his promoter lives in.  This is apparently a good solid way of getting meeting time in with his promoter (which hasn’t been happening as regularly as it was supposed to) as well as eliminating distractions so that he can focus on finishing his work.

I will not share my opinion of this plan because it will make me very unpopular amongst any supporters of it.

*FYI-this was only after I stayed in bed a good portion of the day and read the remaining 75% of Dead Before Dark…after that dream I desperately wanted nothing more than to read and enjoy the english language

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