"elizander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day"

have any of you read that book? it's about alexander (not elizander) and all of the many things that go wrong during a day in his life, from waking up with gum in his hair to wearing his scratchy railroad pajamas to bed that night. today i felt like alexander. i will try and remember alexander's mother's wisdom however, that some days are just like that. even in australia.

i have this one professor who is incredibly awkward. she looks very much like the woman in the incredibles who makes the costumes. she has the same dark helmetesque haircut with the bangs straight across her forehead and she kind of shuffles a little bit when she walks. this lady is taller than her cartoon version, and has this very nasal, high-pitched, slightly grating voice. honestly, she's a bit hard for me to take. i am certain that she is an amazingly intelligent and wonderful woman, but she has this way of making the simple points again and again and again with ridiculous "activities" and examples, while merely grazing past the more complicated and deeper concepts. most of the time we are either bored out of our heads waiting for something significant to get communicated or desperately trying to talk to each other and figure out what she just said.

in class today, while i was totally spacing out, my mind snapped to attention and was drawn back to her in an instant. we are learning how to do a physical assessment of a patient, and she was going through her powerpoint notes very dryly, simply reading what was written on the slides. suddenly she got to one particular slide and started laughing, a little bit frighteningly. then she said something along the lines of how she found it really funny that in this long list of words on the slide, she just happened to put this one adjective in "parens" and not any of the others.

parens.

did she mean "parentheses?" because it certainly seems easy enough to me to just say parentheses if that's what you are talking about. i actually had to look up at the huge screen to make sure that this was, in fact, what she was referring to.
and then, over the next 45 minutes, we experienced at least two more sets of "parens" and the information they contained that didn't really fit with the rest of the lecture but just couldn't be left out.

i am slightly ashamed to say this, but i haven't done a single load of laundry since i got here. i'm not entirely sure how this is even possible; it's kind of like the loaves and fishes or something, somehow there's just always more clean underwear. i've been meaning to do a load for a while, really i have. it's just that something always happens. either someone else is doing theirs, or i don't have time to wait for the wash to finish so i can throw it in the dryer before i have to go, or i just forget. i forget lots of things these days. plus, i've never done laundry in these machines and the first time always takes a little more time. what settings are there? how much can one load hold (because i clearly have lots to wash at this point...)? how much detergent should i put in? there's a learning curve to everything.

and just to justify myself further, i have a list from here back to athens of things that i need to do. somehow laundry hasn't been at the top of it. does anyone else find themselves sort of paralyzed, if you will, by lists like this? i know it would feel so good just to get in there and start crossing stuff off. but instead i find myself sneaking off to read 10 more pages in my book (i'm reading "the cather in the rye" right now--somehow i missed that one in high school), or writing letter to my sweet friends, or updating my blog... while all of these things bring joy to my heart, they clearly do not diminish the ever growing column of my to-do list.

and yet, i hear myself say all of this--as i wait for katie to come and get me so we can do fun things. oh, i'll never learn.