Dreamt last night that Jodie came back to work. For those of you who don’t want to dig through my other blog looking for an explanation, Jodie was my old boss who was insane in a horrible way. At first glance, she didn’t seem to be much different from any old eccentric middle-aged secretary: she had a penchant for tacky decorations and oversharing her medical problems. But a few months into the job, I realized that the eccentricity was just the surface of a deeper, more deranged psychosis. She accused everyone of conspiring against her (although, I guess in retrospect, we kind of did conspire to get her dismissed. Not for the reasons that she thought, though), slandered certain faculty she didn’t like to students, had petty jealousies against us student workers and at the same time acted really condescending towards us. I quit, shit went down, she “left,” and I came back, and end of story. Since I started working here again, though, I’ve had a number of dreams in which Jodie has come back, and they all invariably center around her yelling at me.

So in my dream she came back suddenly. I was in a back room somewhere and hid from her, but peeked my head out the door so I could watch. As in real life, she talked and talked and talked for ages about her problems, and then left, without seeing me. Phew!

The next day, however, she came back again, and she caught me there. For some reason, under no circumstance was I allowed to tell her that they had rehired me in her absence, so she was allowed to assume that I was just there visiting. She proceeded to yell at me and order me out of her office, and I just shrugged and left. Wonderful.

I walked to another part of the building - the office turned out to be part of a big house, with secret staircases and hidden antechambers. I went down one of these staircases and ran into the boy, who was taking care of a baby (I guess he was also employed by my office. I don’t know where the baby came from). I told him that Jodie was running about, and he nodded, and we proceeded to laugh about her, and then - lo and behold - Jodie was at the door to the antechamber, and trying to get in! There wasn’t time enough for me to hide, or leave, so the boy just let her in. She then proceeded to yell at me for being there also, for disturbing my boyfriend at his important job.

Over the next series of weeks (this is one of the few dreams I’ve had covering a long range of time), she would keep showing up at the office, and when she came, I’d sneak out the window in the back. I started to get annoyed because then I couldn’t get very many hours that way, and then I found out that Dr. Kinney and Belle had gone ahead and hired her again, out of pity, at $4/hr. I started despairing that I would ever be able to go to work again, and then the cat woke me up so that I could feed him.

I guess this dream is pretty straightforward - I’m feeling guilty that I don’t actually do work at work, and also a little guilty about not having any sense of direction in life. Therefore I need my harpy of an ex-boss to come yell at me. I hope this does not happen in reality.

I am sick and tired of school. Yeah, I’ve been going for five years, and yeah, part of the reason why I haven’t graduated yet is because I don’t know what I will do with myself if I am not cramming for exams and scrambling to write papers every four weeks. But paradoxically, I am tired of doing this. Maybe I need a year off or two to give my brain a rest. In addition to the Veat! Nugget incident, I’ve noticed a tendency for my brain to shut off randomly. Yasmina mentioned that she saw me blackout during class, and I said, “Huh. I don’t remember that.”

Of course, that particular class wasn’t exactly the greatest for mental stimulation. It was a seminar on humor in Native American lit, and oddly enough, only one or two of the books we read actually contained any humor whatsoever. The professor, an eccentric, vertically challenged boxer, expert on Romantic poetry and Native American literature, Jewish man turned Native spokesperson, would drone on and on about passages of the books that reminded him of a story - stop him if you’ve heard this before - about an exam he once gave on which the question was about the significance of the ocean in ‘Moby Dick,’ and a student simply answered, “They needed somewhere to put the whale.” Hurr hurr! Or the time when he tried to teach Lord Byron’s “Don Juan” and a student corrected his pronunciation - “excuse me, it’s ‘Don - Hwon!” Or how about the Yellow Woman Stories, or the one about the plow, and how those crazy white people can’t stop thinking in their Western Christian evil binaries, and yadda yadda.

The stories were sometimes funny enough the first time around, but progressively less and less funny after the fifth class period in a row in which he told them. Oh, I could go on and on about his stories, as he often did, ad infinitum, until the students in class would mouth the rest of his stories in class to each other and snicker and then bash our brains out on the table. Therein was the humor of the class. Ha! Sadly, I think the class turned a lot of people off to Native literature, which I still enjoy despite being bored to death with it in the class. Yeah, sure, repetition is a keystone element of oral traditions, but so is the participation of the audience and an ability to read when your audience is about to go hang themselves because they’ve had to listen to you tell that one story about the dissertation defense committee twice in one class period.

That’s not even the worst class I’ve had this semester. I think I made it to five class periods total for Child Psych, and didn’t even stay for the full duration for some of those. I guess on paper, child psychology is interesting - some of the material is actually kind of cool, like the different ages at which children develop certain abilities and cognitive skills - but oddly, it’s significantly less intellectually stimulating when you have a lecturer that talks to you as though he is lecturing to a room full of kindergarteners. My professor is who my advisor calls “The Normative Mormon”: he’s uber-Mormon, has the requisite eight kids or so, and looks and talks as though he’d been torn out of the pages of a 1950’s guidebook on the perfect nuclear family. Which could be fascinating to observe - how often do you see real life Walt Cleavers? - but not enough to sit through a mindnumbingly boring one and a half hour class when you’ve just had another one and a half hour class with the Story Repeater.

It might just be the classes I’ve had this semester. I am taking two of my favorite classes right now: Brain and Pathology and Latina Literature. But those two, though awesome and massively interesting, aren’t quite awesome enough to counter the horribleness of the others. And the fact that I’m tired of hoop jumping. The ‘know all this crap long enough so that you can regurgitate it at 2:30 on Wednesday, and then delete it permanently from your memory immediately after you hand in your exam.’ The ‘do this and jump this high and bend over this way, and you’ll get an A no problem.’ Why do I need A’s in these classes anyways? What am I really getting out of this, that I couldn’t get from reading Wikipedia articles for an hour?

Instead of cramming for child psych, as I admittedly should be doing, having not gone to class for the semester, I’m blogging. Instead of cramming for econ two nights before, I knit a hat and made a shitty MS-Paint drawing of a bee. Instead of cramming for Native American lit, I threw a party for the class wherein we bitched about the class and drank. See a pattern here?

I guess I still do care, really, being the dorky honors A++ pet student that I am - if I didn’t care at all, I’d probably be off in Vegas now or Tijuana or whatever it is that normal people do when they don’t give a fuck. But I’m really just going through the motions, showing up to my exams and taking them, and then not thinking afterwards. I’m luckier than others because I’m smart and can usually bullshit my way through things. But for what purpose? So I can get a piece of paper and move on to another school and do it some more?