That’s that
Finals week is over and I’ve got my grades. Nothing lower than a B. The B is in a class I was re-taking to bring up the D I got in the class. That makes me eligible to apply to one of the two art schools in Italy. Now I just need to get more pieces into my portfolio so I can apply to the other one as well.
And I’ve learned my lesson. I was feeling like a slacker for only taking two or three classes per semester. The D happened on the one semester that I took more than that. I could take a full load were I living in a different situation, but the stress of life as it has been here combined with a heavier load of classes (and some of them very heavy, intensive classes) meant I crashed. I had to let the class I was taking just because I wanted to slide in order to keep up with the things that counted toward my degree. And I had something of a stress-related breakdown by the end of the semester anyway. Some of the folks on my friends list got treated to Round Two: Christophine Breaks Completely at a Gay Club, the post-semester follow-up to to Round One: Christophine Starts Losing her Mind. I have amazing friends, by the way. The ones who were there that night managed to mend the broken Christophine by the time kareoke night was over. I think I owe the a drink or two, a thank you for getting just enough alcohol into me that I could calm down but not enough that I was unable to drive when the club closed down.
At least the whole thing got me over thinking I was a slacker. Taking it this slowly is apparently the only way I’m going to get through my classes with my sanity intact, unless a large number of factors in my home life change drastically.
In a few days I’ll be leaving for BayCon. Last year I thought I was going to the Bay Area in order to de-stress after the bad semester, walked into a difficult situation at the place I was staying, and all of that was followed by a very busy Friday night, and I was short-staffed. Some of the day shift was helping to cover (with much thanks to for arranging that, we could never have done it without that.) But it was still rough. It may have been the busiest night we’ve ever had, though I think there’ve been some Saturday nights that were about like it. That Friday night, though, is pretty much a blur. I don’t think I stopped running from one end of the desk to the other in order to put out fires for most of the night. Out of the whole night, I have only two distinct memories. One of them involved saying something to me about how insane night reg was, and I kinda yelled, “Yeah, welcome to my shift!” as I ran past to deal with some issue or other. The other was getting seriously annoyed with one of the Kinkajous. I’d been runnning, quite literally, all over the place dealing with issues, and someone was hollering my name what felt like every couple of seconds as yet another issue arose. In the midst of it, the Kinkajou putting badges called. I was pretty much in crisis mode by then, because of all the problems that had been cropping up. I’d just put out about three minor fires in as many minutes, and then turned and ran over to the badge area to find out what that fire was. And there wasn’t one. He just wanted to tell me something unfunny that he thought was hilarious. There’s a time and a place for joking around. The Kinkajous certainly do enough of that on the slow nights (almost always Sunday night.) But right then was not the time or the place. Being stressed as I was even before the convention started plus being in crisis mode probably made me more angry than I needed to be. I turned and walked behind the privacy screen for a moment, because otherwise I was going to slap that Kinkajou.
Other than that, nothing. Just a vague impression of the reg desk blurring by repeatedly.
And here I am, about to do it all again. I need my head examined.
But next year, I don’t care who says what (including me, since I’ve managed to talk myself into doing this the last couple years without any outside help), I am taking the year off. I seriously need a break and some time to remind myself that the convention is fun, not just stress and work. It’s been years since I’ve done much of anything other than sit and watch the boffers, because I’m not much of a party-goer any longer, and boffers has pretty much been the only other choice by the time I’m done with my shift.
Even though there’s really no night reg this year, just a third shift that starts and ends much earlier than night reg did, the schedule still means that the panels I know about that I would like to see aren’t gonna be possible. I’ll either be asleep or working for every one. And even though I’m not really running anything this year, or so has told me, I’m still starting to feel tension in my shoulders just thinking about it. Con isn’t supposed to make me tense up. It’s supposed to be fun, dammit.
