Asshole.

Now's about the time for me to lose my shit.  It's time for me to either go into my room and close the door and ignore all activity in the rest of the house or sit here and write a blog and try to vent just enough to keep my shit together.  Pretty soon Ant will finish washing the utensils and come in to say goodnight.  He'll lean in to hug me and turn his head to see what I'm writing.

So what's wrong, Jenny?

I am fed the fuck up with coming home to find that nothing's been taken care of.  Oh, but he did all the laundry.  Well, half the laundry not counting the linens.  And nothing's folded or put away.  And the towels are still damp.  But I'm supposed to be grateful and encouraging because he did the laundry.  Yes, I'm talking about Chris.  God, what a bitch, huh?

Chris had to go out to Washoe again tonight to work on this church project.  He's building speakers and they're almost done.  He dropped me off at home after school and drove back out.  I said I would make Ant and I some mac n cheese for dinner.

"There's the chicken," he said.

"I have a big headache," I said.  "I don't want to cook the chicken."

"You have to.  It needs to be cooked."

Oh, fine, I'll make the stupid chicken.  I walk in the house and here's Ant "working on homework."

"How long have you been working on homework?" I ask.

"About five minutes."

"What were you doing the whole time Daddy was gone?"

"Daydreaming."

"Were you watching TV?"

"No."

I go turn the TV on.  It's on South Park.  Hmmm.  Could be either one of them.

Ant does homework for 2 1/2 hours.  It's mostly math, but he can't answer 2 of his 3 science questions.  I cook, set the table, clean up, and drop a glass on the tile floor.  It breaks with at least half a cup of milk inside and I stare at the floor, forcibly absorbing the metaphor.

Ant asks me to help him with a math problem.  He's using graph paper, which he did not have yesterday.

"Where did you get that?" I ask.

"I got it out of the back of your notebook."

In my mind, this translated to: "If I don't get what I want immediately, I'll just take it."

But let's go back to the car.  This morning I said to Chris that the one thing that really needed to happen today was exercise for the dogs.  Laundry would be great too, but the dogs were the priority.

"I know that."

Okay.  But on the way home he volunteered the information about the laundry, so I asked about the dogs.

"The dogs were taken care of, yes," he said.

Well, that means that Ant took them for a walk when he got home.  As you can imagine, that isn't quite enough.

I'm already unhappy after a long, mentally exhausting day at school, but I was not pissed off when I got in the car.  I wasn't even pissed off when I got out of the car.  I held it together until a little after 8.  Now I think I will not be able to do dammit until I get it all out.

Today's Shakespeare class was supposed to be a review.  It's hard to find the motivation to attend this class since he a) does not take attendance, b) knows very few of us by name, and c) never talks about anything we'll be tested on.  I bet I could have blown off the class all semester, shown up only for the exams and done as well as everyone else.  Just read the plays- that's it.  The two papers have nothing to do with what he says, either.

He's a Shakespeare expert, that's for damn sure.  He is the most conceited person I have ever met and he has every reason to applaud himself.  He is absolutely every bit of the Shakespeare scholar that every English teacher said he was.  What I have learned in his class is fascinating.  I mean really mind blowing.  It is amazing... and completely irrelevant.  He is not a good teacher.  He had a substitute last week (Because he had to fly to London to meet with the Royal Shakespeare Company about his book) and though I never heard her name, this substitute taught me some very basic, important information about Macbeth.  ("Key points!" said Alex, my friend in the class.  "She talked about key points!")  She not only taught us some really relevant information about Macbeth, she taught us about how to find relevant information during the first read!  Do you realize how valuable that is?  She understood that we don't have time to read anything for school more than once!  I wish this woman had been teaching the whole time.  Alex and I learned more from her than we had from Mr. Fabulous through the whole semester!

So.  Today was the review.  I dragged my butt to class because it was the last one, dammit.  Only the final is left after this.  Alex and I pulled out our notebooks, ready to scribble any last important notes Giant Ego Head had to offer.  Here was the review in its entirety:

"It's all Hamlet."

He spent the next hour talking about his book.  No, I am not kidding.  And what's worse is that it was a fascinating talk.  He showed us examples of Shakespeare's handwriting and how all these mistakes had been made by the typesetters and copied over and over for four hundred years.  Lines that don't make sense or repeat themselves- suddenly they make perfect sense and perfect pentameter!  Example after example he showed of places in the accepted texts where s was misread as f and it totally changes the word and the meaning of an entire speech!  Places where the thin lead spacers worked their way up, got dusted with ink and changed anguish to languish!  Altered stage directions and missing characters, unnecessary speeches that Shakespeare edited out or rewrote, and the "purists" that published the cuts along with the final play!

I have never been so frustrated and fascinated at the same time.  It felt like we were in The DaVinci Code.  I would pay to go see this Robert Langdon madness and a lecture like that would be worth every cent.  But right now I need to study for this goddamned exam, asshole.

I spent lunch finishing my presentation for my other English class.  I knocked out my notes for that slide lecture so fast that by the time I was done with my photography class, I had no idea what the hell my presentation was about.  There were a lot of presenters, so I sped through mine under the guise of "time constraints."  The teacher appreciated that, ha.  I made it sound like there was a wealth of information sitting under that presentation and you know what?  There probably was.  I could certainly tell you a lot about American Indians at this point.

Photography was pretty focused today, too.  The final project was due today and we did the critique for half the class.  I'm set for next Tuesday and the work is done, so of course I saw everyone else's photos and wondered if I had time to redo my entire project.  Of course not, but I did think about it.  Thankfully, Mom liked my pictures and offered lots of artistic reasoning behind all my random, haphazard choices.  That made my artist statement a lot easier to write.  We have to post those suckers up with the photos so the whole class can read them, isn't that adorable?  The teacher gave us guidelines to write the artist statement, but it might as well have said, "Try to sound like an asshole."

Yeah, so it was a long, stupid, pretentious day and I came home to the same housework that I left behind this morning.  But there's no reason to cry over broken glass in your spilled milk, so I guess I'll go find my big girl pants and fold those too along with the rest of the laundry.