I am eating a piece of buttered raisin toast and thinking about rational expressions. Chiefly I'm thinking about complex fractions and how very, very much I hate them. You will note I haven't filled this diary with complaints and self-pity even though algebra is dull, brutish torment, and makes me cry all the time. Tonight was the halfway point of the semester and the end can't come too soon. I sincerely hope the level of difficulty will ease up after this chapter. If there's anything harder than complex fractions, for the love of God don't tell me. I need a little delusion here.
I'm doing fine, by the way. I don't understand it, in fact I don't actually understand one thing about algebra, but I am consistently pulling B's on all my tests. It's a miracle of hard work, lucky breaks, and the occasional glimmer of comprehension combined with a teacher who intends for every one of his students to pass. My jaw and shoulders hurt from being so tense while I do my homework. It's a physical endurance test to sit laboriously factoring and simplifying equations, hour after hour, as I clutch my forehead and fill up the notebook with pages of numbers. Only eight more weeks to go.
Then I get to take Statistics.
Dixie went to the vet today. Her hair is falling out, and the part that hasn't fallen out is so dry it's brittle. She's lost a worrisome amount of weight since the medications combined to upset her stomach and depress her appetite. We're going to be giving her fish oil and some other natural supplements to try to combat the hair problem. She doesn't have mites or any external parasite. The good news is she's feeling energetic, her blood pressure is normalized and she's certainly eating again now that we've cut back on two of the medications. She begs for biscuits again, will even eat dry dogfood once in a while. Still, it's obvious the Cushing's disease is making inroads into her health. I'm near tears a lot these days even when I'm not doing math homework.
Some friends of mine are writing fascinating diaries over at LiveJournal.com. Ellie Lang is there, and Scraps deSelby. There are other good writers there, not friends of mine but friends of friends, or names familiar from the online diary world like Kill of onesandzeros, Halsted, Bill aka silvertide. The latter two are exes of Karawynn as indeed is Scraps, and because the world is very small it turns out Scraps and Ellie were together for awhile. I have never dated any of them, in case you were wondering. It's a very New York circle of friends, though some of the names belong to northern Californians. Still, I associate them with a fiercely literate, popcult enabled, edgy, engaged sort of New Yorkishness. I've never had it, myself. Couldn't live there, love to visit, love to slink back to my serene, intellectually fuzzy, navel gazing life. I only regret that I now have little in common, either culturally or talentwise, with those who moved to New York and ramped up the stakes.
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