january 18, 2001. I am stressed. I am last-two-weeks-of-the-semester stressed and it's only the second week. I am so stressed that I have trouble sleeping. I am so stressed that I was reduced to tears last night when the Boy came home at 10 p.m. and interrupted my reading homework. See, I've got this one class. The designers of this class seem to think that I only have this class to complete, and they're loading on a semester's worth of work to compensate. It frustrates me when I can't do my best. It frustrates me when I have to choose between sleep and work - and I'm not talking about that situation where you've watched teevee for 3 hours and you're getting sleepy so you decide to blow off your chapter for the next day. I'm talking about coming home from class, eating something, writing a paper or completing some other massive assignment, then trying to gauge if I have another 2 hours of attention left in me. I honestly didn't expect to be in hell at this point in the term. There are a few good things about this semester. For one thing, I feel a lot more comfortable with the other students. I really do need three months or so to feel completely at ease in a new geographical situation. It's like a swimming pool: some people can jump right in and get the cold shock over with right away...and some people ease in inch by agonizing inch. That's me, folks. Edging into the social world with a pained expression on my face, listening to canonballs off the deep end with a mixture of resentment and envy. I think that something special is happening with The Girl Who Looks and Acts Like Ophelia. We're talking a lot these days and it's that getting-to-know-you conversation in which you use your best anecdotes and build up a base of knowing about the other person. I spent all of last night dreaming about students in the department in various situations, which made me feel like a bit of a geek for getting so much happiness out of mental nothingness. As if to further illustrate my point that I can't do small talk for beans, when I saw The Girl WLaALO, the first thing I said was, "I dreamt about you last night." The absolutely great thing was what she did next: she grinned and said, "Was it me or the girl who looks like me?" And I was unable to stop from shouting "It was BOTH!! You met!!" It's definitely nice when somebody other than the Boy appreciates my twisted mind. "Let's get down to brass tacks. How much for the ape?" So I was in the living room, talking to the Boy about the assignment that I'm supposed to be writing right now. I was talking about how difficult I find the concept when I noticed that his attention kept straying to the movie he was watching (MVP: Most Valuable Primate. I'm not making this up.) Then he starts wiping tears out of his eyes. "Are you listening to me?" I ask incredulously. "This part really chokes me up," he replied emotionally. "The chimps are reunited..." It was at this point that I had one of those flashes of unreality that one gets from time to time: am I really sitting in Nova Scotia listening to my husband wax melancholy about a movie based on a monkey winning the hockey championship? Apparently I was.