My strained relationship with my dad should be no stranger to this blog, as I vent about it all the time. He disappeared from my life when I was 9 or 10, and we have not spoken since until today. As I was heading back to the break room for lunch at work my phone buzzed and I saw that I had a Facebook message from my dad. This was the first time I’ve heard from him in 8 years and it shook me up a little bit.

The message basically said that he had left his wife of 15 years and that he was sorry for everything he had put me through and that he missed me. I still haven’t responded to him because I have no idea what to say and I’m honestly really angry with him. I’ve had the same home phone number basically my whole life, and my mom has the same cell phone number she’s has since I was 8, yet he sends me a message over FACEBOOK, to say that he’s finally left his horrible wife and that he’s sorry. He left my mom and I to go start his dream family and now that that is falling apart he’s realized the damage he’s done and suddenly feels bad for it?

Nah ah sorry that is not how it works.

Your half-assed apology will never make up for the pain that you have caused me and all the times I felt like an unloved mistake. Stay away from me.

Rape of The Whaaaat

I am extremely confused. I’m sitting here reading and re-reading The Rape of The Lock and wondering what in the heck is going on in this poem. I understand certain parts of it and I get the satire, but there are certain elements that completely and utterly confuse me to the point where I want to scream and throw this book across the room, but it is way too heavy and I’m not very physically fit. I understand how Pope is mocking the society he lived in and how people made large battles out of unimportant issues yet remained idle about the pressing issues. What I don’t really understand is how or why all of these extra characters are necessary and pertinent to the story.

I even resorted to something I don’t, spark notes. I’m usually too proud to look at spark notes, but I was unable to come to any conclusions by myself and was really frustrated. The spark notes didn’t really help though, they actually just confused me more and got me more off track than I originally was. Now I’m sitting here blogging about it rather than try and understand it anymore because I just don’t have the patience at this point.

Hamlet was tough, but this is for me at least, very very different from Hamlet and way more difficult to understand. This language seems a little simpler, but in my opinion it’s much harder to understand than Shakespearean text.  

UGHUGHughgu

It’s so surreal to think that I’ll be graduating high school in less than 8 months. It seems like not that long ago I was in 8^th grade anticipating the start of high school and now I’m getting ready to move out and start a career and I almost don’t believe that it’s happening. While I am trying to convince myself that I’m ready and totally prepared, I’m probably not and it’s terrifying.

I plan on going to school out of state, but the community college I want to attend requires me to be a resident of the state before I can enroll, so I’ll have to take a year off after I graduate and build residency first. This is what my mom did, and she never went back to school after the year off and in the back of my mind I’m worried that I’ll do the same. I don’t even really know how I’m going to move since my family is making it basically impossible to leave their house. I can’t take my car out of state, and they’re only willing to help me out with tuition if I go to UNR, which doesn’t have the funeral service science program I need. I’m trying to save up my money, but my expenses leave little wiggle room for any kind of savings. It’s just very frustrating and I’ve been trying to pick up as many hours at work as I can to save up, but that interferes with school and then my grades go down.

I think people under estimate how hard it is to be a high school senior with a full time job. It sucks.

Black Thursday??

Black Friday used to be one of my favorite parts about the Holidays. I remember waking up at 3 am and bundling up, getting coffee and donuts, and heading out to stores early in the morning. It was a tradition I looked forward to every year, and ever since I started working retail, I’ve been on the sour end of things.

Up until this point, I’ve never minded working Black Friday because I at least got to enjoy Thanksgiving with my friends and family, but this year I am a little upset. On what people are now calling “Black Thursday”, this year many retailers, including the one currently employing me, will be opening on Thanksgiving night to increase their profits.

While I am not that personally hurt by this, I know many people are as they will miss out on being with their families and be forced to work as early as 6 pm at some stores. I don’t believe it’s fair to interrupt a National Holiday with a frenzied holiday shopping spree, forcing people to leave their families and work 10+ hour shifts without the option of working later in the day. Contrary to popular belief, these employees have families and some of them even kids, who they deserve to be spending Thanksgiving with.

The whole point of day after Thanksgiving sales was that they were one day only, and the day after Thanksgiving. If stores open on Thanksgiving, it eliminates the whole point and takes out all the fun.

Fairwell Hamlet

As much as I hated Hamlet in the beginning, I’m finally coming to terms with it and hating it less. As I finished my Hamlet packer last night everything that confused me began to make sense and form a larger picture in my mind. It’s still not my favorite thing I’ve ever read, but it challenged me and hopefully in some way prepared me for the AP exam. I’ve never really been a fan of Shakespeare mainly because it’s always been hard for me to grasp and extremely boring.

Though for some reason the way we approached Shakespeare this year definitely helped me to understand it more that I have in the past, making it a more enjoyable experience.

Although it wasn’t as horrible as I thought it would be, I still am looking forward to moving onto other pieces of literature where I can at least maybe understand the language and vaguely grasp what’s going on without having to look on the internet or read over it 50 times.

This year has been incredibly stressful so far. Even though my class load is lighter and I have less homework, I’ve been spending a lot more time at my job. At the beginning of summer I switched departments, thinking maybe I’d get less hours and work would be less stressful, but that was not the case. Where I am now, I’m really the only one who does my job properly and excels at it, so I get most of the hours allotted to the department. It’s not that I don’t like my job, I actually enjoy it, just piled onto everything that goes along with my senior year, it’s a little overwhelming.

I haven’t gone and taken my senior pictures, I haven’t ordered my cap and gown, really the only thing I feel I have going for me is my capstone, and I even feel uneasy about that. I need my job, I need to pay bills, but going into my last year of high school, I feel like I should be paying better attention to my school activities and I just can’t.  I have this overwhelming feeling of guilt and fear about maybe somehow not enjoying this year or giving it enough time. Even though I’d have to royally screw up to not graduate, I have an uncomfortable feeling in my gut that maybe I won’t, that I’ll be a failure high school drop out for the rest of my life because I put paying my bills above school, which is ridiculous. I don’t believe school should come with this much stress or make you feel guilty for trying to balance anything else in your life.