Day 926: The Home Stretch

There will likely not be any entries till after the bar. The last time I updated was last Saturday, so it's been a week of no updating. In my defense I have been doing pretty well - study with mom over Skype ever morning, write essays, watch Invisible Man or get caught up on White Collar or Drop Dead Diva, play Jeopardy in the evenings. I finished the baby blanket and sweater for the baby nephew and was quite pleased at how both turned out. I talked to Cody pretty much every night, which totally made me smile. On Thursday morning I talked to mom on the phone for studying and ended up wandering around the park while I talked to her, but it was with the quirky headphones, so a whole lot of people thought I was talking to myself and got scared off (one elderly couple, a young couple, a young mother with children, and a single dude). Apparently commercial paper and secured transactions are scary. I got essays done and then my parents came and took me, my sister, and her husband out to dinner, which was nice. My sister and her husband took me back to the house, and on the way Wayne offered tips for Cody about surviving the parental inspection.

Now I'm a little freaked out.

On Friday morning mom came over and we sat in the park together. We studied bankruptcy, and she also got me all caught up on what's going on in life with her and dad and also Shannon and Wayne. Then we went to lunch together, just the three of us, and then I...I came home, but for the life of me couldn't bring myself to study. I took a nap. Ended up watching a whole lot of I-man and White Collar. My brain just wasn't having it, but I totally freaked out, because I needed to study but couldn't, and...grrr. Ericka called me on the phone to make sure I was okay, and I totally started crying on the phone, which of course freaked out Ericka, who's more tomboy than me, but she promised to read me poetry sometime, and yeah...I love that girl. She's my sister. I talked to Angela on the phone to make sure the first draft of her paper went okay, and we talked about training (Elder Sensei Raymond is back, which is awesome - till he goes under the knife in September) and the bar and life. And then I talked to Cody. I'd spent all day doing nothing, and then halfway through our conversation I was exhausted, which sucked, and I fell asleep.

Yesterday morning was...yeah. I burned through 100 multiple choice questions despite it being Social Saturday in the House, and then Cody showed up. My roommates were all giggly over the fact that I would be having a boy over. (Okay, yeah, I'm the only one who has a boyfriend, but they hang out with boys much more often than I do.) Cody and I had lunch (my mother had scored us some leftover chicken pasta salad, which was awesome), and then we went to the zoo. Wandered around looking at things. Cody is smarter than he lets on or maybe cares to admit - he knows his bio and anatomy pretty well, so I had fun listening to him explain the physics and mechanics of animals. Also, he actually reads signs, so we both could pause and learn something new.

Then we watched anime back at my place - a few episodes of Peacemaker, because swordfights and quirky samurai are so romantic. He'd never been to Café Rio, but he loves Mexican food, so we went out for dinner, and then we went to see Inception. Well, first we wandered around the mall because we were early, so we visited GameStop and bemoaned being grown up and not having time for video games like we used to, and then we ended up back at the bookstore (we hit the graphic novel section, obviously, but also the poetry and classics sections; he's very well-read for having not been a lit major), and then...the movie.

Was awesome. My friends love Ellen Page. I was super-excited to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt finally get an awesome grown-up role. Also, Lukas Haas, Ken Watanabe, Michael Caine, and...Cillian Murphy absolutely made my day. I knew I could trust Christopher Nolan to do something amazing, and he did, only the lame part was that I started coming down with a migraine halfway through the movie, which was long, and the deep sound effect they used whenever there was a "kick" kinda hurt. Cody drove me back to my place (he gave me a pep-talk about passing the bar), and we sat on the steps for a bit, but it was after eleven and he needed to get home. I had a full-blown migraine by then, and there were all kinds of strangers in the house (like half of Anna's family from Armenia or something), so I went straight to bed. With my sword by my side.

Around 2:30 Cody sent a text message informing me he'd made it home all right, and as I lay awake in the darkness I realized I could hear my roommate breathing in her own bed, so she was home. But then I heard footsteps on the porch, and someone open the back door, and I saw someone about Jackie's shape and size carrying Jackie's laptop ease into the room. I was wound so tight I nearly leapt out of bed with my bokken in hand then and there, but I knew that my hearing breathing was just my fan and giving my roommate a heart attack would not be cool.

I'm still a bit headachy this morning, and I didn't manage to make it into the shower because Anna's 101 guests all needed to shower. Yesterday, Honivah, one of my roommates, asked me if there's anything she can do for me for the bar. I told her I'd be crazy and to forgive me if I was mean. Friday was the crazy. Saturday was the awesome because I got to see Cody. Today starts the home stretch, the final push. Today starts the paranoid and mean, and I feel bad for my roommates, because being irritable is not cool. I'm going to hit sacrament meeting today and that's it - I need to reread notes for MBE subjects (I've given up on the bankruptcy essays altogether at this point) and grade yesterday's quiz.

I'm scared, but more than that, I just want this to be done.