Things have been pretty normal lately in the school sense. Midterms and papers abound, and stress levels are rising. So far it’s fine, manageable and not heart-attack inducing. But I still find myself too stressed to really sleep, which makes it harder to critically think and thus to do very well on any of my assignments. A lot of the problem is that one of my profs is marks incredibly hard, but he didn’t tell us this until right before he was about to hand our first two papers back. It wouldn’t be so bad except those are two-page “comment sheets” which we were lead to believe would be informal and relatively easy. Lo and behold, he’s marking them as if they were submissions to a journal or something. Scary. Now that he’s handed out the 10-page paper assignment I’m not sure what to think. The standards for it are so high. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s that with the other three papers I’m supposed to be working on at the same time, I worry that I’ll neglect the others or not do as well as I should on his.

I haven’t been working on Blueprint as much as I should be, and that’s also getting frustrating. The Mambo template system is outdated and cluttered, which means a complete overhaul of any template I want to use, or making my own complete from scratch every time the content changes. It’s really making me think I should uninstall Mambo and use WordPress or something like that instead. Considering most of the features of Mambo aren’t necessary for the site and that a blogging software would be much more efficient it seems the better course.

I’ve said it before, I’m sure I’ll whine and say it again: I need more things to do. I really want to get a job at the library, though volunteering there would also be a huge help. Having less free time to waste would certainly mean that I would be more productive and probably have much more rewarding days. I hate feeling like I’ve just wasted the hours away. That’s fine for weekends or the occasionaly school day, but not right now when I should be getting stuff done but am too tired or bored to really be motivated. The knowledge that I have time to waste certainly means that I waste much more of it than I should.

Plus, when I am around Dean, I find I’ve wasted so much time during the week that I have to spend at least half of the weekend doing things I could have finished up before. It’s disappointing. Though my weekends are much better even so, just because he’s around. What a sweetheart.

Before I waste any more time, I should see if there are any positions open at the library and then sleep so I can get an early start on papers tomorrow morning.