Angst.

It's been a blegh few days.  I taught on Thursday afternoon, and as usual went "I could have done that, and that, and that better" afterward, but for some reason it got really, really under my skin this time.  I really don't know why.  The feeling that the Thursday afternoon class is a practice run for the Friday morning classes is not a new one, but I got plain depressed about that fact this time.  It's not fair to the Thursday students and I know it.

And then Vicki came home from the pub at 4:00 in the morning on Thursday night/Friday morning with about ten of her friends in tow.  Four oh damn clock in the morning ON A WEEKNIGHT.  I'll summarize by saying that I asked them to keep it down twice, and was woken up just as I was about to fall back asleep twice, once by someone opening my door thinking it was the bathroom, and then by someone knocking on my door thinking...I don't even know what.  I think I scared the guy out of his wits by answering the door in all my sleep-deprived glory with the greeting "In God's name WHAT?!?!"  Vicki came out in the hall just in time to witness this.  By 9am, they were still there.

So without ever really getting back to sleep, I went and taught my Friday morning tutorial.  Needless to say, I was in an absolutely murderous mood when I got there.  But running the tutorial was actually a welcome distraction, especially as I got to be a bit of a drill sargent with the activity we were doing.  Then I went and participated in an eye-tracking experiment, which involved a space-age-looking contraption being fastened to my head to track the movements of my left eye (because I am apparently left-eye dominant) as I looked at random pictures.

I lingered in town for a bit, had lunch at my favorite noodle place, and read.  I'm about 3/4 of the way through A Storm of Swords, and if GRRM keeps killing off major characters at this rate, there's going to be no one left at the end of the series.  But the most recent character death was one I've been rooting for since book 1, so there's a silver lining to everything.

I got back to my flat at about 2:30 in the afternoon, wanting nothing more than to take a nap.  And they were still there.  It took an hour and a phone call to my mother for me to regain my composure sufficiently enough to go into the living room and calmly ask Vicki if I could have a word in private.  I won't go over the details of that conversation, except to say that the living room was quiet as a tomb afterwards.  I don't know precisely when they all left, because they did that extremely quietly too.

In any event, I never got that nap.  I read for a while (this time a re-read of Katherine by Anya Seton) and watched a couple games of the ACC tournament.  I went to bed at 9pm and slept, almost without interruption, until 11:00 this morning.  Today I went grocery shopping, watched more basketball, and felt vaguely upset all day.  This is due in large part to the fact that Vicki and I need to have a much longer conversation about our relationship as flatmates and where it stands after yesterday's incident.  In spite of the fact that we both know I was absolutely in the right, I'm avoiding it.  Although I can rise to the occasion when absolutely necessary, I dislike interpersonal discord of any kind, even when I know I'm in the right.  It needs to happen, but that doesn't mean I need to look forward to it.

Tomorrow will be a library day.  Hopefully it will also be a sunny day, because it's been grey and cloudy lately, which has not helped this angsty mood at all.

Cheers, y'all.