311001, 0247hr, illinois time.

poachie dearie just called, which completely turned my day around, i swear. she's a darling i would never get sick of talking to. which is why i can even think of moving in with her if we both reach a certain age and are both unmarried.

but sorry dear, now that alvin's in the picture, gotta put that plan on hold, so put that ikea catalog down. now. haha.

i never quite explained myself clearly why i'm so stressed up. see, next week is the Hell Week this semester. the week when i have 3 midterms, 1 quiz and 1 major paper due. one of the midterms is for the communications class that i screwed up about a month ago. which means the pressure is really on this time to do really well to offset the failure last time round. and the major paper due is for my political theory class, which consitutes 25% of my grade in that class. i'm quite a perfectionist when it comes to essays, i like my essays to flow, both with style and with logic. though i can't really say i take a lot of pride in my writing style, at least by training my essays tend to be structured, cohesive and logical. and i want the same for this essay, but it turns out to be on topics that i'm terribly unfamiliar with, because i missed so many classes during my slacker depressed mood a couple of weeks back. so i really need to do more reading before i can come up with a satisfactory essay even by my own standards, not to mention to warrant an A from my believed-to-be-difficult prof and TA.

i probably wouldn't have been so stressed up if i was as organised in my work as i was at the start of this semester. then, the feeling was, yes it'll be tough, but i can do it. now, the feeling is, i will die. especially for my communications midterm, i dread it, not cos i don't want to study for it, but cos i fear i will fail again even if i study, like before. yet, i don't want to start this self-sabotage mechanism of not studying just to avoid disappointment. that will be just dumb, though i have done that to myself before.

alvin's really stressed up too, cos he'll be taking his GRE test tomorrow, and he really wants to do well, so he can apply to his choice of very tough grad schools. like stanford. logically speaking, i want to encourage him to go to the west coast, especially, cos i think it'll be a good change of environment. yet, seeing how i will be here in uiuc, i selfishly also wish he would stay here with me. he's already received an invitation from the department to stay here anyway, so that's the default thing he can always fall back on. would it be mean of me to say i hope he doesn't do too well in his GRE, so we don't even have to come to a time of deciding what to do when it's time for him to leave? i feel evil, that i'm really half-hearted in my encouragements to him. especially seeing how seriously he studies for this GRE test, i feel terrible, that selfish me would actually prefer his efforts to go to waste. sigh. i'm trying to be honest here, i don't have a lot of faith in long distance relationships, for myself.

anyway, so after i wrote that last entry, i fell asleep in alvin's bed, waiting for cw to come home to unlock the door for me to go back to my room [it's a complex story of why he and which door.] when cw finally came back, upon prompting by alvin's email, he was so apologetic, of course i'm not angry with him. he also told me that there was a phonecall for me downstairs. so i groggily dragged my ass back to my room, only to hear poachie dear's "cindy? it's me!"

now, that was nice. *take a deep breath* and now Hell Week isn't that bad after all. a little warm and stuffy in hell, but heck it, it's no big deal.