Empty chairs and empty hallways . . .

A great many people have left. Some of them, I will miss very much. Others . . . no. It's very bizarre to sit and watch people pack everything and go, knowing that I myself don't need to complete the packing part for another week, and that even then I won't really be going anywhere (mind you, I'm sure that the other side of campus will seem plenty far when I'm hauling boxes (and Lucinda!) over there). I have done a lot of my packing (I plan on having one more tub for the trunk room and hauling everything else with me), but a lot is not the same as all, both in the way that the room feels and in the amount of work that still remains to be done.

That said, I am enjoying hanging out with those who are still here, and with those who aren't but pop in to visit and to help people haul boxes.


I had another dream about the SpecFic exam going badly (and this one was actually a bad dream). Most of the class was in a large room somewhere one evening, studying and getting ready for the exam. Bill Oram showed up to hand out self-scheduled exams for the evening slot, and while I hadn't quite finished studying, I decided that I might as well take it and get it over with. So I got an exam, too. It seemed to involve reading an article and writing about it, and for some reason I decided that the best way to do this was to write while reading. The whole exam structure was rather odd; I was writing in my notebook, and several of us seemed to have knitting or other fibercrafts, and even though we were in the middle of an exam, we didn't seem to feel any compunction not to talk to each other. The room got darker as the evening went on, to the point where it was hard to read the article or to see which of the round things on the wall was the clock and which was temperature and which was barometric pressure (and it was hard to read all of them). vorindi suddenly announced that it was close to the end of the time, and I still hadn't finished reading the article, much less writing my essay, and didn't really have a clue what the article or the essay was saying or how the latter ought to be concluded, so I scribbled a note to this effect on the bottom of the paper in red pen, and then accidentally put the essay back in my bag and had to fish it out again (and noticed, in the process, that it looked like I had shredded the corners of it; terribly unprofessional), and put it in the envelope and did the seal and sign thing and handed it it. The odd thing about this dream is that in this dream reality, I'd already taken the first SpecFic exam, and this was our second self-scheduled exam.

Now one might think from the number of dreams I've had about doing poorly on the SpecFic exam that I was terribly stressed and worried about it, but the funny thing is that I wasn't at all; I figured that an English test is an English test is an English test, and that there's only so much harder they can make it in college than in high school, paticularly if you read all of the material* and liked a large portion of it. And English tests are something I'm good at. And I feel like I did just fine on it.

Which leaves me wondering about the dreams. Perhaps my subconscious is dealing with stress by completely freaking out and making up situations in which I'm bad at things that I take for granted on the grounds that I've already worried about things that I'm not as confident about, so it freaking out about them wouldn't have as much oumphf. I hope you can follow that sentence.

So those are my ramblings this morning.



*I did read "Breathmoss." Admittedly it was a year and a half ago.