Hillary for President? She's got my vote. But sadly, I don't think she'd win in a nation that re-elected George W. Bush.

I was in full "Betty Homemaker" mode this weekend, as my sister puts it. I made oatmeal raisin cookies yesterday and then today I made a full dinner of baked chicken and rice with sauteed vegetables. There's something very satisfying about home-cooked food. Much better than junk food, in so many ways.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about my future career. There was a career expo on Friday, and I didn't go. I scanned the list of companies that would be attending, and I didn't see anything that interested me. I am very apprehensive about moving to another city just for a job. I don't think I'd be willing to do that. My family is here, I don't want to leave them. Plus I think this is a nice place to live. On the other hand, the career opportunities are limited. I don't see too many opportunities for the things I am being trained in for my master's degree. And I have zero experience, so even the few jobs in my field that I might be able to get are out of reach for now. And then there's that which I don't want to acknowledge, which is that I don't know if I'm cut out for this supposed career path and that I might want to do something else.

It's probably not worth losing much sleep over. I don't need to plan every detail of my life out in advance. I have to do what is going to make me happy. If that means I'm going to keep living in this city and miss out on possible career opportunities, well, so be it. If that means switching to a career that is more fulfilling but lower-paying, that's OK, too. Of course I'm worried about the future, but it's going to be OK. If all else fails I have my parents as a safety net, and that is a very nice thing to have.

Yesterday my dad, my sister, and I ate chicken wings at a place called Wingstop. I ordered ten regular hot wings, and they were unbelievably good- spicy, cooked just right, not too fatty. Then my dad gave me one of his Atomic wings. I took one bite of the peppery shell and I thought I was fine. No big deal. I took another bite. Tears formed in my eyes, and I drained the rest of my soda in one long gulp. Then I ran to the bathroom because my mouth was *on fire*. I took my styrofoam cup and filled it up with water from the faucet. I drank five cups of water and my lips were still burning. I finally regained my composure, so I went back to the table and noticed the pile of bones next to my dad's plate. My dad had eaten eight atomic wings. My dad is superhuman. That's the only logical conclusion I can come up with. Or maybe that the first one numbed his mouth so much that he couldn't even taste the rest.

The weather turned even uglier today. Mother Nature's a witch, walking back to my car when it was ice cold windy and freezing was one of the worst experiences in recent memory.

More bad news: my dad changed jobs all of a sudden and as of Monday I will have no health insurance. I will have to sign up for the school plan as I am too old to be covered on his new health insurance. It's kind of a wake-up call, as in I can't be a kid forever, and I'm going to have to start worrying about things like health insurance. Great.

Other than that, well, just a regular old bummed-out Thursday. Thursday really is my day to be bummed out. I'm OK on the weekends, usually, I can deal with Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, but by Thursday I usually decide that I've had a long unsuccessful week, I'm a failure as a person, and loneliness is going to kill me. Thursday is the typical day for me to call my dad crying about how hard my life is. Today was no exception. I got all stressed out for no discernible reason, other than it's getting to be a certain time of the month, and I need a vacation. I'm really looking forward to sitting in a nice warm house and consoling myself with some high-quality TV entertainment.

What a long day. I hate JavaScript. Not only is is unfamiliar to me, it doesn't have a compiler to tell you where the errors are in the code. That means you spent a long time trying to figure out what's not working, if you figure it out at all. Which I didn't today.

Guess what? It's raining again. I can't believe it. It was so sunny and warm today, and then I drove home in the rain. Weird. But I can tell it's getting to be spring. There's more sunlight out, and the winds are picking up. Warm weather makes me happy.

I think I am on information overload. I have noticed that my attention span has gotten shorter. I constantly have to have new things or else I get bored really, really easily. Like I'll start a book but before I finish it I'll start another book that sounds more interesting and then finish neither one. Or when I read blogs, which are themselves very friendly to a person with a short attention span, I find that I can't even finish a reading a whole blog entry. I have a ton of blogs bookmarked and I just skim through one after the another. And I'm addicted to TV, and I don't study nearly enough, and I need to read more papers to cite in my thesis, and on and on and on...

I guess I just want to have the discipline to actually get through something important and do a really good job. Not that I want to get all uptight and obsessed with perfection, but just to have more structure and focus and not always feel like I'm doing a second-rate job. School, case in point. I've been content to get B's, but how much more work would it take to get an A? Or to do a really great job on my thesis project, instead of just doing the minimum of what I need to graduate?

I'm thinking about this mainly because on Friday, I had to do a mock career fair interview and a presentation for my research group. I think I messed up on both things. The career services guy, this really enthusiastic guy with red hair and bad teeth, interviewed me. He got really into the mock interview, he made up all this stuff about the fake company he was "representing" and took it really seriously. I was completely unprepared. I had no idea what to say, especially since working for the Florida headquarters of the parent company of McDonald's isn't exactly my career objective. I stuttered, I couldn't think of questions to ask, it was completely horrible.

Then the meeting, well, I know I was talking way too fast. Even I couldn't follow what I was saying. Again I didn't prepare very well. There were points of my own proposal that I was uncertain about, and I didn't handle that well. I guess I could have ironed that out by more in-depth preparation, or I could have found a way to gloss over the details or something. Again with the short attention span thing, maybe if I hadn't spent three hours watching Survivor, CSI, and ER I could have been more prepared. Yeah, I guess it bothers me that I have trouble with public speaking. I get nervous, and I expect criticism of every thing I do. It gets where I stop paying attention to what is going on around me and all I can think about is how nervous I am and how everyone thinks I am such an idiot.

I guess these are things I should practice on. Fact is, this is my practice. That's why I do these things, so I can can get practice with public speaking before I go out into a real job. So far, I haven't had much success. I wonder what I'm doing wrong.

Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be able to get a job. I was able to land a job with a real company once, but what if that is the only time I'll ever be able to do it? Or what if I'll only be able to get crummy jobs and I'll never be able to make myself stand out from the pack and do something great? I guess that's what scares me, and I'm seeing more and more every day why you have to find excitement in what you do, or else you will come off looking fake and dispassionate, and you will never be motivated to excellence.

The highlight of my day: Mom made breakfast for me. Usually she leaves for work before I'm out of bed, but today she had conferences so she got to leave later. It was nice. A break in the routine of getting up and sitting in front of the computer with a bowl of oatmeal squares.

What else. Just some general stress. I need a day to myself, not to have to deal with people. Even when positive things happen, like today when someone gave me a huge compliment about my work, I get stressed out about it. I overthink it, I find a way to believe I don't deserve it. Oh well, whatever, I can't let angst get to me, there are much, much worse things in the world than having someone give me a compliment. Anyway, that's all for now.

Thanks to the City of El Paso for filling in the five or so potholes I used to encounter on my drive home. I can now drive home without getting my car tires majorly misaligned.

I went to see Million Dollar Baby today. The ending was totally unexpected for me. It was kind of a cheap trick of a plot device, but I was still nearly moved to tears. Like Mystic River, I think the strength of the movie was in the acting performances rather than in the originality of the story.

Check out Sarah Hatter's latest post. That's kind of how I feel. I watch TV weddings and think, what's the point? Why don't people just live together? Why do they bother with marriage any more? That way you can go your separate ways without having as much baggage. You don't feel obligated to stay stuck in a relationship you no longer believe in. I guess if you want to have kids, you should get married, but otherwise, why?

With Valentine's Day coming up and that incident last week where I got to talk to my big crush, my thoughts have been on love and romance. I must admit that I want that for myself, I want to fall in love and have a lasting relationship. But it's so much trouble, too. I'm insecure enough without putting my heart into someone else's hands. I guess there are those moments in life where things are so perfect, you fall into your lover's arms, you trust that person completely, you feel intense feelings of intimacy and togetherness. Then there are those lesser moments, the ones where you're wondering what the other person thinks of you. You're standing at the kitchen sink doing the dishes wondering if that person will ever call you again. You wonder who else that person talks to and if she is prettier than you. Thinking about those ugly moments makes me hesitate, and ultimately, the fear of being betrayed scares me more than the fear of being alone for the rest of my life.

I'm listening to the Beatles' number one hits CD, inspired by hearing the song Revolution on the radio on the way home. I had forgotten about that song. The electric guitar intro of that song always shocks me. Hello, that's why the song is called Revolution. A revolution is rude and shocking and in-your-face.

It was pretty cool to discover the Beatles at age 16. It was like discovering a big secret. I used to own an album with some of the Beatles' lesser known songs, like Revolution, Old Brown Shoe and Across the Universe, and somehow listening to those songs made me super-cool and very sophisticated. I watched the Beatles Anthology at around the same time I bought that CD, out of a curiosity to know what transpired back in the '60s. I thought I was so smart back then, a budding Beatles aficionado. Now I look back and think, who cares? Learning about the Beatles isn't much of a priority in my life right now, to say the least. Still, for what it's worth, I'm glad I know more about the Beatles than the words to Hey Jude, like that at the end of Strawberry Fields John says I killed Paul, and that John and Yoko got married at Gibraltar as sung in the Ballad of John and Yoko. And I'm glad I discovered the song Back in the USSR because it is way cool, and that the background of Paperback Writer sounds like the pounding of keys on a typewriter.

So this guy sat next to me in the computer lab, and I looked up and it was the guy I've had a crush on for over a year, the one guy that always comes to mind when I dream about members of the opposite sex. His computer wasn't working, and so I let him check his e-mail on my computer. And then we talked about school, what classes we were taking, the usual things. Of course, I was totally blushing the whole time. I am such a dork. I've seen this person/been in classes with this person/been in groups with this person for over a year. If I were even a little bit braver, I would have found some way to talk to him months earlier. And then by some chance he ends up talking to me and I can't believe it. Sometimes good things happen without me even trying.

I just got home. I ordered a pizza from Papa John's. I have been eating so much crap lately. I haven't eaten a vegetable in a week. I'm not even kidding. And I don't feel like going to the store, or cooking, or anything, right now. Maybe I will go on Friday, just so I can have a little bit of nutrition in my diet. I've been following the all-carb diet and it shows, if you know what I mean.

One sad fact of having a having a job and being a grad student: I haven't been able to watch Oprah in a while. I guess I could watch Oprah After the Show, but it's not the same as watching the actual show. Maybe this sounds funny, but the Oprah show is like therapy for me. I feel like it's OK to be a woman and it's OK to cry. And without that, I feel off-balance.

Well, off to watch a few hours of tube. Bye for now.

I'm sitting at home on a Wednesday morning. I'm looking up papers for my thesis project, trying to come up with something before my meeting this afternoon with my thesis advisor. Yesterday I got home and just crashed. I watched The Amazing Race for a couple of hours then went to bed. Mom and I commiserated about our busy schedules. She wins, it's not even close.

Life continues as a TA. I'm doing the best I can. It's tough working with people. Not that the people I work with are jerks, more like just disorganized. And I have a hard time approaching people, I feel like I'm going to offend them, so the lines of communication get frayed and I end up messing up even more.

Hey everyone. It is so gloomy outside. I still managed to go to the library and check out two books: a bio of Isaac Newton and a novel, Snow Falling on Cedars. We'll see if I get the chance to read any of these, since I've been so busy. Then I went to Ross and the mall to buy some clothes. I decided I needed more sweaters, so I bought two. And some underwear at Victoria's Secret. I like that store. It feels like going into a rich lady's walk-in closet. I bought the most boring underwear they had, I didn't want to try out any of the more exotic items.

Another long day for me. First a test, then I had to give a lecture. The test didn't go so well, partly because I've studied this stuff before and I didn't feel like reviewing it, and because I was so busy preparing for the lecture I didn't have time. The lecture, well, parts of it seemed to go OK, but then there were parts where I was standing around awkwardly, wondering, "What do I do next?". After I explained what was supposed to be the "grand conclusion" time analysis, I was met by a sea of blank stares. I guess it wasn't a total disaster. I would probably do it again if I had the chance.

One thing my dad tried to teach me and my sisters as we were growing up was how to make phone calls. If we were going to the movies, Dad would hand one of us the phone and tell us to call the theater to find out the movie times. My typical reaction was to get all embarrassed and say, "No, you do it, Daddy." Once on a family vacation when I was about 9, Dad asked me to order room service. I did it this time, after a little protesting. I called room service and ordered breakfast. I was nervous but I tried to keep my voice level and pretend that I did this all the time. When the person on the line asked how I was going to pay, I said, "Charge it to the room", because that's what my dad told me to say. At that age I didn't even know you could do that, that you didn't have to have cash or checks or a credit card ready. I got through the phone call without the woman on the other line bringing up my age. I even thought I might have fooled her into thinking I was an adult. Then she asked me, do your parents know that you're ordering this? I said yes, and she accepted that. It was done, no further questions asked. I hung up the phone, amazed at the power I had. The power to order room service. What if I had lied, and I was just some kid playing a prank? She would never know.

Looking back on it, I can see why my dad did used to force us to talk on the phone even when we hated it. It was a neat little lesson, I realize 14 years later, because as an adult I do so much of that. I talk to people on the phone or in person, ask them for information or favors or whatever, and I do it in spite of that little voice that says I'm just a kid, or that I'm inexperienced and no one will take me seriously. I think my dad was trying to teach us how to be assertive, that if we act like we're supposed to be there then people will treat us as if we're supposed to be there.

I'm starting to realize the magnitude of work involved with being a TA. Starting with grading papers. Who knew there were that many people in the class? And then to enter each score individually in the grade sheet. I haven't even started grading the labs. And the prof asked me to actually teach the class on Thursday. Teach. I am petrified. This could be a disaster, on par with the worst public speaking disasters I've ever had, and believe me, I've had some humiliating ones.

Meanwhile, I'm getting behind on other stuff, mainly my thesis project. I've put it on the backburner since there is no scheduled work, no class times, nothing so urgent that it has to be done right this second. I've put more time into my AI class which is supposedly a blow-off class. I need a few quiet, uninterrupted hours of time. Hopefully I will have some quality time tomorrow.