It's all busy. It's all good.
I am sitting in the outdoor plaza at Portland Community College and the sun is so bright I can hardly see my laptop screen. There are lots of puffy white clouds in the sky, and for once there's no sign of rain at all. There's no wind at all. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous day. I can't wait to get home and dig around in the garden bed.

Midterms are over! Yay! That was one of the stressier weeks of my life. Not as stressy as moving last fall was, but definitely stressy. This semester is the first time I've ever taken a full load of college classes, and I could definitely tell the difference. But I did really well on everything, and got almost all of it in on time, too. *grin* I ended up quitting my job at the Rose Garden arena, too. They had scheduled me to work twice as much midterms week as they had in the previous month total, and during the weekend my family was visiting. So I said no way Jose and wrote them a very polite letter telling them I wasn't showing up. The end. Yay. So life is feeling beautifully unstressful this week.

I think math is my favorite class. I adore my teacher. She gives us tricky logic problems which are easy once you just figure out how to write them down. I love that kind of thing. We just starting graphing linear equations, so I get to spend the next couple weeks playing connect the dots! What could possibly be bad? Also, I'm very proud of myself for getting 100% on the last two tests, especially since I only got about 70% on the first test. Go me and my mad math skillz!

Writing class is okay. I like writing essays, and need the practice, but the class really drives it home that I'm at a community college and not a four year private liberal arts college. We talk a lot about how to analyze everything from scholarly essays to beer ads to the Simpsons, but not about how to analyze writing. It's writing practice, and that's good, but something better would be nice too. About a third of the class don't speak English as their first language, and another third know the structure of an essay up and down but don't know how to care about it. So, as usual when I'm slightly bored with something, I got a little crazy on my last essay. It was about beer advertisements, and the last sentence sums the essay up nicely: "We look to the godlike images above our freeways for an example, and find only empty pixels and a hangover." I used the word "betrayal" a lot and talked about the downfall of American society. It was fun. It's not what I would consider a serious essay, or my best writing, but that's not what the class is asking for. I did it right, and I had a little fun with it. It's all good.

I just came out of poetry class. I'm learning at least as much about history as poetry in that class. I want to learn more Spanish so I can read Pablo Neruda. I want to learn all about the history of Latin America through it's poetry. I want to learn about William Blake and 19th century England. We were supposed to talk about other political art forms besides poetry this week, and bring in CDs, but Tom, the teacher, wrote "What is poetry?" up on the whiteboard and we spent the whole class arguing about that. It was wonderful. That's one reason I want to take more art classes, so that I can argue with people about what art is. Wonderful stuff.

And sign language. Next month I'm going to an orientation for the sign language interpretation program, and I'll be applying this spring. On Saturday I'm hopefully going to go to a Deaf coffee night and see how much I can handle when it comes to communicating with native speakers.

I'm looking for summer jobs. I want to work pretty close to full time in July and August so I won't have to work as much if I get into the interpretation program. It's an intense program... 15 to 18 units a quarter. I definitely don't want to be working with that kind of courseload. So I'm going to apply for a job as a counselor with the Parks and Recreation summer programs, and I'll keep looking around for office-type jobs too.