Check out the new iteration of my diary: http://colleenfischer.bloggedup.com. I know, the name's not so great, but I'll change it as soon as I feel like it's okay to spend $15 for a domain.

All -- all -- of my classes are going to meet during WCAS Reading (and for some, even Finals) Week. What's with that?! I thought CAS classes weren't allowed to have required classes during Reading Week -- and I'm not in any Medill or Tech classes this quarter. I feel all kinds of cheated. But at least I will only have one final.

I am broken.

First, I had an intense swing dance class full of lifts and swings. I was sliding all around the floor and then twisting into odd-shaped pretzels. It left me tired.

After that, I sat around the student center hoping against hope that residential college presidents would come pick up their fliers. One did. In fact, that dorm sent two people to pick them up. But that was the only one. No one came to help me post fliers around campus, though, so I spent an hour and a half walking four feet, crouching, placing, taping, standing and walking again.

At this point I can no longer feel my middle and lower back.

My room smells really bad, too. I swear it smells like burnt plastic, but I can't find the source of the odor. Scott says it smells like sour milk. However, I smelled the washed-out milk bottle and it didn't smell funny to me. I left my window open all afternoon to air it out, but it didn't help. It's as if something has died in here.

I pre-registered for two classes today, the first time I've ever pre-registered for more than one and the first time I've pre-registered for one I wasn't already scheduled to take (like most journalism courses). Unfortunately, I couldn't sign up for the Asian and Middle East Studies classes I want to take. That's what comes from having an interdisciplinary major. The mailing list gave me the hope that I would be able to sign up for anything on the list, but I think it really meant to say "only the courses in the history department that meet the requirements." (And no, you smart alecks, the reason I couldn't registered for the sociology or English courses was not because I'd already signed up for two. I wasn't intending to pre-register for my second journalism course.)

Do you ever think that this dorm we live in is just teeming with education? That we're surrounded constantly with brilliant minds absorbing and creating knowledge, weaving insight into insight in bold strokes of thought? Are you ever inspired by the knowledge that we live in an environment of learning, where the strokes of brilliance that will illuminate tomorrow are currently being nurtured?

Of course, if you do, you probably then see someone watching Final Destruction 367: The Last Doom in the TV lounge and wonder what the heck you were thinking.

Sorry, I got cut off yesterday by my shift ending. To continue the narrative ...

The printing people harassed me with questions about the Communique -- did I have the pictures? Did I have the PageMaker file? Did I know what was wrong? Did I, did I, did I. Being that I am a work-study, not a professional designer, and that my design skills fall more toward the digital than the print, I had no idea what to tell them. I looked at the proof, and yes, the pictures looked awful, but what could I do? The Political Science Department doesn't give us any sort of professional-quality equipment for putting together the Communique. Even though they upped the print quality in order to use the publication as a promotional tool, they still have us rely upon my rather crappy digital camera for the pictures (and maybe it's me, or maybe the camera's been dropped one time too many, but I think the picture quality has gotten worse lately). I simply couldn't give them anything better than what we gave them, and the printing people didn't seem to get it.

We made several attempts to contact editor Matt (who was in the shower), and once we got a hold of him, we tried to figure out what to do. In the end, we just collected every version of the pictures we had, converted them to the format the printer wanted, and burned them to a CD. I don't know that the pictures will help any, but there it is. It was the best I could do, and if the printing people give me any more crap ... well, I don't know what I'd do. I'm not exactly powerful here. But these people are driving us nuts -- they've already delayed publication for weeks and a great deal of the stuff in the Communique has become outdated.

After that debacle, I decided to go back to the task that brought me to work on Friday in the first place -- fixing the scanner that has not worked from the moment I brought it downstairs. After searching fruitlessly through the support documentation and reinstalling the software again, I decided I would e-mail HP to ask for help. I wrote a long message on the page for a different product (ours wasn't listed) detailing my problems and then clicked the "Submit" button on the form ... and I got a page saying "Page Not Found." I nearly exploded. I went to another form and wrote a new message, saying, "I hate your company, I hate your scanner, and I hate your web site." At least it released some frustration.

So much frustration.

I have had the most irritating day. First, I had to go to Gothic Lit. That's painful enough in itself. Then around 1 p.m. I went to work, to be immediately assaulted by the printing company people who apparently found only just now -- just a week or two after it should have gone out -- that the pictures we sent them for the Communique were unacceptable.

It's nice to have my midterm crush out of the way. True, it was a very short one, relatively speaking (though my body disagrees after all the hours I forced it to stay awake). But by unfortunate chance it happened to land right in the middle of a good deal of other stuff I had going on. And by truly unfortunate chance I ended up in a class with a professor who believes 12-15 page take-home midterms are fun to write.

I'm currently looking for a new text editor. TextEdit, the program that comes free with OS X, is certainly better than SimpleText (and it would be much better than AppleWorks, too, if it only let me turn on automatic curly quotes), but it's no good as an HTML editor for some reason. When I open up a page in TextEdit, instead of finding the plain code I expect I get all kinds of messed-up images and tables, as if TextEdit were an ill-conceived web browser. It's very frustrating if all I want to do is view code or make a very simple change, and I don't want to wait for Adobe GoLive to boot.

Good news: Casey Newton, the former proprietor of newtonline, has apparently decided web sites aren't immature college habits after all and has launched a new site called newt : case. Casey Newton ... newt : case ... get it?

PARC had a "fire" today. Fire in quotes because we only think it was a real fire this time; other than a few scattered reports of "haze" or "smelling smoke," no one I know of actually saw said fire. But something must have happened in the basement (that's where the indicator said the alarm went off) because just as I was printing my long-delayed "table tent" ad for RCB Field Day, piercingly loud sirens went off all through the building. (Strangely enough, just about everyone I think went out the front doors of the building instead of the purported "fire doors," even though it was the middle of the day and they were open. Shows what creatures of habit we are.) I dashed out my door, cursing -- then I went back into my room and grabbed a jacket -- then I dashed out my door again and went outside. Several people had neglected jackets and even shoes, figuring it was a drill and we'd be let back inside soon. However, we learned that was not the case when two University Police cars pulled up outside PARC, shortly followed by three -- three -- speeding fire trucks. Two fully geared fire fighters went into the building with two not fully geared UP officers, and after a while they came out and said we could go inside again. So in the end, nothing really happened, and for all that nothingness PARC will probably get slapped with some sort of fine. And more than likely, we'll never know why.

It's 5 a.m. and I still have four (FOUR!) pages to write of this 12-15-page midterm. It makes me long for those lovely in-class midterms that never last more than an hour and a half and don't have steadily mounting requirements coming from the professor from hell. Challenging? Whatever. That's far too positive a description. She's irritatingly smug yet concurrently irritatingly encouraging (how does that happen? She tells us all we've done a wonderful job -- then gives us all C's). She gets all kinds of random ideas about how the projects we do could be SO ... MUCH ... BETTER! and then makes the new ideas a required part of the assignment (at least if you want to make up for that C). The class is early in the morning and too much work for too little credit. I hate it but I can't afford to drop it since I need to finish certain requirements before I graduate. I know, scary, graduation. But it creeps up on you a lot more quickly when you know you'll be missing a quarter next year.

Terrific. I'm hearing the birds chirping now. I just wish I could e-mail this stupid midterm to the prof and then skip class tomorrow to sleep.

Happy birthday, Kim!

My teeth are too close together. I have an overbite, so the edges of my lower-jaw molars cut into my upper-jaw molars. This seems to concentrate the pressure and make it very uncomfortable to have my mouth shut. My lower jaw really feels squashed.

I went to Osco today, to spend far too much money on personal care products like deodorant and toothpaste. The bulk of the bill came from a bottle of vitamins I bought. I went to Osco with the intent of getting an iron supplement, as I've been getting headaches and I know my mom usually attributes headaches combined with fatigue to low iron. However, all the iron supplements at Osco contained 200 to 300 percent of the daily dietary requirement for iron, and I didn't want to poison myself if my iron wasn't really that low. So I moved on to the multivitamins, which unfortunately almost all seemed to contain that evil mineral, zinc.

See, I have a multivitamin already. It's currently sitting in the back of a drawer, and it's been sitting around my room since last year. Every time I take one of the pills, I get a violent stomachache that lasts about five to fifteen minutes. Sure, that's not terrible, but a multivitamin shouldn't be such a trial to take. Especially since that means I won't take it.

So why do I blame zinc, you ask? Well, once upon a time, I had a little cold. Probably it was a big cold, but that sounds less poetic. Anyway, at this time zinc lozenges were all the rage for curing colds. It was a miracle breakthrough treatment, it seemed. Since my mom had some lozenges sitting around the house, I took one. Did it cure my cold? Far from it -- I felt as bad as if I'd suddenly come down with the flu for the whole day. All kinds of nausea. It was awful. I swore I'd never take zinc again.

But alas, as fate would have it, vitamin makers consider zinc to be an essential nutrient. Almost every bottle had a full day's worth per serving -- it was sad. And the ones that didn't have zinc also didn't have iron. Lucky for me, as I was about to give up and buy children's chewable vitamins on the premise that they'd never made me sick before, I caught sight of a bottle marked "with iron." It turned out to be some sort of stress formula, which I considered an added bonus. Here at last was the remedy for what ailed me.

Unfortunately, upon examining the label after purchase, I found it contains 833 percent of the daily recommended dose of DNA-deforming vitamin C. Guess you can't win them all.

I have been on the go since Monday. On the go meaning that almost all of my time has been scheduled away, taken out of my hands. Monday I had class, then I had to write a couple of short papers, then I had another (very long) class. Tuesday I had two classes, then I studied at Lisa's Cafe before heading to the fancy Domain Dinner that I was guilt-tripped into attending, and from there I went straight to my in-progress swing dance lesson. Wednesday I had class, then I worked on poli sci stuff all afternoon, and then I had an RCB meeting in the evening. This morning it took every ounce of willpower I had (and a looming midterm paper assignment) to pull myself out of bed for my first class of the day.

I'm not sure why I really bother going to my Islam Studies class. On occasion the professor takes attendance, which counts toward part of the grade, but I'm sure he must have seen me fall asleep several times during today's lecture. For the past several classes it has been a great struggle staying awake. Not only is the material kind of dull, I just don't get enough sleep. It's not so much that I have too much to do -- rather, I often don't feel like sleeping at night (I only feel like that all day). By the time 2 a.m. rolls around, I've worked and socialized and Web surfed for so long that I'm finally truly awake. At that point it seems like no problem to stay up until 3 or 4. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

At any rate, I've taken to drifting off in my Islam class. It's strange, since I really do find religion to be an interesting subject in general (I sometimes even check out Beliefnet to read about what different religions teach). However, this class is less about Islam than about mysticism, specifically Sufism. The mystical tradition doesn't have the same appeal to me as the theological tradition. To me, theology is like a good logic puzzle -- sort of analytical like a geometry proof -- whereas mysticism is like grade school literature class -- how does the story make you feel? (I always thought the questions in our literature textbooks were full of crap.) That's not to say mysticism has no value -- it just doesn't challenge my mind as much. (Except when I'm trying to figure out what al-Ghazali's actually saying, but mostly that's just boring.)

It's like my theology classes in high school. I really liked my freshman year class, where we took an analytical look at the Hebrew Scriptures. The textbook they gave us was actually insightful, and I learned a whole new way of looking at the Bible. That made it all the more disappointing the next year when our class on the Christian Scriptures was a whole lot of "Jesus loves you!" Not that I'm denying that, but after doing so much critical textual analysis it was hard to accept nothing more than expounding upon "Love your neighbor as yourself."

It's the same way now. There's only so many times I can hear "There is no god but God," and "There is no reality but God," before it really puts me to sleep. Britt might remember this method of sleeping from our fall quarter History of Modern Japan class. My eyes start to close, my head droops, and for a few seconds I'm completely unconscious, then -- UP! I remember where I am and jerk myself awake. But it doesn't last -- half a minute later my head falls again, and the process continues like this for however long the class lasts. Unlike in history class, though, I can't give up, slump behind the row in front of me and just sleep the whole time.

Nonetheless, I don't remember anything the prof said in the last half of my Islam class this morning. I'm not kidding when I say I go unconscious -- I honestly get the same feeling of complete zoning out that I got when I fainted at work the day after my Thanksgiving food poisoning. I feel all warm and rested, and my mind is floating away somewhere, and more than anything I don't want to get up -- until I realize, wait, I'm not supposed to be doing this! Then I wake up confused, having completely missed what happened in the past couple of minutes (or God knows how long) and still not quite catching what's happening at the moment. But it doesn't matter since presently I'll fall asleep again.