Painful experiences supposedly get better with the passage of time. Everyone's heard the adage that the pain of labor is forgotten shortly after the arrival of the child, and supposedly this sort of adage applies to lots more things than just labor.

I've got one word for you guys: liars. Tonight, while ostensibly digging for knitting and crochet patterns, I found a folder that I hadn't opened in quite some time. The first sheet of paper contained a grid of some kind, and when I looked closer, I started laughing.

The icky semester.
by domesticat.
[original on flickr]

Oh, I remembered this piece of paper well. It was my schedule from December of 1997, the end of the semester that I so affectionately nicknamed "hell." In a bid to graduate on-time (and thus come in under my eight-semester scholarship limit) I had to take 21 hours of upper-level classes, which required written permission from all major and minor local deities.

Let me tell you, Vishnu's central Arkansas office isn't much on returning phone calls from college students.

I'd done a schedule similar to this in November of '97, and found that it helped keep me on track. When I wrote out the schedule for December, I remember sitting there for a moment, holding the fresh schedule in my hands, and then gently placing it on my bed while I opened my dorm fridge and took out my oh-so-deliciously-illegal bottle of port.

If ever there was a collegiate schedule that called for a bottle of port, this was it.

I don't remember all of the color-coding that I did on this schedule, but I do remember a bit of it. Most tests were clearly marked, but anything not specifically marked 'paper,' 'presentation,' or 'meeting' (excepting the 8th) was a test.

In addition to the tests, papers, and presentations, I logged over three thousand miles in my car that month. I made a mad weekend dash to Alabama on the 8th to attend Jeff's Theta Tau Christmas party, which was a big deal because he was a graduating senior. On the 19th, the day after my last final (and moving my things back to my parents' house) he and I drove from central Arkansas to Lake Charles, Louisiana (the purple 'LA') to see Kara. We returned on the 21st, then drove to North Little Rock to see Andrew and Joy, who were staying with her parents at the time. On the 27th, I drove from Arkansas back to Alabama (again!) to spend a week with Jeff's family.

I don't remember much about that last weekend in December.

For some reason, I think I slept a lot. Can't imagine why.

…and people wonder why I don't reminisce about my collegiate career as being my "glory days." Ha. Those last two semesters, I ate, slept, studied, worked, and drove to Alabama to see Jeff (~700 miles round trip each time) every chance I got.

Life got SO much simpler after I got out of undergrad.

Sotto voce to Andrew: I thought this might cheer you up. I know you're feeling overwhelmed right about now. It gets better, promise. Hang in there. :)

Sotto voce to everyone else: while working on Quarto, my reading of non-geek-crew sites has dropped to almost nil. I've added a couple that I think are worth reading to the list, but I've also finally listed all of the geek crew sites in my dropdown sites list.