My school, work and internship schedule have left me absolutely exhausted at the end of the day and while I know there are six-year-olds in China working 75 hour weeks in sweatshops just to make ends meet, I am still too tired to post a blog entry (or to find out whether the previous sentence is grammatically correct). I complain but I couldn’t be happier. My tiredness is the direct result of my doing things. So, ultimately, I am content that my exhaustion is because I am being productive and not because I work at a sweatshop for pathetic wages (although I’m sure one could make a convincing argument that entry level positions for graduates are pretty pathetic).

For the most part, I can refrain from saying or doing totally stupid things. Yesterday, however, I stuttered, I stumbled, I asked stupid questions and practically pantomimed my way through all of my tasks. It was as if I had forgotten how to be normal, functional human being. Compliments from friends and strangers never fail to embarrass me. Normal people would accept a compliment with grace and gratitude, then carry on in the conversation as if nothing happened. But for me, compliments are life-altering events (like a lunar eclipse) and I put so much emphasis on my response that I can’t seem to control the urge to be completely awkward. I just don’t know what to do with them. Kind of like children.

In my course, Editing Essentials, we’re learning the basic structure and function of sentences. The material sounds fairly simple, even juvenile, but it’s discouraging to find out how much I don’t know. I’m grateful that the course is challenging but this also means that I’ve discovered something new about myself: I seriously don’t care about grammar. I’m sure once I understand the material, I’ll have a much better opinion of modifying modifiers or whatever. To conclude, I love school but school does not necessarily love me.

On a vastly unrelated note, I had a chocolate chip cookie before lunch today and it was delicious.

I watched the Super Bowl XXX on a 3D-High Definition Super Digital Megumultiplex Flatscreen TV and somehow, it was still boring (but in an awesomely 3D-High Definition Super Digital Megumultiplex Flatscreen way) .

On our way home from the Super Bowl Party Deluxe, my boyfriend and were stopped by a police car. The right tail light of my car was out since last week and I figured sooner or later a cop would stop me to let me know or ticket me. Still, I’ve never been pulled over and after seeing the movie Crash I’ve been terrified of being wrongly taken advantage of. I was shaking and tears were ready to squeeze out of my wide-as-saucer eyes even though reason should rule that I had nothing to be afraid of; I left all my pot at home. As my boyfriend parked the car in the nearest gas station he turned to me calmly and said, “You know, I think my license is suspended.” At this revelation, I think I peed a little. In the seconds it took for the police officer to approach the driver side window I had already envisioned my boyfriend being carted away in handcuffs for driving a vehicle with a suspended license while I sat there peeing and crying miles away from home.

My boyfriend rolled the window down and the cop asked, “Have you been drinking tonight?” This was a very easy question for my boyfriend to respond truthfully: no, we hadn’t.

Before I could let my boyfriend answer I started to babble, “Well, you see Officer, we don’t know where we are! We just came from a party and we don’t know the area!” At this point I am fully aware that I am hysterical for no reason and that, more importantly, the officer wasn’t even directing the question to me, the passenger. I noticed my boyfriend’s sidelong glance that longed to silence me but I was much too preoccupied with what jail would be like. Do they have a continental breakfast? Is a cavity search mandatory?

In my hyperventilating daze my boyfriend stepped out of the car, chatted with the cop, observed that all my tailights were out and escaped the situation without a shootout occurring or a ticket being issued.

Moral of the story: always fix your tail lights and at a time of crisis, never tell your girlfriend your license is suspended just because you forgot to take an online driver’s test.