E: Tired of myself, not tired of you

Joel Plaskett lyric.

Me in relation to every woman in the world.

I want to tell you amusing stories about my co-worker Ryann. She's a really cool girl: she was heading over to Shopper's for water or whatever and asked if I needed anything. I said soap, jokingly (but not really, I needed soap) and I'll be damned if she didn't come back with a three-pack of Irish Spring.

I'm trying to get out of the habit of sharing other people's business on this blog, but she's popular with the gentlemen (and lesbians) that frequent our store. Sometimes this attention is wanted (well, not from the lesbians) and sometimes not so much. One night last week I overheard her awkwardly flirting with some dude, and just as she was scrawling her number down, in walks the guy's girlfriend. As for the lesbian, that hits closer to home, because I was kinda-sorta into her before I realized she was, according to my sources, "hardcore lesbian." I don't take it that personally, though, because I'm kinda-sorta into a lot of girls.

It's getting to the point where people who barely know me can see my problems. In my anthro class, I've formed a little study group comprised of girls, and I met up with one for studying Monday prior to the test. Between flipping through notes and generally discussing the class, we were talking about the other people we know in the class and she asked me if I liked a certain other member of our little group.

"She's fine," I says, not having been asked that question in way too long.

"There's something there," she says with the smile of someone who gets a kick out of watching someone else's story unfold. As I tell her my life is not that simple, she assesses "You seem like the kind of guy who has a lot of female friends." Yeah. "That's because you get stuck in the friend zone."

I do get stuck in the friend zone, although that isn't the source of all or even most of my female friends. I'm not sure if it counts as being friend-zoned if the person is in a relationship when you meet them, for example, and either way it only counts if you were seriously attracted to the person. I just tend to meet girls because I'm not interested in meeting dudes, and yes, with every female I meet I see a potential partner, until I know better. My problem is at this point I haven't got the wherewithal to determine what that perfect, ideal, nonexistent woman would look and act like. There are imperfections with every woman and every person and especially with me, and these I don't bother looking past because I'm no longer the kind of guy who pines, I just keep looking. And all of this assumes any of these girls were into me, and gets into my sense of myself as totally undesirable and worth nothing to anybody.

So yes, it's a bit more complicated.

It's like this pretty much all the time in my head. I'm not even upset right now, I just can never shake this negative perception of myself, I just live with it.

I was feeling this pretty severely a year ago when it felt like every female who was willing to tell me somebody should want me was in no position to speak for herself on the matter. But if I go on about that, I'll jsut depress myself. Things aren't like they were a year ago. I'm not caught in a flurry of adjustment to my job, I've been there over a year now. The new people are mostly all experienced and we have 2 temps rather than a dozen (there were fewer full-time employees then, if I recall correctly.) I'm a go-to guy, I do new releases.

It's hard balancing school and work. I did it a lot better last semester but I did it okay this year. I had all my term tests today, a problem I repeatedly said I should have corrected, but realized it too late and just wanted it over with. The build up to today was characterized by attempts at studying and occasional realizations that I'm not cut out for studying. I'm John Locke banging on the hatch door, weak, vulnerable, looking for answers and reassurance when nothing more can be done.

The first test was in American studies. I thought that was going to be the hard one, but my moderate understanding of all the sources and some of the theories helped me through. I'll probably end up with a solid B in that class, assuming my paper is as good as I think and no better. The essay question on the test was tricky since it wanted you to cite specific sources off the top of your head, and most of the people I spoke to afterward didn't feel capable of doing that. My advantage was in doing the question about cinema of attractions; I just wrote a paper on that in Film Theory, so I know Gunning back and forth. The Identifications I was sketchier on.

After that class, I said goodbye to Daron. Daron is a girl I met late in second year when we were doing presentations in Shakespeare. I don't remember how or why I struck up a conversation with her, although I pretty much just explained it several paragraphs ago, so start there. She's a bit daffy, like Elaine Benes meets Annie Hall, but we always had a lot to say to each other about school stuff and life in general: she's a talker. Anyway, I thought she'd drift out of my life like so many people after that class, but I had two classes with her in semester 1 of year 3, then one the next semester too, and then at the beginning of this year she walked into this class. I told her this was the end of her walking into classes and seeing me there, since barring extreme circumstances, I'm already taking my last U of T courses.

An hour later was cinema studies. This was the exam that was harder than I thought, because it was a lot denser than I figured, considering it mainly engaged with the second half of the class. Honestly, it was repetitive as hell and frustrated me, since we kept running over the same few theorists. Bazin, Kracauer, Brecht, Kracauer, Adorno/Horkheimer, Bazin, Benjamin, Adorno/Horkheimer, Bazin, Brecht, Kracauer. Sheesh. Dulac got in there too somewhere.

I got irritated while writing my essay question because I had to attempt to reconcile Brecht's ideas with those of Bazin, and Brecht doesn't play well with others. Including cinema as a medium in general.

An hour after that was the Anthro exam. It was the one I studied most extensively, and probably for the best (although US Studies was most deserving of my attention given my inability to get readings done there). The exam basically amounted to a 100-question trivia quiz, and I knew what I knew and missed what I didn't, and thankfully one was much larger than the other.

I'm feeling writery. I really wanted to write during the last two weeks but I couldn't justify spending much time on anything that didn't explicitly apply to school. Life is like that sometimes, albeit less so in the near future with only three classes remaining on my schedule for next semester. I'm still technically enrolled in The Graphic novel, but I've heard it's overrated and the schedule time doesn't really work for me so I might as well let someone more eager take it.

So tomorrow, after I go pick up my paper from Brit Lit, that'll be it until January, and the work overload may commence. I'll find time, however, to get some writing in, especially as I have ideas to fix up my play and a novel I'd love to bite into (dumb, too much commitment, yet a possible avenue to success? Can't know if I don't write it.) I swore I'd get back to my webcomic in December but it's looking unlikely; not impossible, just unlikely, since I still like my ideas I just feel way too, way too, way too exhausted.

Time to get my first restful night seemingly all month.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto