happiness might possibly be home made silver dollar pancakes

[katekat]

After making pancakes for 15 odd years with varying degrees of success I found myself this morning with the perfect plate of silver-dollar pancakes (see above). They may look a little large in the picture but they're approx 3 inches in diameter and freakishly they came out perfect. I am a pleased Kate.

My plan today is pancakes, Maeda Ai (one of the foremost philosophers/literary scholars/interrogators of the modern periphery in modern Japan) reading, and possibly the buying of a vacuum cleaner belt if there are any stores open Sunday.

It was a fairly hellish week last week - rescheduling a make up class meant that I had two sets of reading to do for the class that is trying to create records in how much we read a week - and by the end of it I wanted to club the woman who is taking all the same classes as me over the head with my computer. I'm going to have to come up with a name for her, I think, so I can vent properly.... possibly co-student? The sad part is that she's making me happy to have my nemesis in one of our classes because he's an annoyance in an entirely *different* kind of way. It's freakish when that's more welcome!


you see, the thing about co-student is...

If she hadn't said she didn't, I'd think she might have a mild form of aspergers.  But she doesn't - instead she's got ADD and some anxiety disorders (and yes, i know this about her).  Last semester she started in our program, and I was super excited to have someone else working on contemporary Japan (she works on anime, but seemed to be slightly more knowledgable than your run of the mill anime student - after all she did get her MA), and another single girl to boot!  And since she didn't know anyone in the city I thought - yay, we can go and get out and do stuff together.

Which is all well and good, except for the fact that she rubs me the wrong way in a variety of manners.  After hanging out with her for a couple of afternoons, trying to make sure that it wasn't just me putting up barriers, I was forced to admit the basic fact that, no, I wasn't ever going to be busom buddies with this woman.  And while going to the occasional event was fine, it was also work to hang out with her because she focused on micro-details that were boring, and didn't really seem to have a sense of humor that fit with mine, and told interminable stories that could have been summed up in half the time (and boy, did that make me aware of my own tendency to do that - self, dislike thyself), really liked CSI LA and invited me over to her place to watch it all the time even though quite frankly NO INTEREST did I have in it... and

Well, yes, so by asking myself to hang out with this person I realized that I didn't want to hang out with her.

But, we're in the same program.  And this semester WE'RE TAKING ALL THE SAME CLASSES - ONE OF WHICH IS A CLASS MADE UP OF ME AND HER.

And that might be ok except all that undiluted time spent together is not making me like her more it's making me get annoyed at her quirks.  Additionally we are not at all compatible in our approaches to scholarship, and that shows up over and over in this class that we take together - her complaints about the books we're reading I find frustrating, she probably finds me dismissive when she's trying to vent although I am trying to ratchet down that condescension that sneaks into my voice as much as I can because she's not evil she's just not someone I'm compatible with. 

But on Wednesday, when we're together with the professor reading Edogawa Rampo's "The Human Chair" (which you might actually be able to read in it's entirety in Google's book preview of the some collected Rampo works - I HIGHLY REC if you haven't read it and like Poe or suspense - it is super creepy and fantastic) and co-student offers a reading that is character analysis (a habit she constantly gets into - one of the least interesting ways to discuss literature) and interesting but weird, and I ask her to justify why she thinks that.  Her justification?  NOT IN THE TEXT at all, but instead a fantasy *she* makes up based on something that happens at the end of the story -- it ends on a cliffhanger and she makes up an non-cliff hanger ending afterwards and then suggests that it's a legitimate form of discussion to do so. 

And honestly?  With other people I might actually have had more patience with it, but because she continually defaults to character analysis and suppositions that aren't founded on textual references it's annoying.  And professor is trying in this very gentle way to suggest that this is not a productive line of analysis and co-student JUST KEEPS GOING.

so that was one thing.  There were others.  Several.  On Wednesday alone.  I'm doing my damndest to not be crazy about this - to keep a distance that allows me some breathing room with this kind of stuff - but having her in every single class I take is not helping (see rant above that went on for ever! hahahahaha!  but see, I know when I'm doing it, and I'm doing it in my own blog, where people can skim if they want to.  Oh, don't get me wrong, I've bored EB & Tyler & boy!housemate with complaints too trying to get it out of my system.  Likely the only cure will be, well, not taking as many classes with girl in the future.  If I don't kill her before the end of the semester.


Other than that life is pretty good - still tired, and have applications to work on and a paper to edit on the to do list too.  And possibly a friend coming to spend the night tomorrow night.

And this was supposed to just be a quick entry about pancakes.  *shaking my own head at myself*