B: Yer head won't explode if you smile

I do not cope well with stress.

I hide it decently from those occasional friends I have kept from high school, because I never have anything to be stressed about with them. I have ruined at least one major friendship in my life as a direct (or at least indirect but close) result of it. I spent the first two years of high school as a mopey loner (even amongst my friends) because I was stressed out by the anxiety of being attracted exclusively to girls with whom I had no shot (and wouldn't have been good with anyway.*)

(*I occasionally wonder if parts of my life would've taken a different path if I had spend those years finding and focusing on available girls who might actually have been into me. This probably involves the intervention of a completely fictional character, though.)

Of all my close friends, probably only Amanda has truly seen me at my worst. Joe might have some idea, having been around for some of the more colorful moments of Sheridan. I talk about it here sometimes but if you haven't seen, you probably don't know. I whine, I pout, I feel like hitting, I do pratfalls of frustration, I scream and moan, I think dark thoughts. I do not express myself well in these cases. It's not a side of myself I'm proud of and I've done my best to beat it over the years, but it still comes up.

March 2009 is already and will continue to be a very stressful time. I shouldn't really be writing this. I shouldn't do anything except work on essays. And yet here I am,. being a bastard of a procrastinator, feeling sore about the way the day went. I don't know what was even that bad about it, other than not being able to think about anything other than how much I suck and how screwed I am due to my own fault.

After a few unmemorable classes, I met with my Film History TA to hammer out some direction on this whole "Film History Paper" thing. She was glad to indulge and very helpful, totally reversing my previous belief that she thought my proposal outline was a load of bullshit. That's one essay accounted for, four to go.

I had another appointment with an AmLit TA I'd never met in a building where I'd never been. I arrived at that building (UC) at 3:00 only to find I was completely unable to find the room where the meeting was supposed to be. So I raced around the building a while before I finally found a stairwell labeled "A" and climbed up to the third floor, where I found a distinctly TA-looking guy sitting quietly. He asked if I was Scott, and yes I am, so yeah. I told him I was not as far along as I'd hoped to be in the essay-writing process, but I talked over some of my ideas, looking into the influence of the past on the writings of certain poets we'd studied. He seemed to think it was a worthwhile prospect so I noted it down, got his e-mail, and got on my way. That's two.

I just suddenly got deja vu, including me writing about getting Deja vu. My dad got me a new computer case *(well, his old one, which is standard protocol) which is too ginormous to go on my desktop, so now I have twice as much space to clutter up (ironically, perhaps due to his comments as such, I have actually tidied my space for the first time in a long while. Not completely but to some degree.) The only problem is I need to re-install my printer and scanner drivers and uh, I can't find the CDs. Crap. I thought I had them kicking around somewhere.

I got to AmLit. We were looking at the provocative poetry of Pat Parker. We did some group work, it was... not great, but okay. Then near the very end of the class, I'm waiting patiently to talk and getting into some of my ideas about her work. I started in on my thoughts, the prof seemed to agree, then went to someone else. Frankly, it bothered me, and I can't distill exactly why because I haven't done a very good job of recounting the scenario... it had happened earlier that day in the film history tutorial. That brings me back to my initial thought on stress and how bad I am with it. I tend to bunch up all of the things that are bothering me, draw connections between things that have none, take offense to otherwise innocuous slights... in short, like many people, I just get pissy sometimes.

The title of this entry was "Yer head won't explode if you smile." I was walking to the subway yesterday when I saw a homeless dude with a sign saying just that. I took a few steps further, thought about it, stopped and smiled. I backtracked and gave him a buck for the sheer feeling of being cheered up in that way. He smiled back at me, and had about 4 teeth visible in his mouth. Good times.

Today, I passed another homeless guy. Still feeling uncharacteristically charitable, I asked him if he wanted the free doughnut I'd just won at Tim's (3 wins in 10 days, approximately 2 per day.) He said no, because of his teeth. Homeless people and their teeth? Equally likely, he can't buy crack with a free doughnut. I have such great faith in humanity.

The lecture, complete with being cut off, ran longer than usual so I had to take the later train. The whole affair was a bummer. And so, we're back at the beginning.

Someday I'll get ahold of myself.

Or not.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto