Two more weeks

[rushthatspeaks]

This evening there was Harry Potter and the Second Movie, which was being shown in the Campus Center, and it was a delight, because I got to watch a very large percentage of the student body turn into screaming fangirls. We so go to Hogwarts here. We need to wander about wearing the robes, with our various House badges-- Denbigh, Rhoads... we have the architecture, we have the sense of humor, we have the professors, hell, we even have the statuary. Not to mention the Quidditch team. No, really. It's always nice this time of year to do stuff that reminds me how very deeply I love this school, because this is the time of the semester when I always wind up hating everything and everybody and considering a new career in Tibet as a hermit. I have too much to do and I always wind up getting sick and, most annoyingly, whenever I'm stressed I have a tendency to revert to being a small, scared, twitchy little Catholic schoolgirl convinced that everyone knows more about everything than she does. I was not raised Catholic by my parents. I was raised Catholic by my elementary school, and they were very good at what they did; I never officially converted, but in around sixth grade or so, after six years of that school, it would have been redundant. There were many wonderful things about my elementary school, and I actually count its religious focus as one of them, because being raised as two religions at once caused me to have to sit down and think at a very young age about the differences between what I was being told by various sides and what, if anything, I actually believed, which is the reason I have been a neopagan since about the age of thirteen. However, there is this entire side to my personality that they managed to instill, and it is heavily tied in with my self-destructive streak, or what remains of that. Probably because it became obvious to me quite early in life that certain essential elements of my personality clashed majorly with Catholicism. So that part of my personality that tried to be Catholic is not only the part that tells me I am incapable of doing things for myself, but that I shouldn't, because having any initiative is somehow immoral. I hated that the first time I was going through dealing with it, and I hate that I snap back to it under stress. Because I am mostly unshakeable in my skin, but so many of the things about myself that I really appreciate have been kicked by myself and other people for so many years that they're still a little tender.

That's one of the things I love about this college, really, that I can be my academically obsessed feminist socialist into-body-modification S&M lesbian separatist self here *and nobody bothers me about it*. That there are people here who understand perfectly well that a deep love of classical literature, singing in a Renaissance Choir, learning ancient Greek, owning a collection of really good porn, and being in the process of designing my next tattoo are not only not mutually exclusive, but are not even slightly inconsistent. This is what I remind myself of whenever I am ready to pull my hair or somebody else's out over the sheer bloody amount of academic stuff I somehow have to pull off in the next week or so.

At least my Archae presentation went well.