This has not been my day. I guess I was due for a bad day, but man...

I guess I should have realized it when I put on the brand-new sporty black tank top that Mom bought me when I was in Jacksonville, walked out the door, and got hit by a wave of cold. Seriously, it was like fall came overnight. Overcast, uncomfortably cool, breezy. Not great swimming weather.

As it happened, swimming was my first class. Normally, I love it. And since the air was so cool, the water actually felt warm. But today it just didn't feel good. Everything was off, and she had us doing so many drills like catch-ups and fists and finger drags that I started having trouble swimming normally. I kept it up for the whole 1200 meters in the hope that it would get better, but it didn't really. My body just felt weaker than normal, and I felt like I was running out of air faster.

So then I went to Criser and received the one bright spot of news in my day - that my National Merit check went out on the 17th, and that some of my grades were finally posted. Finally, progress!

Then to LIN 3201, where I dutifully took notes and tried to pay attention... until the end, when I heard a classmate informing someone else, "Yeah, we have Smalley and homework due today!" The girl next to me and I both whipped around and in perfect chorus said, "Wait - what?" Unfortunately, we hadn't misheard - there really was an assignment due. Excuse me, but would it have killed the teacher to at least mention that during the last class? For the first homework, she passed out the sheets and told us the due date, then moved on to her lesson. Since that's what 99% of the teachers here do, I had expected that that would become her pattern as well. Well, no - apparently we're supposed to print the assignments offline and fill them in, relying on the syllabus for the due dates. So, yes, okay, this is also a viable method, and no, I don't expect to have my hand held in college, but could I be informed if the first-time pattern isn't going to always be the pattern? I can deal with pretty much anything as long as it's consistent. Anyway, so those of us who didn't know about the assignment got permission to e-mail it to the professor before midnight tonight for full credit, so I've got to go do that when I'm done with this gripe session.

On to TESL, which wasn't too bad until she informed us that our first conversation partner journals are due Friday. (Well, thank you at least for telling me, Patty, that gets you bonus points.) Which means I have to squeeze an hour-long English conversation with Martin into my already-too-full week and write a detailed journal about it. Then we spent the rest of class analyzing textbooks she had brought from the English Language Institute on campus, answering questions about what we thought about the methods and such. It wasn't too bad until my partner and I had to turn ours in at the end of class. Patty flipped the pages over, frowned, and said, "You guys have to do the back, too." Duuuhhh... So even more homework.

Then anthropology, which actually managed to be halfway decent except for the reminders that we have an exam coming up...

Then a classroom observation of an ESL classroom, something I have to do three times as a TESL assignment. It went fine, except that the teacher asked me to say something intelligent about human cloning right at the moment that I was spacing out and trying to dig an eyelash out of my eye.

Then, finally, home... and just to add insult to injury, my check, which was sent three days ago, is not here. So there was no bright spot, after all.

Sigh.